112 articles
FOR MANY YEARS, THERE was an open secret in the battle against AIDS in Africa. A few of us knew about, and earnestly sought to publicize, crucial findings indicating the most effective approach to AIDS prevention. Yet the "experts" in the field didn't want to hear. Our secret was that the country…
The Lives of Agnes Smedley
TOO EARLY FOR REPUBLICANS TO fret about 2008? Never! Before last week's inaugural fireworks had even been lit, the handicapping of 2008 Republican hopefuls was well underway. GOP sources slice the potential '08ers into an A-list and a B-list. Here's a quick roundup of who's where, as President Bush…
'A Rigorous Scholar Who Cannot Defend Himself'
Unforgivable Blackness
PRESIDENT BUSH COULD HAVE OPTED for an easy route to modest success in the White House. After overthrowing the Taliban and routing al Qaeda in Afghanistan, he could have stopped there and not ordered an invasion of Iraq. In his first inaugural address, he advocated "a balance of power that favors…
YOU'VE GOT TO HAND IT to our political players. Even with the onset of second-term ho-hums, everyone did his part to convey the momentousness of what some wags call the "peaceful non-transfer of power." Republicans turned out for the inauguration in cashmere-swaddled, mink-stoled finery, dutifully…
DEPENDING ON THE OUTCOME OF the investigation, a recent grisly murder in Jersey City, New Jersey, may be a sign of things to come in our domestic war on terror.
"WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE political philosopher?" a group of Republican candidates were asked early in the 2000 race for president. And the frontrunner at the time, a Texas governor named George W. Bush, calmly answered, "Christ, because he changed my life."
A social science that cannot speak of tyranny with the same confidence with which medicine speaks, for example, of cancer, cannot understand social phenomena as what they are. --Leo Strauss, On Tyranny Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered. Yet we have this consolation with us, that the…
SAMIR VINCENT WAS VISITING BAGHDAD when Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. He had not lived in his native Iraq for some three decades, having left in 1958 for the United States and a track-and-field career that would later land him in the Boston College Athletic Hall…
Pension Panic
GEORGE W. BUSH IS a strong, clear-minded president--one of the strongest and clearest-minded we have ever had. Why can't a great president give a great speech?
Books in Brief
RICHARD DALEY, THE LATE mayor of Chicago and a master of ward politics, would have been proud. In a Baghdad suburb last week, activists for Prime Minister Allawi's "Iraqi List" were handing out the Middle Eastern equivalent of "walking around money" to Arab media covering the election--a little…
Gilead
HILLARY LEANS IN TO HER husband, teeth clenched in a polite smile: "Bill! I swear, you are so predictable. Stop ogling that woman in the black beret! It's Karl's wife, for heaven's sake."
Hitler Youth
WHEN MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. brought his campaign against segregation to Bull Connor's Birmingham, he laid siege to the bastion of Jim Crow. Birmingham was among the most segregated cities in the country at the time; King called it a city whose fathers had apparently never heard of Abraham Lincoln.…
FDR REPORTEDLY SAID IT FIRST, though the story could be apocryphal. Sizing up Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua's brutal (but pro-American) dictator, Roosevelt quipped, "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."
THERE IS NO WORD in Latin for "volcano."
ONLY SUPERHEROES have superpowers. But are superpowers the only ones who have superheroes? Let me explain: In the six and a half decades since the birth of the superhero comic-book genre, a disproportionate number of super-powered men and women have--surprise, surprise--turned out to be American…
Dear Senator Frist, Senator Reid, Speaker Hastert, and Representative Pelosi:
ON THURSDAY the Brussels-based European parliament voted on a resolution remembering the victims of the Holocaust and condemning anti-Semitism, ancient and modern, in all its forms. The resolution, which also established January 27 as a European-wide Holocaust memorial day, passed overwhelmingly.…
SENATOR HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON has given a speech on abortion that is befuddling the political class. Did she, in her speech Monday to abortion-rights supporters, say what she's always said on abortion, or something new?
Kabul
SITTING ACROSS from the very pleasant Soledad O'Brien, I got the impression that she had been well briefed and may even have dipped in my new book Blog, but I was certain by interview's end that she was not an enthusiast of the blogosphere. I'd had the same feeling upon completion of a four way…
Caracas
Editor's note: Larry Miller has been on hiatus recently, working hard on both a book, which will be published soon by Judith Regan, and a pilot for a television show for Sony and NBC. He will return regularly to THE DAILY STANDARD in a few months.
THE MUSIC HAS STOPPED, the flower arrangements have wilted, and the 2,000 police who came from all over the country to aid the 4,000 Washington cops (and the military) maintain security have gone home, as have the 12,000 Texans and Texan-wannabes who consumed 21,000 enchiladas at the "Black Tie and…
Detroit
IMAM HAMZA YUSUF, formerly Hanson, is a one-trick pony: He, like other radical Muslims in America, claims discrimination where none exists.
MY FELLOW AMERICANS, I had intended to reach out to all of you and bring a divided nation together. But I changed my mind. America isn't divided by political ethos or ethnic origin. America isn't divided by region or religion. America is divided by jerks. Who wants to bring a bunch of jerks…
IS A BIPARTISAN COALITION REQUIRED to pass legislation that would allow individuals to invest their Social Security payroll taxes in stocks and bonds? Not really. Surely, the White House will endorse a Social Security reform plan that slows the growth of benefits by roughly 40 percent, right? Don't…
The Israel Factor
Reagan's Revolution
LAST TUESDAY'S OVAL OFFICE INTERVIEW appeared to be over. Washington Times editor in chief Wesley Pruden had thanked the president. But President Bush had something to add:
Leader (Possibly) of the Self-Revising Forces
LIKE AN IDIOT, I once took a break from the journalism business and spent a year writing presidential speeches. I wrote talking points for the annual Thanksgiving Day Turkey Pardon, a couple of commencement addresses, and long, meaty disquisitions on fiscal policy, regulatory reform, the health…
AFTER SPENDING THREE MONTHS ON an investigation that must have rung up hundreds of thousands of dollars in billable hours, the team of lawyers hired by CBS to investigate its scandalously spurious report about George W. Bush's long-ago National Guard service finally concluded last week that CBS…
THE WORLD CHANGED ON SEPTEMBER 11, and with it the Bush presidency--but not as much as you may think. True, its priorities shifted dramatically, with the war on terrorism taking precedence over all else. But much of what this presidency has become was there in the beginning--indeed, when George W.…
LAST SEPTEMBER, CBS NEWS president Andrew Heyward promised a full accounting within "weeks, not months" of his network's attempt to pass off as genuine four fraudulent memos about President Bush's long-ago service in the Texas Air National Guard. Last Monday--nearly four months later--CBS released…
Election 2004
A Bit on the Side
Books in Brief
Hyde Park, February 13, 2005 (AP)--The Culinary Institute of America yesterday denounced participation of military nutritionists in torture of Guantanamo detainees. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, nutritionists on the Cuban naval base assisted in the preparation of Halal…
A REMARKABLE ELECTION TOOK PLACE in Ukraine on December 26. After the ruling party stole the November 21 presidential vote, massive street protests forced a new runoff, in which the rightful winner, Viktor Yushchenko, finally prevailed.
"We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as he wills. We have confidence because freedom is the…
WEDNESDAY marked the 1,000th day that pro-democracy activist Yang Jianli has been incarcerated in a Chinese prison. Congressmen Barney Frank and Christopher Cox, along with Jianli's wife, Christina Fu, and his lawyer, held a press conference to commemorate the occasion, to review the state of human…
WHAT WAS SO GREAT about President Bush's inaugural address? First, it was eloquent, noting that freedom lights "a fire in the minds of men" and represents both "the hunger in dark places [and] the longing of the soul." More important, the speech laid out an extraordinarily sweeping and ambitious…
OVER AT POWER LINE, John Hinderaker has found one of the most egregious bits of media bias yet recorded. (Hinderaker found the story at a smaller blog, The San-Antonio Express-News Watch.) It seems that yesterday ABC News posted a call on its website for help from readers:
To: Les Moonves, President, CBS
THE DATA RELEASED last week showing that America's trade deficit hit still another record in November startled those who have been expecting the shrunken dollar to shrink the deficit, and soon. The $60.3 billion recorded in November, a jump of 7.7 percent from the October level, appalled those…
THE CBS REPORT issued last week by Richard Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi left a number of interesting questions unanswered. The Internet in general and the blogosphere in particular are a means of harnessing open-source information. So we'd like to invite the blogosphere to help answer some of the…
PRESIDENT BUSH WENT TO MADISON County, Illinois, last week to kick off his campaign for tort reform. "Junk lawsuits change the way doctors do medicine," said the president, surrounded by a phalanx of doctors from southern Illinois. "Instead of taking care of patients, they're worried about…
MAYBE WE SHOULDN'T WORRY. President Bush is bravely pushing ahead to introduce personal investment accounts in Social Security and to save the system from insolvency. This is political turf where others, including President Reagan, have feared to tread. And Bush is poised to press later this year…
THERE IS A NEW YEAR'S story (it may even be true) about Merriman Smith, one of the great White House correspondents of mid-century. As a young reporter freshly arrived from Georgia in the 1930s, Smith was told to man the Washington desk on New Year's Day, while his more senior colleagues nursed…
CONSERVATIVES HAVE BEEN INCLINED TO defend Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld because many of his critics oppose him for executing a war they don't like, or because these critics' true target is a president they despise. It is quite possible to support President Bush and the war in Iraq and still…
CARTESIAN ETHICS
The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln
A NORWEGIAN DIPLOMAT, JAN Egeland, is the United Nations' undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and chief emergency relief coordinator. Egeland has worked at the U.N. since June 2003. He lives in Midtown Manhattan with his wife and daughters, and he has written many books and articles.…
IN DEFENSE of Rummy
DESPITE A FEW PLAYS FOR political advantage, here and abroad, the world's response to the Indian Ocean tsunami has been heartening. With few exceptions, the vast majority of people, countries, and religions are working together to alleviate human suffering. The big exception is radical Islamists,…
PRESIDENT BUSH WANTS TO REFORM the Social Security system. He is right to want to transform the system into one that meets the needs of an America whose economy and demography markedly differ from the day when Franklin Roosevelt put this safety net in place. He is right, too, to have decided to…
RARELY HAS A PRESIDENT, successful in his first term, collapsed so totally in his second term as Russia's Vladimir Putin did in 2004. Alberto Fujimori of Peru might offer the closest parallel, with Carlos Menem of Argentina another contender.
Books in Brief
DISCOUNTING FOR AN UNDERWATER EARTHQUAKE that sent 40-foot-high waves traveling thousands of miles across the open sea to inflict death and destruction on an unimaginable scale, it was kind of a sleepy holiday for the Washington political community, newswise. So you can understand the titillation…
Harare, Zimbabwe
I CALLED UP Brian Anderson yesterday to ask him a few questions about his forthcoming book, South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias.
REALITY SHOWS regularly feature contestants eating maggots, swimming with snakes, and jumping off cliffs. But none has ended in people tearing one another apart, limb from limb, the victors feasting on the flesh of the losers. This might happen next season but in the meantime, there's the National…
NO POLITICAL BIAS--none at all. So says the independent panel that CBS News asked to find out what went wrong with its infamous Sixty Minutes Wednesday broadcast concerning George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. "The panel," says its 224-page report, "cannot conclude that a…
MY REVIEW of C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln for THE WEEKLY STANDARD has caught the attention of several bloggers--but Andrew Sullivan seems to have been the most irritated. Indeed, his website contains half a dozen angry references to my essay--and that's not counting the…
YESTERDAY, the Washington Post reported ("Search for Banned Arms In Iraq Ended Last Month") that the conclusions reached in Charles Duelfer's September 2004 report on Iraq's weapons programs will be the "final word" on the subject. The New York Times editorial board weighed in today. The Times…
LARGE AND POWERFUL INSTITUTIONS do not react well to internal scandal, especially when that scandal threatens to erode a central pillar of the institution's authority. The first reaction will almost inevitably be denial, followed by various efforts to isolate and minimize the scandal, to protect…
THE ESTABLISHMENTARIAN CRITIQUE of President Bush's policy in Iraq--and the scheming neocons for whom the president is supposed to be the Manchurian Candidate--is that they are blinded by ideology. There is, almost certainly, a grain of truth in this, but it comes from a profound belief in the…
SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, Western publics have boned up on Saudi Arabia and its strict Wahhabi variant of Islam. In the process, some may have come to think of the Saudi kingdom, with its police-enforced public segregation of the sexes and total absence of religious freedom, as monolithic--a…
THE THORNBURGH-BOCCARDI PANEL makes a great show of its agnosticism about the question at the heart of the CBS scandal: Are the memos CBS presented authentic? On this score, the CBS Report is certain in its uncertainty: "The Panel was not able to reach a definitive conclusion as to the authenticity…
FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD CHAIRMAN Alan Greenspan is famous for his ability to use the language with such precision that it ceases to be a means of communication. He once told a congressional committeeman, who congratulated him on the clarity of his response to a question, "Then I must have misspoken."
MARY MAPES is right. In a response to her firing from CBS News, the former star producer accuses CBS of "scape-goating" her and says that her dismissal is the result of "corporate and political considerations."
IN A DOCUMENT shot through with agnosticism, perhaps the most agnostic section of the CBS Report is a six-page segment toward the end titled, "Whether There Was a Political Agenda Driving the September 8 Segment."
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.
GEORGE W. BUSH got more votes in winning re-election than the entire population of France. He improved his share of the vote among Latinos, women, African-Americans, Jews and Catholics. Winning a plurality of states along the Mississippi River has guaranteed presidential victory since 1912. Bush…
IF YOU'RE GETTING OVER being steamed at Norwegian U.N. apparatchik Jan Egeland, who a week ago thought the U.S. response to the tsunami "stingy," then you need to check in at The Diplomad, a tremendous blog run by a State Department careerist serving abroad and which has done more for the…
IN THE AFTERMATH of Arnold Schwarzenegger's second State of the State Address, delivered early Wednesday evening in Sacramento, this much is apparent: Though nearly 14 months into the job, California's Governator is no longer a political novice, but he is still a political novelty and must-see TV.…
ON December 21, a terrorist blew himself up in the U.S. military mess hall in Mosul, in northern Iraq. Twenty-two people were killed, including U.S. soldiers and contractors.
ONE OF THE OLD STANDBYS of Pentagon defense planning--particularly in the age of PowerPoint--is the notion of the "spectrum of conflict." The concept attempts to plot the gamut of military operations--from Kantian peace to Hobbesian Armageddon--along one axis, with the proper allocation of…
NEARLY 60 YEARS AGO, Allied soldiers liberated Nazi concentration camps throughout Europe, bringing an end to the nightmarish Nazi system that utilized factories of mass death to eliminate enemies and despised ethnic and religious groups. The pledge "never again" was heard then, and various…
AUBURN FANS know exactly how Joe Jacobs must've felt. Jacobs, a boxing manager, coined the adage "We wuz robbed!" back in 1932. His fighter, Max Schmeling, had just lost a controversial split decision to pugilist Jack Sharkey. Since then, myriad athletic teams have adopted Jacobs's phrase to…
AFTER HUMILIATING OKLAHOMA last night, USC was officially declared the top college football team in the country. But is there any doubt that Auburn is No. 2 and would have played a far better game against USC--and perhaps even won? Oklahoma's weak pass defense was easily picked apart by USC…
REPUBLICANS GREW SO EXASPERATED by the reign of Mary Frances Berry as chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that they wound up calling for the agency's termination. But now that Berry, a member of the commission since 1980 and its chairman since 1993, has resigned, Republicans see things,…
THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW has a long, proud history of ignoring the story of the forged documents used by Dan Rather and CBS News. You'll recall that the scandal first broke on September 9, 2004, when a group of bloggers publicly questioned the validity of the four CBS memos. In the ensuing…
ON DECEMBER 19, 2004, the Tennessean broke a story which made waves in the world of country music. The paper was contacted by Stephanie Hoffpauir, a member of the Chely Wright fan club, who claimed she had participated in a scheme to boost Wright's single, "Bumper of My SUV," to the top of the…
AS THE NEW YEAR BEGINS, the latest chapter in the remarkable tale of a rich, 47-year old Saudi subject named Yasin al-Kadi offers many lessons, regarding terrorism, responses to it, and the role and responsibilities of Saudi Arabia in fighting it.
THERE ARE TWO REASONS why economic forecasters live dangerous lives. The first danger lies in the unknowables--unpredictable events of such magnitude that they swamp the variables that economists are comfortable dealing with. Consider just a few:
State of Fear
British prime minister Tony Blair visited Baghdad on December 21. Excerpts from Blair's remarks at his press conference with his Iraqi counterpart, Iyad Allawi, are reprinted below.
THE INCOMING REPRESENTATIVE FROM GEORGIA'S 4th congressional district is the outspoken Cynthia McKinney. She is a Democrat, she is 49 years old, and she has held the job before. She held it for a decade, in fact, from 1992, when she became the first black woman elected to Congress from Georgia, to…
Blood From Stones
CONSERVATIVES COME IN MANY STRIPES and various hues. There are the paleoconservatives (the guys who want to get the cars off the streets but haven't yet found an efficient way to deal with the horse manure once they've done so) and the neoconservatives (those former liberals famously mugged by…
Chaucer and the House of Fame
AT HIS PRESS CONFERENCE JUST before Christmas, President Bush was George the Salesman, pitching Social Security reform. He failed to make the sale. He stumbled in his explanation of why the system is in trouble. He awkwardly ducked questions on the grounds that he shouldn't "negotiate with myself."…
Ferreting Out the News
No Free Lunch
Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South
OUR BLACKHAWK FLIGHT FROM VICTORY Base to Babylon packs 2,700 years of Iraqi history into a 100-kilometer dash at altitudes a cubit or so above the tallest date palms. Every Iraqi August day is a blowtorch by 1030 hours, and this morning is no exception. As I wait in the lead helicopter, sweat…
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION EMERGED IN THE 1960s as a policy intended to help blacks. How, then, would institutions committed to affirmative action respond if it could be shown that the policy does blacks more harm than good? Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA, is about to find out.
OF ALL THE LEFT-wing responses to Bush's reelection--the crying jags, the applications for Canadian citizenship, the bulk orders of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint--perhaps the strangest of all can be found online at left2right.typepad.com, where a roster of academic all-stars have embarked on a…
Books in Brief
THE MIDDLE EAST HAS DEFINED the first four years of George W. Bush's presidency. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the administration's evolving pro-democracy Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, and the downplaying of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation have overturned America's…
LAST MONTH A CLASSIFIED UNITED Nations report prompted Secretary General Kofi Annan to admit that U.N. peacekeepers and staff have sexually abused or exploited war refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The worst of the 150 or so allegations of misconduct--some of them captured on…
CALIFORNIA REP. HENRY WAXMAN'S REPORT last month on abstinence-only programs, in which his researchers found some curriculum errors, gave him an opportunity to (again) slam alleged weaknesses in President Bush's sex-education policy. Some in the mainstream media willingly played along.
WHO WILL MAKE the biggest political splash of 2005? Will it be an Indian-American Rhodes Scholar from Louisiana? Or the star of the Democratic convention? Or maybe a conservative Republican winning the New Jersey governorship? Who knows. But here's a list of five politicians to keep an eye on…