163 articles
BURIED IN THE SECOND SENTENCE of the seventh paragraph of a 2,119 word story in Sunday's New York Times was the first sign that John Kerry has a prescriptive plan for Iraq. It wasn't easy to find. Ostensibly an article on Kerry's decision-making process, "Kerry as the Boss: Always More Questions"…
YESTERDAY at 2:58 p.m. the House of Representatives passed the "District of Columbia Personal Protection Act." Floor debate was stunning, often managing to simultaneously defy the rules of logic and of constitutional law.
ANOTHER CONGRESSIONAL CUBA DEBATE. Another mini-breach among House Republicans. It's nothing new, but the latest flare-up comes at an inopportune moment for George W. Bush.
IT STARTED on the Late, Late Show Monday night. Drudge posted a link to a picture of John Kerry's suddenly orange face on Tuesday, and Blogs for Bush, Blogs of War, and Best of the Web started an Oompa Loompa meme Tuesday afternoon. I played the Oompa Loompa song a few times during the afternoon…
"WE BELIEVE a well functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high quality information. Google therefore has a responsibility to the world," co-founder Larry Page declared earlier this year in the company's letter to prospective shareholders. But is Google all that…
THE PRESIDENT and first lady appeared on Dr. Phil today in an interview that was recorded in June. Dr. Phil's wife joined him for the living room heart-to-heart, in which the first couple discussed parenting and home life.
ON TODAY'S Good Morning America, John Kerry defended his "I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it," comment: "It just was a very inarticulate way of saying something, and I had one of those inarticulate moments late in the evening when I was dead tired in the primaries…
AS PRESIDENT BUSH prepares for Thursday night's debate, he might want to take a minute to read the remarks on Iraq and the war on terror by his ally Tony Blair, in his annual speech Tuesday at the Labour party's annual conference in Brighton:
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION argues that the Iraq war was the central front in the war on terror. Not long ago, John Kerry agreed. He called Saddam Hussein a terrorist. He worried about Iraq passing weapons to terrorists. His running mate prominently cited Iraq's terrorist connections as a chief reason…
DOES THE FIRST AMENDMENT guarantee the right to conduct research into human cloning?
ON SEPTEMBER 12, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo published a wide-ranging interview with Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, prominent conservative activist, and Karl Rove ally. It was a long interview, presented in a traditional Q & A format. You can go to El Mundo's…
A SURE BET in this campaign is that the media will write a big October comeback story for John Kerry. It is evitable for three reasons. First, the media works in a pack that is happiest when following a simple narrative. Second, from moribund to miracle campaigner is Kerry's tiresome myth turned…
YESTERDAY, September 27, marked the ten-year anniversary of the historic signing of the Contract with America on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. And this fall marks the tenth anniversary of the subsequent (some would say consequent) election of a Republican majority in Congress. So far the…
EARLY LAST WEEK a select group was invited to George Soros's posh New York apartment to witness a debate between Richard Holbrooke, assistant secretary of State in the Clinton administration and a leading candidate for the top State Department job in a Kerry administration, and Bill Kristol, editor…
IN A SPEECH Monday at George Washington University, Senator Ted Kennedy accused the president of conducting an Iraq policy that has made it more likely that al Qaeda could launch a "nuclear 9/11." According to Kennedy, American military resources were needlessly diverted to the war in Iraq rather…
AMONG DEMOCRATS, it is fashionable to remember the Cold War as a bipartisan effort. "Until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989," former senator Bill Bradley has said, "we were sure about one thing: We knew where we stood on foreign policy." The world was simple, according to President Clinton's…
The "Fake But Accurate" Media
LAST MARCH, when the University of Georgia decided to revive race in the admissions process, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution hailed the move as sound education policy. "Diversity holds rewards for all students," the editors assured their readers. Set aside talk about remedies for past…
THIS MORNING, out for my regular constitutional, I was called Adolf and accused of being a Nazi by a man with long orangish hair carrying a purse. I saw him coming down the block, and I nodded to him, for he had turned up some months ago at a book promotion talk I gave at a nearby Borders. During…
The Family
LAST YEAR--on August 16, 2003, speeding in a borrowed white Cadillac down one of those long, dusty South Dakota highways that glide across the plains like endless ribbons--a Republican congressman named Bill Janklow ran a stop sign at 70 miles per hour and killed a passing motorcyclist.
The Truman-Bush GOP
THE UNITED STATES took the bold step last week of formally designating Saudi Arabia a "country of particular concern" for its lack of religious freedom. In the words of the State Department's 2004 report on religious freedom worldwide, "basic religious freedoms are denied to all [Saudi citizens]…
Bush on the Couch
WHERE HAVE ALL the swing voters gone? The conventional answer is that the nation has become politically polarized and swing voters have taken sides. There's some truth in this, but there's a better explanation. In disproportionate numbers, swing voters have become Republicans over the past three…
The Candy Men
THE LEGAL LIMBO of the prisoners at Guantanamo is coming to an end. Spurred by the scandalous revelations from Abu Ghraib in late April and three Supreme Court decisions in late June, the administration is belatedly putting in place several layers of due process intended to ensure that the 585…
Books in Brief
SOMETHING HAPPENED last week that sent reporters across the country scurrying for the nearest gun shop. A ban on certain assault weapons, signed into law by President Clinton in 1994, expired on Monday.
IN 1969, THE CALIFORNIA rock musician John Fogerty wrote a song called "Fortunate Son," recorded it with his band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and released it on the album Willy and the Poor Boys. It is a short song, lasting just over two minutes, and it is an intense one. "Some folks are born,…
LAST WEEK was the week the Kerry campaign, facing the increasingly likely prospect of its own electoral defeat, embraced the prospect of defeat in Iraq. Once upon a time, it seemed possible that a Democratic presidential candidate might (plausibly) charge the Bush administration with errors in its…
IF YOU TRAWL the posting boards at FreeRepublic.com long enough, you'll go mad. Hundreds of voices are shouting, spitting, and clamoring for attention at any given moment. The night of Wednesday September 8 was no different. Following the 8 P.M. airing of CBS's 60 Minutes hit on President Bush's…
LAST WEEKEND, Florida was swarming with FEMA workers, insurance adjusters, and pollsters. And all three groups agree--it's a mess down there.
Sidebars Laurence H. Tribe's God Save This Honorable Court (1985), p. 83: Taft publicly pronounced Pitney to be a "weak member" of the Court to whom he could "not assign cases." Henry J. Abraham's Justices and Presidents (1974), p. 164: Taft publicly pronounced Pitney to be a "weak member" of the…
EARLIER THIS WEEK, I commented that, as Yusuf Islam, the singer Cat Stevens has held to an extreme Islamic fundamentalist position regarding music. I wrote, "Wahhabism, the state religion in Saudi Arabia, and the inspirer of al Qaeda, is especially known for its hatred of music. In Wahhabi…
PUNDITS THESE DAYS are quick to compare the fighting in Iraq with the American loss in Vietnam 30 years ago. Terms like "quagmire" evoke the Southeast Asian jungle, where America's technological advantages were negated and committed Vietnamese guerrillas wore down the U.S. will to fight.
PHOTOJOURNALIST Eddie Adams died last Sunday at age 71, but his place in history is secure. Indeed, Adams made history with his famous picture of South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Taken in Saigon on February 1, 1968, the picture showed Gen. Loan's point-blank execution of a Viet Cong…
JOHN KERRY'S NEW POLICY on Iraq is like a doughnut. It has a big hole in the middle. The Kerry four-point plan calls for recruiting more allies to help in Iraq, accelerating the training of Iraqi soldiers, pushing ahead on reconstruction, and guaranteeing a national election by next January. All…
SELDOM HAS THE GULF between diplomatic talk and effective action been as stark as it was this week at the United Nations. On Tuesday, President Bush, speaking before the U.N. General Assembly, called on the Sudanese government to stop the killing in Darfur, reiterating Secretary of State Colin…
WHAT IS IT with John Kerry and "allies?"
ON TUESDAY, CBS president Les Moonves told the Los Angeles Times that it was "clear that something went seriously wrong with the process" that produced DanScam. That's like The Zepplin Company announcing that the Hindenburg had a little trouble landing in New Jersey.
ON TUESDAY, U.S. authorities diverted a United Airlines London-Washington flight to Bangor, Maine, where the ex-pop singer formerly known as Cat Stevens, now as Yusuf Islam, was questioned by federal security agents, and then ordered deported back to Britain. Yusuf Islam, it turns out, is on the…
ON MONDAY, in Brussels, Republican strategist Charles Black debated Kerry campaign adviser and fundraiser R. Scott Pastrick on the implications for Europe of the upcoming U.S. presidential elections. As reported from Europe, Pastrick stated that a Kerry administration would be "culturally…
IT HAS BECOME de rigueur for China to oppose Taiwan's status as a self-governing nation at every possible turn. As two events last week demonstrate, Beijing's determination to squeeze Taiwan continues unabated, with scant opposition.
YESTERDAY, John Kerry repeated what has become a standard Kerry-Edwards campaign talking point: Saddam's Iraq had "no ties to al Qaeda," or, as Kerry recently told Time, Saddam Hussein had "nothing to do with al Qaeda."
OVER THE WEEKEND, comments made by Republican Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana concerning aspects of the Bush administration's post-Iraq policy received lots of media attention. But the senator has also commented on the Iraq speech John Kerry delivered yesterday before an audience at New York…
Dear Mr. Rather,
BUSINESS IS BOOMING. Most airplanes are full, or almost so, including--so British Airways's staff tell me--the pricey first- and business-class cabins on most transatlantic flights. As September 11 recedes from memory, and as the business recovery takes hold, carriers are putting more buns on…
CHARLEY CAME IN AUGUST, smacking the Florida coast with high winds and torrential rain and a surge of water several stories high. He was followed soon after by Frances, who was about 500 miles across the waist, who tore through the tiny island of Grenada before setting her eye on the United States,…
IN COMMENTS to the Weekend Australian, Diana Kerry, the younger sister of the Democratic presidential candidate, has expressed concern for the safety of Australians facing an increased terrorism threat brought on by the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq. The Bali bombing and the more recent attack on…
IN THE MIDST of all the committee-produced and consultant-shaped verbiage of John Kerry's "major" speech on Iraq today, one paragraph stands out as being truly Kerry's own:
ECONOMIST FRIENDS who have served in government like to joke that after a newly arrived president has finished admiring the Oval Office, he starts hunting for the secret room containing the knobs that control the economy. It's always a fruitless search. Still, presidents are not completely…
LAST NOVEMBER, suicide bombers killed 19 Italians stationed at a military police barracks in Nasiriyah, southern Iraq. It was the largest single-incident loss of life for the Italian military since the Second World War, and the shock and pain that reverberated through the country was palpable.…
Prince Albert on His Can
Des Moines
AFTER MORE THAN TWO YEARS of complaining that President Bush's Council on Bioethics has been a reactionary, jaundiced, and unscientific influence upon American science policy, its critics have changed tack. The sneer du jour is that it has had no effective influence upon the administration.
Copies in Seconds
AS NEW PARENTS, my wife and I want and need plenty of advice. From time immemorial, that advice came from elders--parents and grandparents and other wise souls who were presumed to know better because of their life experience. No longer. We parents of the new millennium know better than to look to…
Kerry's "Winter Soldier"
AS AMERICAN POLITICIANS point fingers and question one another's qualifications for leading a war on terror, as Europeans and Americans hurl mutual recriminations about the war in Iraq, the terrorists have been acting. Radical Islamists have struck Spain, forcing a change of government there. They…
LAST WEDNESDAY, CBS News's 60 Minutes II aired a report that strongly challenged George W. Bush's service in the National Guard. It's a story that has been explored dozens of times in the past five years. Two things in the 60 Minutes II story made it fresh--or, in newsroom parlance, gave it a peg.…
I said at the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him. John F. Kerry, May 3, 2003 Those who…
MIX EQUAL PARTS a vague Star Wars daydream ("Only you can save America, Luke") and a paranoid Matrix fantasy ("There is no America, Neo, only the System"). Add a dash of old-style political manifesto, a pinch of new-age mysticism, and just a touch of J.S. Mill's On Liberty, and you've got that part…
BETTER TO BE LUCKY than good. That's an old baseball saying that applies as well to President Bush's reelection campaign. First CBS News--then the entire mainstream media--plays up damaging documents about Bush's National Guard service. But within hours, thanks to bloggers and not to any effort by…
"I've met foreign leaders who can't go out and say this publicly, but boy, they look at you and say, 'You've got to win this, you've got to beat this guy, we need a new policy,' things like that." Senator John Kerry, March 6, 2004 "As the president has made very clear, there is a difference between…
THREE ROADS led to the horror at Beslan in the Russian republic of North Ossetia, in which at least 330 people, most of them children, died: one road beginning in Grozny, the capital of neighboring Chechnya; one road beginning in Moscow, to the north; and one road beginning in Riyadh, the capital…
Another Harvard Copycat
EVELYN WAUGH thought movies vapid and dishonest, one of the evils of the modern age. In the Waughian universe, the film industry attracted self-promoters and hucksters, always at the ready to trade their own self worth for a bloated swell of bogus importance. Hollywood is the setting for the…
AS FAR BACK as I can remember, I always wondered why there was no remastered DVD of Goodfellas. It was bad enough knowing there exists a special edition of The Godfather Part III. And yet the only version available of Martin Scorsese's mob masterpiece was a disc so primitive you had to flip it over…
BACK FROM HIS ORATORICAL tour de force at the Republican National Convention, Arnold Schwarzenegger gets to devote the remainder of September to business as usual in Sacramento.
IN REACTION to Russian President Vladimir Putin's announcement this week of plans to curtail democratic institutions in Russia and assert increased political control over the country from Moscow, Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry criticized President Bush for having "taken his eye…
INSIDE THE BUNKER AT CBS, Dan Rather must be finally feeling some sympathy for Richard Nixon. Rather is caught in a cover-up begun during a presidential campaign, the cover-up is unraveling, and a baying pack of critics greets his every utterance with disdain, as mockery begins to replace analysis.…
"There was no terrorism in Iraq before we went to war." --Stephanie Cutter, chief spokesman, John Kerry for President Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2004 IN THE LAST FEW DAYS, John Kerry's campaign has challenged Bush administration claims of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. The effort has been…
"Every time George Bush has had a choice, he has really chosen, I think, the wrong thing." --John Kerry, September 15, 2004 WHAT ABOUT some of John Kerry's foreign policy choices in the last two decades?
WHAT DO New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof and tabloid biographer Kitty Kelley have in common? They share a source.
ON DON IMUS'S RADIO SHOW this morning, John Kerry suggested that he would not have gone to war with Iraq, knowing what we know now (no evident stocks of weapons of mass destruction): "Not under the current circumstances, not that I see. I voted on the basis of weapons of mass destruction," Kerry…
AFTER HIS 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry had to publicly defend his testimony. He debated fellow Swift Boat veteran John O'Neill, a young pro-Nixon conservative and future author of the anti-Kerry bestseller Unfit for Command, most prominently on the Dick…
ON PAGE 266 of her new book The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty, Kitty Kelley writes, "[The president's] sister-in-law Sharon Bush alleged that [George W. Bush] has snorted cocaine with one of his brothers at Camp David during the time their father was President of the United States.…
LAST THURSDAY, Secretary of State Colin Powell finally called a spade a spade. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he said the atrocities--including murder, rape, and village razing--committed in the remote Darfur region of western Sudan qualified as genocide.
Update 6:05 p.m.: Late Tuesday afternoon, NBC News and CBS News requested that that the Democratic National Committee pull the campaign video in question. The DNC, through a spokesman, says that the matter is under consideration.
Breaking their silence on the CBS forgeries, the Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk finally mentioned the scandal yesterday afternoon. In a post titled Blog Report, CJR finally turned to the biggest media story in recent memory; they gave it five sentences:
JUST IN TIME to brighten our Sunday, the Washington Post broke with precedent and ran a hilarious piece of satire on its op-ed page, all about the "end of network news." The crisis, it appears, is that the networks have gone too commercial and ceded coverage of the political conventions to . . .…
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Donald Rumsfeld told an audience at the National Press Club last Friday afternoon that America must remain on the offensive and cannot be "faint-hearted" when it comes to the war on terrorism--a war he likened to the Cold War. He also spoke optimistically about the progress…
"FRANK JONES says he's angry about newly revealed memos that indicate President Bush got preferential treatment in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War." So reads the lede of an AP story released on Saturday, September 11.
ON SUNDAY, the Kerry campaign put out a statement accusing the Bush administration of "misleading" the country in claiming a "direct link" between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks.
YESTERDAY, John Kerry called the New York Times to blast the Bush administration's North Korea policy. As David Sanger wrote in today's front-page Times story, it is "highly unusual for Mr. Kerry to seek out a reporter on Sunday, when he had no public appearances scheduled, to attack Mr. Bush."
CBS has left the flap over purported documents involving President Bush's record in the Texas Air National Guard in this posture: Who are you going to believe, CBS or your lyin' eyes?
The Case for Sovereignty
THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE consists of two campaigns. One concerns who would be the better commander in chief in the war on terrorism. President Bush, bolstered by speech after speech at the Republican convention (including his own), is handily winning that race. The other, the campaign John Kerry…
IT'S OBVIOUS not only that George W. Bush has already earned his Great President badge (which might even outrank the Silver Star) but that much of the opposition to Bush has a remarkable and very special quality; one might be tempted to call it "lunacy." But that's too easy. The "special quality"…
OF ALL THE policy recommendations in the president's acceptance speech last week, none got more applause than his promise to revamp our antiquated and antigrowth IRS tax code. But even a mild cynic has to wonder whether this call for a "simpler, fairer, pro-growth tax code" was just a flirtation…
New York
IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE how the Senate could become more partisan than it is today. But that's what Democrats vow will happen if Republicans attempt a rare parliamentary maneuver to break the stalemate over President Bush's judicial nominees.
ACCORDING TO a monograph I read a while back, called "The Rise and Fall of the Televised Political Convention," television networks used to cover political conventions for 10 hours a day, sometimes more. Then they gave up, and you can't really blame them. The all-news cable channels, it was…
Old Boys
Swift Justice
New York
Common Sense School Reform
She's No Girly-Man
IN A WEEK dedicated to Republican speechifying about why John Kerry should not be the next president of the United States, the most persuasive words came from a Democrat. And I don't mean Zell Miller's invigorating speech on Wednesday.
Fortunately, we had a resolute president named Truman, who, with the American people, persevered, knowing that a new democracy at the center of Europe would lead to stability and peace. George W. Bush, at the Republican convention Those policies--containing communism, deterring attack by the Soviet…
Books in Brief My Name is Bill by Susan Cheever (Simon & Schuster, 306 pp., $24.00). Bill Wilson is the most influential American you've never heard of--unless you're a recovering alcoholic. Wilson, a near-hopeless drunk, founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. The key to sobering up, he had learned,…
FIRST, Dutch euthanasia advocates said that patient killing will be limited to the competent, terminally ill who ask for it. Then, when doctors began euthanizing patients who clearly were not terminally ill, sweat not, they soothed: medicalized killing will be limited to competent people with…
A NUMBER OF EXPERTS have now weighed in on the inauthenticity of the documents CBS breathlessly revealed on 60 Minutes earlier this week--documents purportedly typed by the deceased commander of George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard unit in 1972 and 1973, but actually produced on a personal…
HAVE YOU ever wondered how Hollywood makes so many bad movies? If the movie-making process was random, then some small percentage of films every year would be good just by chance. Yet the product put out is so relentlessly bad that it defies probability: The people who make movies must be doing…
DOCUMENTS CITED Wednesday by 60 Minutes in a widely-publicized expose of George W. Bush's National Guard Service are very likely forgeries, according to several experts on document authenticity and typography. The documents--four memos from Killian to himself or his files written in 1972 and…
The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night -W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939" AND SO IT DOES, once again. Three years ago, the terrorists attacked symbols of U.S. strength. Last week, they struck at the children of School No. 1 in Beslan. In between, the forces of barbarism, holding…
EVERY DAY, it becomes more and more obvious that a dreadful wrong has been done to Al Gore. No, not the outcome of the 2000 election, though that would have been gruesome for anyone. The election was a tie, each side had grounds to complain about one court or another, and each had reason to believe…
IN THE SPRING of 1985 Ronald Reagan struggled with a Democrat-dominated Congress for authority to ship aid to the Nicaraguan Contras fighting the spreading grip of the Sandinistas on their Central American country. There was quite a lot of heated rhetoric and over-the-top theater. The Sandinistas…
SO MUCH for the much-promised Kerry foreign policy speech. In Cincinnati today, John Kerry basically repeated his stump speech, with no sustained discussion of Iraq, the war on terror, or foreign policy in general. An astonishingly weak performance. Is Kerry so wrapped around the axle on Iraq that…
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM has it that John Kerry's problems began with a convention that produced no bounce, followed by a Swift boat veterans offensive that tarnished the senator's warrior image.
New York
Sarajevo
JOHN KERRY said yesterday that Iraq was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." Translation: We would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power.
THE NEW YORK CITY CONVENTION was a smashing success. The Bush campaign and the White House should seize upon the convention's lesson and apply it to win this vital election. The lesson is obvious--the campaign is about President Bush and when we focus on making the case for his reelection, he sells…
THROUGHOUT the start-and-stop growth that has characterized the American economy in the past year, all eyes have been on the American consumer. Accounting for about 70 percent of the U.S. economy, consumers have kept the American and, indeed, the world economies from slipping into a deep recession…
THE MINUTE the ads of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had begun to draw blood, the Democrats attacked them as a giant, malevolent plot. The same plot, drawn up by a diabolical genius of unsurpassed malice and cunning, that has been causing Democrats trouble for so many years now, always unwarranted,…
Los Angeles
Douglas Brinkley Reports for Duty
Amsterdam
We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans' Day waving small flags, calling to memory those thousands who died for the "greater glory of the United States." We will not accept the rhetoric. We will not readily join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars--in fact, we will…
At the beginning of last week, the online magazine Salon.com asked a "roundtable of experts," on the eve of the Republican convention, What can President Bush do to win reelection in November?
JOHN MCCAIN WARNED John Kerry, a fellow Vietnam vet, not to emphasize the Vietnam war in his presidential campaign. No good would come of it. It would only reopen old wounds. Kerry ignored McCain's advice. The Democratic convention made Kerry's Vietnam record the focus of his candidacy. To know the…
JOHN KERRY has written the introduction to Let America Be America Again, a new but very slim selection of verse by the famous black poet Langston Hughes. In the preface, Kerry insists he was "drawn to incorporate the words" of the title--taken from a poem Hughes wrote in the 1930s--into his…
A MAN HAS BEEN in the news lately, accused of dishonorable behavior in war, and Iam here today to defend him. Blood, after all, is thicker than water.
ONE OF JOHN F. KERRY'S most damning accusations against President Bush is that he has made America a global pariah, thereby undercutting the international cooperation we need to win the war on terrorism. Kerry pledges to restore "America's respect and leadership so we don't have to go it alone in…
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 prep school known mainly for its famous alumnus John F. Kennedy. Like Yale, Choate is in Connecticut, so Kerry didn't have to travel far. He went with his…
Kerry the Hawk
Green Bay
DURING THE AUGUST 19 edition of PBS's NewsHour, Tom Oliphant unspooled. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence--and it's easy when you leave out the exculpatory stuff--is what keeps this story in the tabloids," the Boston Globe columnist sputtered, "because it does not meet basic…
"STARS WILL NOT play weak and they will not play blemished," William Goldman wrote in his seminal 1983 book, Adventures in the Screen Trade. "Try asking a major star to play a real Mafia head, a man who makes his living off whores and child pornography, heroin and blood; sorry folks, those parts go…
PART FICTION, part historical speculation, the publishing genre known as "alternate history" is a literary chimera--a seeming anomaly that is perfectly in sync with its time. Popularized by the Edwardians, alternate history pottered along for decades, mostly as a literary curiosity, before roaring…
BEHIND THE STARTLING FLIP-FLOPS, beneath the gauzy rhetoric, what does John Kerry really think about foreign and defense policy? Ranging from his 1971 testimony on Vietnam to his current statements on Iraq and the war on terror, there's a lot to be said. But one good place to start, of course, is…
THERE IS AN OLD POLITICAL SAYING: "It is better to be lucky than good." This week, President Bush was both: He gave a well-received acceptance speech to the Republican convention, and now he gets a jobs report that suggests his economic recovery program is working.
New York
New York
New York
New York
New York
THE SPEAKERS at the GOP convention this week agree on two things: that the war on terror trumps all other issues, and that President Bush would wage a stronger, more determined war than John Kerry.
New York
New York
New York
New York
New York
New York
PRESIDENT BUSH has reason to be delighted, though not giddy, as he prepares for his acceptance speech to the Republican convention tonight. He's already gotten to the point in the campaign against John Kerry where he figured to be after the convention. Several weeks ago, he was a few points down.…
IT'S OVER. The love affair of the left with John McCain is now ending, as these things do so often, in tears. Of course, liberals' hearts have been broken before, usually as the result of some cherished illusion that a maverick Republican, who seems to them "better," will blow the whistle on the…
IF YOU'RE going to be in New York, you ought to see a show. There's the usual Broadway fare, such as 42nd Street and The Lion King--assuming the talent shows up (the New York Post last week reported that anti-Bush actors were talking of calling in sick to avoid performing for Republicans). There's…
New York
New York
New York
SENATOR JOHN KERRY told veterans at the American Legion convention in Nashville today that America is engaged in a "global war on terror against an enemy unlike any we have known before." But last January he called the threat from this same enemy an "exaggeration."
"THEY COME because their hearts say to them, as mine did, 'If only I can get to America.'"
ON MONDAY, speaking in Wilmington, North Carolina, Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards gave a major foreign policy address that insulted America's allies in the war on terror, and suggested giving France and Germany a virtual veto over American security policy.
IN AN INTERVIEW with the Washington Post published yesterday, Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards promised that a Kerry administration would offer a "grand bargain" to the totalitarian theocracy in Iran. This "grand bargain" would allow the Islamic state to keep its nuclear power…
New York
New York
THE TALK OF THE GARDEN last night was Arnold Schwarzenegger's exuberant tribute to the American freedom that first drew him to fame and fortune in California. Every other pundit compared his oratory to Ronald Reagan's. Many Republicans criticized the organizers for failing to end the evening on…
As reporters focus on upcoming speeches from Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush, many delegates in New York City are buzzing about a Senate race that could mean the end of Tom Daschle's political career. Daschle is facing John Thune, a well-spoken former member of the House,…
THE WEEK the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, had dinner at the White House, his party back home did something that stuck in Mayor McKelvey's craw. It named Jerry Springer Ohio Democrat of the Year for 2004.
ACTOR RON SILVER has played some amazing roles. He was boxing trainer Angelo Dundee in the movie Ali. He was defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz in Reversal of Fortune. And he played Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Kissinger and Nixon, a TV film about the final days of the Vietnam war. At the…
IN A PROFILE that aired over the first two mornings of the Republican National Convention, ABC News reporter Claire Shipman asked Vice President Dick Cheney about his alleged distaste for retail politicking. Shipman read a comment from a reporter who covered Cheney. The vice president, this…