July 2004

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IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND trial lawyers like John Edwards, you have to recognize their one enduring fantasy. They are knights in shining armor rescuing damsels in distress.

THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION has not been unified by single policy or campaign promise. ,hey talk of hope and the like, but they don't deliver. It's been more or less a parade of Democratic stand-bys from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Al Sharpton, each in turn giving their spiel. And last night at…

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RON REAGAN'S SPEECH at the Democratic convention last night was expected to urge expanded funding for stem cell research using so-called "spare" embryos--and to highlight these cells' potential for treating the Alzheimer's disease that took his father's life.

Boston

Boston Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley endorsed Howard Dean for president shortly before Christmas 2003, but tonight he will deliver a 1,000 word pre-primetime speech at the Democratic convention on the financial burden of homeland security in big cities. Since September 11, 2001, O'Malley has made…

Boston

I'VE SPENT the last two evenings sitting back in tranquil northwestern Michigan and interrupting two perfect summer nights to painfully dose myself with several hours of the Democratic National Convention beamed directly from the podium in all its unfiltered glory to my drooping eyes via C-SPAN.…

Boston

According to previews of John Edwards's much-anticipated speech tonight, the junior senator from North Carolina will attempt to establish his foreign policy bona fides. At the center of the address, naturally, will be Iraq. The issue will be a tricky one for Edwards. Along with Senator Joseph…

"HARVARD HATES AMERICA." That's how John LeBoutillier titled his 1978 bestseller about life at the country's most prestigious university. LeBoutillier's story was one of ivory-tower elitism run amok. Its central theme--that Harvard students and professors are mostly knee-jerk radicals--is by now an…

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Boston EVERY DAY, Washington Republicans accuse Democratic candidates of being too cozy with the high-profile liberals of their party like Massachusetts senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry and New York senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

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AND IN other baseball news . . .

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ONE DAY LAST OCTOBER, Ambassador Joe Wilson, his wife Valerie in tow, traveled to the National Press Club in downtown Washington, D.C., for lunch. It was a big day for Wilson. He was the guest of honor at a banquet thrown by the Nation Institute, which publishes the Nation, the venerable lefty…

A Terry Teachout Reader

THE CHILEAN WRITER Pablo Neruda is "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language." Or so said Gabriel García Márquez, in a line recently repeated by the Washington Post and several other American publications. Readers in the United States seem destined to have Neruda thrust upon them…

MY NAME is Jonathan and I'm a Philly fan. In 1995, the Philadelphia Eagles made what was then the biggest free-agent signing in sports, acquiring star running back Ricky Watters for $6.9 million per year. In his first game as an Eagle, Watters found his new team losing in the fourth quarter to the…

Preaching Eugenics

A Strong Odor

WHEN THE SENATE Intelligence Committee released its report on prewar assessments of Iraq's WMD programs and Iraq's ties to terrorism, it generated a host of front-page stories, news commentaries, and political debate--as it should have. Even in its heavily redacted form, the report is well worth…

The Dark Heart of Italy

Portrait of the Artist

WHEN L. PAUL BREMER, fresh from stepping down as American regent in Iraq, visited the White House on June 30, he was greeted by President Bush with a bear hug. Half-jokingly, Bush insisted a White House photographer take a picture of them and drew attention to the signature soft leather boots…

THE FINAL REPORT from the 9/11 Commission is scheduled to be released this Thursday. It will be a dense thicket of chronology, narrative, analysis, and proposals for reform. But one issue is likely to be prominent in the news coverage. In fact, it already has been. "9/11 Report Is Said to Dismiss…

DUMP DICK CHENEY? It won't happen, and if it did, it would be a terrible idea. The president would be losing his most intelligent and experienced adviser. And conservatives would be losing one of our most consistent and effective champions, at home and abroad.

IN THE FLOOD OF COMMENT that greeted the Senate Intelligence Committee's 511-page report on pre-Iraq war intelligence, no one remarked upon this sentence from the document about the Iraq-al Qaeda connection: "Any indication of a relationship between these two hostile elements could carry great…

THE WORLD COURT'S ruling that the West Bank barrier is illegal and must be torn down has been greeted in Israel with a giant shrug of the shoulders. The court's opinion is only "advisory," and any attempt by the United Nations to enforce it is sure to be vetoed by the United States. The…

Books in Brief

Istanbul

UNDER PRESSURE from insurgents in Iraq, assailed by his Democratic opponent at home for a reckless "unilateralism," struggling to reassure a restive American public that his foreign policy is on the right track, President Bush has turned to an unlikely corner for help this summer--Europe.

JOHN KERRY has a well-deserved reputation for waffling and attempting to get on every side of every issue. Now, he's done it again by signing up as a co-sponsor (along with Senators Orin Hatch and Dianne Feinstein) of what could be called the Human Cloning Legalization and Legitimization Act of…

Boston

Boston

BETWEEN MARCH and April of this year, more than 3,000 same-sex couples were married at the Multnomah County Courthouse in Portland, Oregon. Since then, the gay marriage procession has been temporarily stopped. Today, as the building undergoes renovations, makeshift walls of wood plank and metal…

ARE MENTALLY or physically disabled people funny? A dimwitted hunchback like Igor the lab assistant in Young Frankenstein is, sure. But what about a real-life disabled or differently abled person? Take Ron Simonsen in the documentary How's Your News? Watch as Ron flops his slightly lame body onto…

THOSE OF YOU who have paid attention to popular culture over the last three years know about Hollywood's uncomfortable views on terrorism.

With the release of the September 11 Commission report, some media outlets may ignore or mischaracterize the fact that the report offers more confirmation of Iraq-al Qaeda ties. It is especially noteworthy, however, that the previous staff report's finding of no "collaborative relationship" between…

NO MATTER WHAT KIND of life you lead, there is inevitably a guidebook to help you lead it. Right now, as we speak, on Amazon.com, one can find a Guide to Living and Working in a Multicultural World, or a Guide to Living in Sin Without Getting Burned, or a Fat Girl's Guide to Life. There are…

HERE ARE the two key sentence from yesterdays Washington Post: "[Sandy] Berger returned two of the after-action drafts within days, according to his attorneys. Other drafts of the after-action document, they said, were apparently discarded."

THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.

THE FINAL REPORT of the September 11 Commission, to be released tomorrow, cites many examples of "friendly contacts" between Iraq and al Qaeda, while concluding that those contacts do not appear to have resulted in a "collaborative operational relationship" for "carrying out attacks against the…

OVER THE LAST FEW DAYS, ever since Ambassador Joseph Wilson's credibility was thrown into question by the Senate Select Committee's report on prewar Iraq intelligence, the ambassador has taken to the airwaves to defend himself. How do you respond, he's been asked, to charges that, in numerous…

BUDGET NEGOTIATIONS in Sacramento usually don't heat up until the temperature climbs past the 100-degree mark. Not this year. Sacramento hit triple digits on July 5; the Golden State's budget is now three weeks past its July 1 due date.

GAME, point, and possibly even match to Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. When he and his monetary policy committee raised interest rates by only 0.25 percent a few weeks ago, the inflation hawks were out in force. The economy, they said, was overheating, and the Fed chairman, wedded to the view that…

ON SUNDAY NIGHT, liberal activist group MoveOn.org organized more than two thousand screenings across the nation for op-ed filmmaker Robert Greenwald's assault on Fox News Channel, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War On Journalism. The DC Metro area played host to 16 screenings, with some 800 registered…

The Collected Jorkens

Losing the New China

The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers. --Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861 SENATE REPUBLICANS deserve…

Ft. Lauderdale

"THE UNITED STATES of America should never go to war because it wants to," said John Kerry last weekend in a speech in Cloquet, Minn., accusing the Bush administration of bellicosity. "We should only go to war because we have to."

A SPECTER stalks Europe--the itinerant foreign imam who preaches holy war to minions in Muslim enclaves. The most immediate jihadi threat to the West comes not from the Middle East but from immigrant imams residing right in Europe. Now, Britain's agreement to extradite the most notorious terrorist…

WITH HIS JULY 4 OP-ED in the Washington Post, "A Realistic Path in Iraq," presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry lays claim to being the genuinely conservative foreign-policy voice in this fall's election. Arguing that, in Iraq and in the greater Middle East, the United States…

HOLLYWOOD LOVES HOMOSEXUALITY without reservation--but within reason. Indeed, in movies and on television all portraits of male homosexuality are buffed to a sentimental glow, just so long as certain rules are followed. For example, it's fine for an obviously gay performer to play an openly gay…

Talkin' 'Bout M-m-m-Mike's Obfuscation

LAST THURSDAY, CNN's Larry King asked John Kerry whether he would want former President Bill Clinton to campaign on his behalf. Kerry said yes. "What American would not trade the economy we had in the 1990s, the fact that we were not at war and young Americans were not deployed?"

New York

MUCH HOPE is presently vested, by friends of a free Iraq, in the 74-year-old grand ayatollah, Sayyid Ali al-Husseini Sistani. Ayatollah Sistani acts as a marja, or religious guide, for many if not most Iraqi Shia Muslims from his residence in the holy city of Najaf. Since the Shia make up about 60…

BECAUSE OF IRAQ, and a continuing Washington blood-feud over the decision to go to war, both Congress and the press are perhaps more focused on the Central Intelligence Agency than at any time since the Church committee hearings of the 1970s. The departure of George Tenet as director of central…

Books in Brief

GIVEN his constitutional role as commander in chief, with principal responsibility for the nation's security, the president might be expected to overreach occasionally in times of war, to place the energetic defense of the country ahead of the meticulous safeguarding of civil liberties. Equally,…

THE NOVEMBER ELECTION won't be about the future of Iraq. John Kerry's selection of John Edwards, who joined Kerry and a majority of Senate Democrats in voting to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is merely the final confirmation of the Kerry campaign's decision to remove forward-looking Iraq…

AS I STEPPED OUT into the street after a performance of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra the other evening, it occurred to me that there have been three distinct changes in the urban landscape over the past quarter century: the end of indoor smoking at all but a small number of public places, forcing…

WHEN I WAS ON THE ROAD a lot in my salad days--which, ironically, is the time in all of our lives when we almost never eat salads--my favorite audiences were always in the Twin Cities.

AMONG THE LEAST REMARKED aspects of John Edwards's résumé is that he is a Protestant, a Methodist in particular, a member of Edenton Street Methodist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. Edwards's faith was not, strictly speaking, the reason John Kerry chose him as his running mate. On the other…

TODAY MARKS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s untimely death. One wonders if, by now, he would have formally entered politics (a might-have-been that both Michael Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton probably don't like to mull over).

THE HYPE for Entourage was that it would be salvation for HBO viewers still reeling from the loss of Sunday night comedy after the end of Sex and the City. And it is. If Sex and the City was about female bonding and haute couture, then Entourage is about male bonding and luxury playthings. It is an…

FOUR CRUCIAL FACTS came into the public's view these past few days:

ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO voter turnout and grassroots operations--the so-called "ground war"--were overlooked by Republicans and taken for granted by Democrats. But after labor's surprising 2000 push on Al Gore's behalf and then the Republicans' even more impressive 2002 "72-hour-strategy," that fight…

President Bush continued to insist Monday that there was an operational link between former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida despite reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the commission that's investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that there was no evidence that Saddam and Islamic…

IN GOLF, there are two chronic afflictions. One is the yips and the other the shanks. I occasionally suffer from the latter when the extreme heel of my club sends the ball off on a 90 degree angle, placing whoever is standing to the right of me in jeopardy. My father recently escaped one of my…

ALL THOSE EUROPEANS who live for the day when John Kerry will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States should have paused before cheering his selection of John Edwards as his running mate which they uniformly think will add to Kerry's chances of moving into the White House.

YOU COULD EASILY HAVE MISSED the two-inch story on an inside page of yesterday's Washington Post about the young mother attacked on a train near Paris, but it dominated the front pages in France. "Train of hate," was the lead headline in the conservative Le Figaro, followed by the subhead, "The…

DEVASTATING. CRITICAL. SCATHING. Those are just some of the adjectives used to describe the report on prewar Iraq intelligence by the Senate Intelligence Committee. I'd like to add another: Hilarious.

JOE TRIPPI, the political svengali behind Howard Dean, has a new book out, entitled, humbly, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything. Trippi, you'll recall, became famous in 2003 as the architect of Howard Dean's Internet strategy, which used…

My Summer

WILCO is not the most successful American rock band working today, only the most storied. What's made them so is a combination of serious musical ambition and a ready supply of conflict. As the band's sound has absorbed ever more punk and electronic layering over its alt-country foundation, they…

Raleigh

WHAT DOES South Dakota think of Michael Moore and his slanders on American troops and lies about American motives? We will find out in November, because South Dakota's Senator Tom Daschle has embraced Moore--literally.

AT A RECENT PARTY celebrating the expanded, paperback release of David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush, ("Updated with new lies!") Corn quoted the party's "quasi-conservative" sponsor. "I'm not endorsing the book per-se," he said. "I'm just supporting your right to say it." Someone from the crowd…

ON SUNDAY, we Americans did what we always do on the Fourth: We grilled hot dogs and watched fireworks in celebration of the day in 1776 when we declared our independence of Britain by adopting "The Unanimous Declaration of The Thirteen United States of America." As Edmund Burke told the…

MY WIFE just got a new dishwasher for us. She didn't tell me, she just got it. I discovered this the other day when I came home from work and saw it, but it was difficult to learn any more at the moment, since she was in the living room with her best friend, Ilana, planning a party at our house…

D-Day

DURING MY MONTHS as an expectant father, I declared I would do things differently from other writers once my baby was born. I would not exploit her existence for cheap copy. I would not objectify her by writing about her. I would not make use of fatherhood to score easy emotional points in articles.

Dylan's Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks

NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO, in the introduction to an hour-long PBS documentary called Saddam's Ultimate Solution, former Clinton State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said:

CHAPTER 1: Shreveport, Louisiana, 1943. Our future president's father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., escorts "a date with some kind of medical emergency" into a hospital where our future president's mother is working as a nurse. While the other woman is rushed away for treatment, Blythe flirts with…

The Dead Letter & The Figure Eight

Why Lincoln Matters

TEXAS REPUBLICANS wanted to accomplish several things last year, when they began redrawing the state's congressional districts. They wanted to increase the number of safe Republican seats to give them a majority. And they wanted to take revenge on, among others, 13-term Democrat Martin Frost. This…

Here is the New York Times, editorializing in high dudgeon on June 17: Now President Bush should apologize to the American people. . . . Of all the ways Mr. Bush persuaded Americans to back the invasion of Iraq last year, the most plainly dishonest was his effort to link his war of choice with the…

IT IS INCREASINGLY CLEAR that John Kerry and the Democrats plan to make embryonic stem cell research a campaign issue. In a speech in Denver last week, Sen. Kerry attacked the Bush administration for letting "ideology and fear stand in the way" of medical progress. In a June 12 radio address, he…

ONE OF AMERICA'S largest Protestant denominations voted in May to prohibit the solemnization of same-sex unions in its churches, to withhold ordination from practicing homosexuals, to ban church funding for "gay" causes, to require celibacy for its single clergy, and to endorse civil laws that…

Flack Jacket

The Real Jimmy Carter

Books in Brief

CONSIDERING THAT I'm writing this from inside the bunker of what many regard as the Alliance of Neocon Warmongers, it bears mentioning that Michael Moore and I have one surprising trait in common: We both believe that the war in Iraq was ill-advised, ill-planned, and ill-executed, an apparent…

THE BEHEADING of American Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia was terrible enough in itself, but for me it struck strangely close to home.

Editor's note: This article was first published when Sen. Car. Levin released a report questioning the findings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in July 2004.