92 articles
WITH THINGS LOOKING UP for a change, this has been a rough patch of time for the Democrats. They have been suffering from Election Shock Treatment; which means the success of the Iraqi elections has shocked them into the realization that they may have to seek treatment, because of the trauma…
Malmö, Sweden
IT'S HUG-A-European Month for American foreign policy. First Condoleezza Rice inaugurates her tenure at the State Department with a grand tour of Europe's capitals. She wears tweed in London, speaks multilateralist in Paris, and from Brussels to Berlin dispenses erudite grace and scented bonhomie…
I AM NEW YORK CITY'S foremost Starbucksologist. I know which Starbucks in Manhattan have a rectangular shape and which are more curvilinear. I know which ones have their food displayed in horizontal cases with pastries at chest level and sandwiches down around your knees--and which have the…
DISRAELI'S CONSERVATISM
The Flight of the Creative Class
MCDONALD'S IS CELEBRATING ITS 15TH anniversary in Russia. Its sales have risen steadily, reaching $310 million in 2004. The company reports that it is serving more than 200,000 customers daily in more than a hundred Russian locations. Well, three cheers for McDonald's, but what's the big deal?
Isn't It Iranic?
Douglas, Arizona
BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS WANT TO upgrade ties with Indonesia's military. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has told Congress that the Indonesian military is cooperating in an investigation of the 2002 murders of two Americans and an Indonesian in Papua. This would clear the way to resume…
IN HIS SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS, George W. Bush made a full-throated, unabashed pledge to promote liberty throughout the world. Bush had barely stepped down from the podium, however, when "senior administration officials" began to caution that the president's speech did not signal a change in…
IF ARTHUR MILLER TEACHES US anything, it is this: Personal failure is not always a product of social injustice, and resentment is never a noble form of protest. Of course, his writings--from the 1949 Death of a Salesman to last year's Finishing the Picture--always insisted on the opposite. Miller's…
Books In Brief
ON THE EVENING OF FEBRUARY 10, the board of directors of WETA-FM, the only commercial-free classical music station in Washington, D.C., voted overwhelmingly to eliminate its music and arts programming. At the end of this month, someone will flick a switch and--thud!--WETA will fall to earth as just…
Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys
IN 1964, Richard Hofstadter wrote an essay called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." It traced the history of "angry minds" in our politics. Hofstadter meant "angry" in the strong sense. For him, the "paranoid style" is attained when a political movement posits the existence of a secret…
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER is on the verge of doing great things in California. Elected on a radical recall measure, California's governor is taking equally radical steps to mend the broken edifice of the state government. Proposing four sweeping reforms aimed at education, state pensions, the budget,…
ONE OF THE PROBLEMS with being the son of a president with a political future is the strange sort of friends you attract.
IN SEPTEMBER OF LAST YEAR, a small record label in Boston released an extraordinary album, though few beyond a handful of medium-sized newspapers noticed, and several only as the 30-year-old singer arrived in town to promote this quiet almost-masterpiece. Yet, the work began to win fans, due to its…
A REMARKABLE LETTER was issued from Pope John Paul last month. The "Apostolic Letter of the Holy Father John Paul II to Those Responsible for Communications," is titled The Rapid Development. Since my work is communication, I think it was addressed to me, and to every other reporter, editor,…
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.
LET US TALK OF ALLIES, but not, at least for once this week, of Europeans.
A SURVEY of the muck soon to be celebrated at the Academy Awards confirms William Goldman's sad truism: Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood.
[img caption="The newest Belgian fad--a Bush urinal sticker." float="right" width="231" height="282" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8858[/img] Brussels
THE GOOD NEWS is that the Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions came into effect last week, legally binding the 34 industrialized countries that have ratified the treaty to cut their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2012. Good news not because the agreement can do much to…
THE SUICIDE of Hunter S. Thompson, aged 65, according to the New York Times, or 67, according to the Washington Post, at his home in Aspen, may definitively mark the conclusion of the chaotic "baby-boomer" rebellion that began in the 1950s and crested in the 1960s, and which was dignified with the…
WHEN WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY founded National Review in 1955 at the age of 29, he lit the fire that sparked the modern conservative movement. Buckley had already achieved notoriety--if not celebrity--with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951. He attacked the undergraduate education on offer at…
IT'S EASY to dismiss Kim Jong Il as a cartoonish lunatic. The Don King-like hair, the goofy glasses, the drab olive jumpsuit, the eccentric habits, the secrecy--Kim looks, and often acts, downright cuckoo. Even as bloodstained dictators go, his Q-rating is abysmal. But never underestimate his wily…
Homs, Syria
(1) What are the necessary institutional requirements for a successor state of the former Soviet Union to succeed in a transition to democracy? And how have these institutions, which would be essential for a democratizing Russia, fared in President Putin's Russia?
FOR TWO WEEKS Eason Jordan has been engulfed in a blogswarm. During remarks at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the now-former CNN executive accused the U.S. military of deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq for murder. The unleashed fury of the blogosphere eventually overcame a media…
EAGER TO DIVERT ATTENTION from the incredible incompetence displayed in the handling of Eason Jordan's remarks before the Davos audience (and Jordan's November 2004 accusation that the U.S. military was torturing journalists), a number of voices within the mainstream media have argued that the…
IN MANY WAYS, MASSACHUSETTS Governor Mitt Romney is among the most fortunate of men. Scion of a prominent family (Romney's father George was president of American Motors Company and later governor of Michigan), Romney enjoyed a spectacularly successful business career as founder and chairman of the…
SPEAKING OF THE ONGOING BRUTALITY in Darfur, Senator Hillary Clinton recently told an audience at the Munich Conference on Security Policy that "We cannot say, 'Never again,' as it happens before our eyes." Since the 1994 Rwandan genocide where close to a million people were shot, hacked, and…
MICHAEL SCHEUER has uncovered "the most successful covert action program in the history of man." Or, at least that's what he told an audience at Council on Foreign Relations in New York City on February 3. The CIA's former bin Laden-hunter-turned-public-persona is the widely cited author of a…
IAN WILMUT, the co-creator of Dolly the Sheep, now intends to clone human life. This is quite a shift for Wilmut. When he and Keith Campbell entered the science pantheon with their announcement of the birth of Dolly, they forced the world to grapple with the question of whether it is moral to clone…
WHEN DICK CHENEY SAID, "Deficits don't matter," economists took that as proof of the economic illiteracy of the Bush administration. But it turns out there is a case to be made that Cheney was onto something.
I FIRST BECAME AWARE of Thomas E. Woods Jr.'s Politically Incorrect Guide to American History when the New York Times Book Review took note of its rise on the paperback bestseller list and described it as a "neocon retelling of this nation's back story." A neocon retelling? What would that be,…
ONE OF LIBERALS' chief motivations these days is fear of the religious right. Ask people on the left to explain their loathing of President Bush or the Republican party, and the answer often comes around to Jerry Falwell, evangelicals, theocracy, and so on. The left's fear of conservative…
THE DAY AFTER IRAQIS WENT to the polls, the London Independent commented, "In the long term, it is possible that yesterday's elections in Iraq may be seen as marking the start of great change across the whole region." Needless to say, the editors hastened to add that it would be "utterly wrong, now…
FOR MUCH OF THE PAST decade, Darik Volpa labored long and hard in the high-tech vineyards of San Jose and Boston. As an executive in the medical instrument industry, he earned good money, but could not achieve a middle class lifestyle in those pricey locales.
FOR TWELVE DAYS FOLLOWING THE death of former Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang, China's television and radio remained silent about his passing. A handful of newspapers mentioned it, in a government-approved two-sentence statement buried on inside pages. On the day of the cremation, January 29, China…
ALL RIGHT. LET US make an analytical bet of high probability and enormous returns: The January 30 elections in Iraq will easily be the most consequential event in modern Arab history since Israel's six-day defeat of Gamal Abdel Nasser's alliance in 1967. Israel's pulverizing defeat of the Arab…
WHY DID GEORGE BUSH WIN reelection? One factor that has received little, if any, attention is house prices. President Bush has presided over the largest increase in American home values of any president during the modern era--but potential dangers await as he begins his second term.
ON HIS WAY TO A special lunch on the day of his State of the Union address, President Bush asked why he was hosting this event. It's traditional, he was told. Indeed, for years presidents have invited television news anchors to the White House to brief them on the speech that evening. This year,…
"YOU DON'T PULL FEEDING tubes from people," exclaims a governor, objecting to Medicaid changes floated by the White House. At a December press conference, he continues: "You don't pull the wheelchair out from under the child with muscular dystrophy."
THREE DECADES AGO, TWO designers came up with ideas for memorials for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The concepts shared a common core: an outdoor room, open to the sky and enclosed by primitive stone walls. To date, only one of these has been built: Lawrence Halprin's abysmal Roosevelt Memorial in…
Reporters Say the Darnedest Things
Europe's Wake-Up Call
ON JUNE 28, 2004, a front-page article by Washington Post correspondent Robin Wright declared the Bush Doctrine dead, or at least on life-support. "The occupation of Iraq has increasingly undermined, and in some cases discredited, the core tenets of President Bush's foreign policy," she wrote,…
OKLAHOMA'S NEWEST CONGRESSMAN, DAN Boren, is anti-tax, pro-gun, and anti-partial-birth-abortion. He supports the Federal Marriage Amendment and favors broad tort reform. Adorning the floor of his House of Representatives office is a bearskin rug, and mounted on the walls are several deer heads.…
THE DEMOCRATS' WORST WEEK AND a half since Black Tuesday (November 2, 2004, when the U.S. election returns came in) began on January 18, when Barbara Boxer took on Condi Rice in the Senate, and ended on Black Sunday (January 30, 2005, when Iraq held its first free election). In one comparatively…
IF SPORTS ARE A CIVIC religion, then Super Bowl Sunday is Christmas and Hanukkah wrapped into one. For a single night, we all get to play Joe Superfan and lose ourselves in bacchanalian excess. As Dennis Miller once quipped, "More toilets are flushed during Super Bowl halftime than at any other…
Books in Brief
A RECENT CASUAL, DISMISSIVE reference to Lionel Trilling recalled to me the man who was the most eminent intellectual figure of his time--certainly in New York intellectual circles, but also beyond that, in the country as a whole.
Somewhere in the Caribbean
BETWEEN THE END of the American Civil War in 1865 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914, the first great period of human globalization brought the world together as never before. Technologies like the railroad, the telegraph, the airplane, and the internal combustion engine led many…
With three countries already on board and a host of European countries facing referenda to ratify the proposed European Constitution, one would think that the ratification process in Europhile France would be relatively simple. However, despite a majority in parliament in support of the…
President Bush unfurled his 2,300-page, $2.57 trillion budget proposal--the largest federal budget in history--on Monday morning, in a press availability with reporters, and at some point someone asked him what he thought about the document. "It is a budget that sets priorities," the president…
"CHRIS MATTHEWS looked at you like you were Grover Norquist," a very senior Democratic operative commented on my appearance at Matthews' weekend show. During the segment where Matthews asks his panel to tell them something he doesn't know, I predicted a breakout this week into mainstream media of…
Road Town, Tortola
You'd think it would be a great time to be a small-L liberal: human freedom is on the march in such unlikely places as Iraq, Afghanistan, and even among the Palestinians. The president of the United States can't seem to go five minutes without praising the virtues of liberty, and realpolitikers…
p>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. *1* I JUST WANTED to thank Tom Donnelly for taking the time to think about and comment on my ideas. We clearly disagree about what the present and…
Philipsburg, St. Maarten
NATAN SHARANSKY's timing was perfect. On January 25, Sharansky, the ex-Soviet dissident and current Israeli cabinet member, presented a detailed report on the Palestinian Authority's promotion of anti-Semitism and genocide in its official media. He did so amidst the 60th anniversary of the…
Somewhere in the Caribbean
WE HAVE BECOME ACCUSTOMED to seeing their major industries changing before our very eyes. For investment bankers, these restructurings produce a fee bonanza that sends the prices of New York condominiums soaring, and puts smiles on the faces of Porsche dealers, as thirty-something masters of the…
Nassau, Bahamas
SECRETARY OF STATE CONDOLEEZZA RICE has identified Zimbabwe as one of six "outposts of tyranny." She is certainly right. What remains unclear is what immediate steps Washington is prepared to take to oppose the regime of Robert Mugabe and address the consequences of its misrule--a collapsing…
JUST FOUR MONTHS AGO, thousands of mourners thronged the Grand Mosque in Mecca for the funeral of a famous Sufi teacher. This was an extraordinary event, given the discrimination against all non-Wahhabi Muslims that is the state policy of Saudi Arabia. The dead man, 58-year-old Seyed Mohammad Alawi…
Sjokkhilsen fra Bush-datter!
FOR ELECTION NIGHT 2004, America's senior diplomat in Havana threw a party--the only such gala in town. James Cason decked out his residence with balloons, campaign materials, a giant-screen TV, and a mock voting station. His Cuban guests, maybe 180 people, watched CNN en Español, and learned of…
Oswiecim, Poland
The British Seaborne Empire
WHEN A PROMINENT AMERICAN IN any field passes on, it's front-page news. Some sneer at this and say, "The same thing happens to everyone. Why is it bigger if it happens to a star?" But I think it is bigger. Yes, thousands probably die in the same way at the same time, and each is a sorrow, but the…
Venice
A COLD WEATHER WAVE HITS America's northeast, oil inventories are drawn down, and prices rise. A pipeline is blown up in Iraq, and prices rise even more. The OPEC cartel meets and agrees to cut back production, adding to price pressures. The government announces a rise in inventories, or weather…
Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit
BENJAMIN DISRAELI--TWICE PRIME minister of Great Britain, romantic novelist, inventor of modern conservatism--was a neocon in the plain sense of the word, a "new conservative" who began his career on the left. Conservative thinking dates to the dawn of organized society, but modern conservatism--a…
The Other "CIA"
"FRED IS DEAD," read the note my wife left on the small table in our front hall on which we leave each other messages. Fred was Fred Austin, our mailman for the better part of the past fifteen years. Three days before I had put a twenty in his hand, as I do every year, instructing him to have a…
ON THE EVE of the election in Iraq, Democratic senator Edward Kennedy called President Bush's Iraq policy "a catastrophic failure." He demanded that American troops immediately begin to withdraw. "We have no choice," he declared, "but to make the best we can of the disaster we have created in…
LOCAL CRITICS HAVE FOUND IN President Bush's second inaugural address an excellent opportunity to remonstrate, revile, and ridicule the president. Only they've had to rewrite the speech to do it.
THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW PANEL which investigated CBS News's faked memos found no basis to accuse Dan Rather or Mary Mapes of political bias in connection with their roles in the offending 60 Minutes story about President Bush's National Guard service. In its report the Panel characterized the very…
THERE'S SOMETHING ALLURING about flying in a private jet, even if you're sitting backwards, crammed alongside other reporters. Maybe it's because you walk directly onto the tarmac, up the stairs to the Lear, no lines and no need to remove your shoes. Maybe it's the leather chairs and wood paneling.…
ADRIANA BOSCH'S much-touted documentary Fidel Castro made its PBS debut Monday night, as part of the network's "American Experience" series. I can already picture conservatives rolling their eyes. "A PBS special on Castro?" But Bosch's piece is remarkable--remarkably good, that is. It explains (1)…
MURRAY LERNER, a documentary filmmaker now in his 70s, filmed a legendary open-air rock concert on England's Isle of Wight in August of 1970. Tied up until 1997 in legal hassles, Lerner has only just now released a Woodstock-style documentary of the event's highlights along with a collection of…
BECAUSE I HAD TO FILE this column before President Bush gave his State of the Union address, I can only hope he called Democrats on their indifference to the medium- and long-term threats to Social Security. The decision by Democrats and their friends in media and blogosphere to downplay the…
WHEN DISCUSSING Markos Moulitsas and the eponymous left wing blog that he runs, The Daily Kos, it's helpful to start with a few facts. The Daily Kos (rhymes with rose, based on Moulitsas' old army nickname) is far and away the most popular blog on the Internet: Kos averages over 400,000 page views…
I'VE JUST FLOWN IN from Afghanistan, and boy, are my arms tired. Simply sitting in an economy-class seat--even on British Airways, the world's only civilized airline--gave me quite a compacted feeling.
BIOTECHNOLOGY is becoming dangerously close to raging out of control. Scientists are engaging in ever increasingly macabre experiments that threaten to mutate nature and the human condition at the molecular level. Worse, many scientists have made it clear that society has no right to apply the…
I HAVE A THEORY as to why the city of Irvine, deep in the heart of Orange County, was chosen as the California site for Iraqi expatriates participating in Sunday's election. And it doesn't have to do with the obvious swords-to-plowshares symbolism of the voting locale: a former Marine Corps air…