August 2004

New York

THE LATE SEN. HENRY "SCOOP" JACKSON used to say, "I'm a liberal but not a damn fool." On domestic policy, he was indeed a liberal: a lifelong Democrat who enthusiastically backed the New Deal-Fair Deal economic agenda of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But in foreign affairs,…

What a role reversal. After a Boston convention in which Democrats delivered a simple message ("We Like the Army") with the discipline of a Prussian military drill, Republicans--if Night One in New York is any indication--are following up with improv night at the coffee house. The GOP on display is…

New York

THE SCRAPBOOK congratulates the organizers of Sunday's omnibus anti-Bush march for their spectacular success in persuading major print and broadcast outlets to describe the protesters as "peaceful and disciplined" for the most part.

THE MOST POPULAR REPUBLICAN in the country, Secretary of State Colin Powell, won't be speaking at the Republican National Convention this week. But the man who is arguably the second most popular Republican takes the stage tonight: California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. And it should be quite a…

[img nocaption float="right" width="360" height="358" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8851[/img] I USED TO THINK that there was nothing wrong with street activists that a good scrubbing and a few rubber bullets couldn't fix. But that's before I met Adam Eidinger on the sidewalks of Washington, D.C.…

YOU'D THINK DENNY HASTERT would be pretty good with a gavel by now. But when the Speaker of the House steps up to the podium, he seems as giddy as the president of the College Republicans. He's in Madison Square Garden on Monday to perform his duties as Permanent Convention Chairman of the 2004…

Central Park, New York

Athens: A History

EVERY FOURTH SUMMER, athletes seek to remind us that the Olympic ideal soars above politics and brings the world together through the nobility of sport. Of course, that's not always how it works out. During my years as an Olympic wrestler, the shadow of the Cold War loomed over the games. Grappling…

On Capitol Hill

Collected Poems

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother." Henry V "And in this journey, I am accompanied by an extraordinary band of brothers. . . . Our band of brothers doesn't march because of who we are as veterans, but because of what we learned…

FOR THE PAST couple weeks Republican activists have bent themselves to the task of proving that John Kerry, who was awarded five medals during four months of service in the Vietnam war, isn't a war hero, and the marvelous intensity of their exertions started me thinking.

WHEN PHIL BURRESS goes home at night, his phones and doorbell ring long past suppertime. Burress is the chairman of the Ohio Campaign to Protect Marriage, a coalition seeking to put an initiative on the ballot in November that would amend the state's constitution to ban homosexual marriage…

The Big Oil Candidate

OVER THE PAST YEAR, increasing numbers of the displaced and disaffected from across China have been descending on Beijing to seek redress of grievances. Reviving the ancient custom of shangfang--the practice of petitioning the central authority to right wrongs perpetrated by local…

Tailgunner John

THERE'S NEVER BEEN a presidential campaign like John Kerry's. Never has a presidential nominee made his own experience in a war the centerpiece of his campaign for the White House. In 1960, John F. Kennedy didn't hide his World War II record as commander of PT-109, but he didn't talk it up either.…

JOHN KERRY, fresh from a three-day vacation at his retreat in Ketchum, Idaho, addressed the annual convention of the International Association of Fire Fighters in Boston last week, and it was quite a speech--combative, fiery, personal. The firefighters' union was one of the first to endorse Kerry…

E.H. CARR'S powerful little book The Twenty Years' Crisis presciently argued in 1939 that the events leading Europe to war were not sudden and new, but rather two decades in the making; that interwar Europe's crisis was rooted in power politics, framed by the insatiable ambitions of revisionist…

JOHN KERRY'S recent assertions about stem cell research are so obviously untrue and so easily refuted that he must on some level actually believe them--as only an ideologue can. He claims repeatedly that President Bush has "enacted a far-reaching ban on stem cell research"; in fact, the Bush…

Czeslaw Milosz, 1911-2004 We drove before dawn through frozen fields, Czeslaw Milosz once wrote.

Grace and Power

YESTERDAY, to avoid the long lines, I used the recently installed automated system and checked myself out of my local supermarket: two pints of Häagen-Dazs frozen coffee yogurt, three rolls of white necessary paper, a package of six Bays English muffins, a small bag of vine-ripened tomatoes.…

George W. Bush's record in office invites fresh consideration of a question long asked about him: Is he a conservative? Conservatives tend to agree that on the so-called social issues--abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, marriage--the president is a conservative. But on other matters there is…

New York

IT IS NO EXAGGERATION to say the future of national missile defense (NMD) hinges on November's presidential election. This past July, Boeing engineers loaded the first ground-based missile interceptor into a silo at Fort Greely, Alaska; and according to the Washington Post, "five more are due for…

"It comes down to one seat," Alaska's senior senator Ted Stevens said at a press conference on August 18. "That seat is key to the control of the Senate." Stevens's conclusion about Alaska's Senate race this year might not be an exaggeration.

MY STATE of California now has three United States senators. No, we weren't granted increased representation because we are the biggest state. Rather, New Jersey Democratic senator Jon Corzine just tried to boost California's biotech sector by personally donating $100,000 to help pass Proposition…

Las Vegas, Saturday afternoon

IN 1965, John Kerry, a junior at Yale and the newly appointed head of the Yale Political Union, was invited to give a speech at Choate, the tony Connecticut prep school known mainly for its most famous alumnus, John F. Kennedy. Like Yale, Choate is in Connecticut, so Kerry didn't have to travel…

In the September issue of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz revisits some of the key events, issues, and policies that, over the second half of the 20th century, led up to 9/11 and the Bush doctrine. Despite its length, the 30,000-word (57 page) article keeps a strong pace, even as it moves from serious…

JOHN KERRY is still in hiding--and still sinking--but if he ever does surface for an on-camera meeting with the press, it will no doubt be dominated by Christmas-not-in-Cambodia and magic hats from CIA men. I hope a second press conference can immediately be scheduled to catch up on all the other…

NICHOLAS KRISTOF can't make up his mind about who's more dangerous: al Qaeda or gun-toting Americans. Kristof recently wrote two columns on the dangers of nuclear proliferation, his conclusion being that we are now more vulnerable to nuclear attack than ever before. In his August 11 column, Kristof…

JOHN KERRY is very good at the political dodge. This consists of raising one issue to avoid talking about another. He's cleverly done this twice in recent weeks. First, he concentrated on his Vietnam war experience in his speech at the Democratic convention to avert discussion of his dovish Senate…

WITH THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION just around the corner and the serious phase of the campaign looming after Labor Day, many signs point to another extremely close presidential election. There's nothing like the prospect of a repeat of 2000--a virtual tie on Election Day, leading to recounts…

SO NOW WE KNOW. If the demand for oil grows at a surprising rate, and the supply is constrained, the price will rise. Add myriad threats of supply disruption, an infrastructure which has been starved for capital and environmental permits for a decade, and a producer cartel, and you get increases…

DON'T FEEL SORRY FOR GERALD FORD. He was a president who was never elected, lost his bid for a full 4-year term, and served during the rough post-Watergate years (1974 - 1977), a low point for the presidency. But the week before last, Ford and his former aides were in a happy mood as they…

ACCORDING TO A RECENT POLL, new voters are trending pro-life on abortion. The nonpartisan Pace University/Rock the Vote survey, conducted by the Pace Poll in mid July, is the first in a three-part nationwide study of first-time voters, defined as "voters who registered after the 2000 presidential…

THE PROBLEM with being an opportunist is that you can easily forget what you've recently said.

"KERRY WENT into Cambodian waters three or four times in January and February 1969 on clandestine missions," historian Douglas Brinkley told the London Telegraph last week. "He had a run dropping off U.S. Navy Seals, Green Berets, and CIA guys. . . . He was a ferry master, a drop-off guy, but it…

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM has it that Ohio is the eye of the storm of this presidential election. Just ask Howard Dean, who told a Cincinnati crowd last month: "Ohio is going to be the swing state. Ohio will be the Florida of 2004. We have to win here."

IN THE WEEKS, months, indeed years of exhausting campaigning, speechifying, and punditizing leading up to a presidential election--exhausting, that is, from the voters' point of view--and in a particular contest in our nation's history when the rhetoric has been especially, er, tart--I was…

THERE WAS A FLOOD of economic data last week--and of political commentary on the data--and John Kerry had it all his way. The economy created surprisingly few jobs--a mere 32,000, 10 percent of the number Bush had been hoping for--in July. To add to the president's discomfort, the already low…

THE RECENT WAVE of church bombings, kidnappings, and executions of civilians in Iraq seems to support a contested claim by the Bush administration: that radical Islam is the philosophical cousin to European fascism; that it has less to do with politics than with nihilistic rage. As Bush put it in…

Benoit's Gall

LAST SUMMER, as Americans prepared to celebrate their independence, four refugees half a world away were dreaming of their own American freedom. On July 4, 2003, the North Korean defectors, aged between 16 and 19, entered the British consulate in Shanghai, China. Each carried a personal letter to…

AT LEAST 13 IRAQIS were killed in fighting with U.S. soldiers in the Iraqi city of Falluja on July 30, part of the ongoing U.S. offensive against fighters loyal to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the man Bush administration officials claim is the most dangerous terrorist in Iraq today. Critics, however,…

"READING AT RISK" is one of those hardy perennials, a government survey telling us that in some vital area--obesity, pollution, fuel depletion, quality of education, domestic relations--things are even worse than we thought. In the category of literacy, the old surveys seemed always to be some…

Hawthorne in Concord

THIS WEEK marks the twentieth anniversary of the first movie released with what was, at the time, the new rating of "PG-13." Called Red Dawn, it was a near-future tale of teenage guerrillas defending their hometown after the Soviets had invaded.

THE PRESIDENCY of Bill Clinton had a silver lining for Republicans and conservatives. Thanks to Clinton, they made significant political gains in the 1990s. More important, they achieved three policy breakthroughs that in all likelihood would have eluded a Republican president: serious welfare…

THE 9/11 COMMISSION says it wants to have a national debate about its report. Actually, that's not quite true. It would prefer that the Bush administration and Congress, feeling the heat of its bipartisan mandate, submit quickly and completely to its collective and deliberate judgments. The Bush…

Questioning Kerry

ON JUNE 1, Stephanie Herseth, a true-blue Democrat, won a special election for the lone House seat in the blood-red state of South Dakota. But in a state that gave George Bush 60 percent of its vote back in 2000, Herseth's win turns out to be the rule, not the exception. The two senators from South…

EVERY TIME I pass my lefty neighbors' car, there seems to be a new bumper sticker plastered on the back of it. There are anti-Bush slogans like "Hail to the Thief," "The Emperor Has No Brains," "John Ashcroft: The Best Attorney General the NRA Can Buy," and "Dump Dubya," as well as "Boycott Kraft"…

EVERYONE KNOWS that John Kerry is ambivalent about the war in Iraq. In fact, he's so ambivalent that he won't say anything more definite about whether or not we should have gone to war than that, as president, he "might" have done so. Nor will he say what his plan is for the future, though he…

THE JUXTAPOSITION last week was startling. On the same day, (a) voters in the Missouri primary overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment establishing marriage as being exclusively between a man and a woman, and (b) a state judge in Washington ruled that the 19th-century writers of…

Books in Brief

ASSISTED SUICIDE/EUTHANASIA activists are sure a restless bunch. They never seem able to settle on the right terminology to convince people to support legalizing mercy killing. First, it was euthanasia, a perfectly fine word that had a meaning generally akin to today's concept of hospice before…

ONE OF THE KEY FINDINGS of the 9/11 Commission is that al Qaeda was a terrorism innovator. Al Qaeda's "new terrorism," as the commission calls it, is more than just using aircraft as weapons and turning hijackers into pilots, it's about transforming the relationship between terrorists and rogue…

MY ESSAY berating the Illinois Republican party for enlisting Alan Keyes as their Senate candidate has generated a hefty pile of emails from Keyes's many cyber-fans. Since the letters all ask the same questions or make the same points, I thought a brief response was due. The missives fall into two…

JOHN KERRY has long been on record with his view that the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance don't violate the First Amendment's ban on establishing religion. But days before the Democrats convened in Boston, the Democratic National Committee announced as its first ever director of…

LESS THAN A MONTH AGO, Vice President Cheney said that "many of al Qaeda's known leaders have been captured or killed. Those still at large are on the run, and we are going to hunt them down--one by one." The vice president's assessment is backed by a considerable amount of evidence. Many of al…

THE MORE DEMOCRATIC presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry talks about how he would wage the war on terror, the more he appears to be planning a retreat from an offensive to a defensive strategy. Last Friday, Kerry told a Kansas City audience that: "I know I can run a more effective, smarter, more…

MILITANT BUDDHISM may sound like a contradiction in terms, especially while Islamic holy war is hogging the headlines. Nevertheless, in one of its periodic flare-ups in Sri Lanka, extremist Buddhist nationalism is threatening both the physical safety and the legal rights of that nation's Christian…

ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES of spending a great deal of time in London is the opportunity to meet with Britain's prime minister from time-to-time, and to watch him in action through the eyes of the British media. Americans who have witnessed his performances in the press conferences that inevitably…

Boston

IF, as the 9/11 Commission concludes, our "failure of imagination" left America open to the attacks of September 11, then surely some imagination is called for in tackling one of the riddles that stumped the commission: Where exactly did Osama bin Laden get the funding to set up shop in…

Boston

MOST WRITERS are desperate to coin a phrase--to tattoo a saying on the body of the English language. I myself don't suffer from this craving. It so happens I've already seen an invention of mine taken up by strangers. By now, in fact, my innovation has been circulating for weeks. You may already be…

Boston

Arlington, Virginia

Boston

Preen Monster

THERE'S NEVER BEEN a movie remotely like the old version of The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 film starring Frank Sinatra. It was, by turns, a paranoid thriller, a dysfunctional family melodrama with more than a hint of incest, a horror film, and the blackest of black comedies.

Talking Turkey

The Man Who Would Be King

Boston

The Master

IS THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE John Kerry's to lose? After a successful Democratic convention and an adequate but uninspiring acceptance speech, Kerry would never say so publicly. But that's what he and his advisers believe. Their theory is that the country has fundamentally made up its mind that…

UNWILLING TO ARTICULATE a serious policy agenda, unable to explain why his record qualifies him to be president, John Kerry fled Thursday night to the refuge of patriotism.

Books in Brief

HOW GOOD is your knowledge of the political parties' platforms for November's presidential election?

ILLINOIS REPUBLICANS, at one time a canny and crafty lot, have made a stupid error in hiring Alan Keyes to slap together what's left of the party's U.S. Senate nomination and go howling off into battle against Democrat Barack Obama. The Democrat's wunder-candidate will give this race national…

ASK ANYONE not from New Jersey what they know about the state, and you're bound to hear of the Sopranos, the Turnpike (what exit?), and pollution. Listen to anyone from New Jersey and you will hear the same response: There's more to it than that. Why, there are the over one million acres of natural…

EVERY Caddyshack fan has a favorite line from the 1980 movie and for sheer kitsch, it's hard to trump the exclamation by millionaire loudmouth Al Czervik following the climactic scene: "Hey, everybody! We're all gonna get laid!" In and of itself, it's not that funny; it's not even a joke, really.…

ONE OF THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENTS to the GOP in the election of 2000 was the disappearance of more than 4 million evangelical Christians in the final turn-out numbers. In this cycle, evangelical leaders have launched ivotevalues.org to encourage registration and turn-out, and to educate pastors and…

LOCATED FOUR BLOCKS from the White House, the National Archives are best known as the home of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The two founding documents are beautifully displayed in the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom. Every day tourists line up for the exhibit, and after…

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.

Boston

ASK JOHN CORNYN when the Senate might again consider the Federal Marriage Amendment, known as the FMA, and he has a ready answer: "It's probably going to take an adverse court decision." By that, Texas' junior senator means a decision adverse to marriage as traditionally defined--as consisting only…

VLADIMIR PUTIN may have done John Kerry a very big favor. When the former KGB agent threatened Yukos with closure for failure to pay the $3.4 billion in taxes he discovered it owed when Yukos' principal shareholder became a political opponent, oil prices temporarily hit a 21-year high. Never mind…

MANY DEMOCRATS seem convinced that George W. Bush is losing traction with his Cuban-American base in South Florida. Press coverage of the administration's new anti-Castro measures--which tighten restrictions on family travel to Cuba, limit personal gift packages to the island, and reduce the…

Hef's Little Black Book

HOW IS JOHN KERRY DIFFERENT from every other liberal Democrat from Massachusetts? This is the question Sen. Kerry needs to answer this week at the Democratic convention in Boston. For, even though President Bush's poll numbers are less than he (and we at THE WEEKLY STANDARD) would like them to be,…

IT IS POSSIBLE that at the end of the day, gay marriage will be an enduring reality, at least in some places. This troubles many people, even as others hold it up as an important element in the recognition of equal human dignity. But how much, really, will be changed by gay marriage? With all due…

POOR PRESIDENT BUSH. It's not often a man with a net worth in the low eight figures is made to feel destitute. But compared with the other three men atop the national tickets, Bush seems almost indigent. This year, both ends of both tickets are rolling in lucre. Taken together, their net worth…

Don't Bogart that Ballot Petition, Dude

Editor's Note: Harvey Mansfield, one of America's leading political scientists and a widely published author, will deliver the 2007 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, May 8, 2007. The annual NEH-sponsored Jefferson Lecture is the most…

DENNIS KUCINICH'S campaign for president ended last week with an uninspiring fizzle, as the man who brings new meaning to the word "quixotic" tried one last time to assert his national viability.

Antidemocratic?

"THERE WAS NO QUESTION in our minds that there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."

Cities of Words

ON JULY 27, Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, will deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. The keynote address is a coveted opportunity, a chance for silver-haired politicos to deliver their swan song to an adoring crowd, or…

WHEN THE DEMOCRATS meet in Boston this week, it will mark the first time that their 200-year-old party has held a national convention in that historic city. The Democrats, moreover, are breaking precedent in a big way in Boston--first, by staging a tribute to Edward Kennedy, the host state's senior…

THE RED SOX were playing the Angels in Anaheim last Sunday. I tuned in on the Internet with Boston one run down in the sixth, just moments before future Massachusetts governor David Ortiz drilled a three-run homer to right. A hollow silence usually descends over the ballpark at such a reversal,…

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION is curtailing democracy in America. President Bush himself, in case you hadn't noticed, is like Hitler. By the way, he knew about 9/11 beforehand. On top of that, he let Osama bin Laden's relatives sneak out of America shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and…

MITT ROMNEY isn't someone Democrats from the 50 states have traveled to Boston wanting to meet and greet. Yes, Romney is governor of the Bay State, but he is also a Republican. Worse, he believes, contra the nationally unsettling decision of his own state's supreme court, that marriage consists…

The Twentieth Train: The True Story of the Ambush of the Death Train to Auschwitz by Marion Schreiber (Grove, 262 pp., $25). In this fascinating volume, Marion Schreiber, a German journalist who spent sixteen years working at Der Spiegel, tells the story of two hundred and twenty-five people who…

Munich

THE DIVINE MRS. M. went with a friend to have something done to their feet the other day. It was a Saturday afternoon, about one o'clock, and I was downstairs reading the obituaries and watching our sons build things and destroy them. (I love the obits; they're like tiny biographies of regular…