110 articles
IN JANUARY, Universal Studios told Variety that it was going to be a while before the DVDs for the first season of Miami Vice would go on sale. Licensing the soundtrack--with music by U2, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, and Tina Turner, among others--was proving very expensive. What then explains the…
IN 2002, the movie Hero became an instant hit in China, where it was made by Zhang Yimou, perhaps the best-known Chinese director. When it opened in America last year--complete with an above-the-title imprimatur by haute auteur Quentin Tarantino--it was billed as an action-romance of the Crouching…
AMERICA IS THE LAND OF THE AUTOMOBILE. Cars are the keys to adulthood, the grail of status, the lifeblood of the economy, and the passport to a vast land. They are also Public Enemy Number One.
TUESDAY marked the third year that pro-democracy activist Yang Jianli has spent in a Chinese prison. Congressman Barney Frank, along with Jianli's wife, Christina Fu, and his lawyer, Jared Genser, held a press conference yesterday to acknowledge the sad anniversary and urge a medical parole for…
IT'S THE $64,000 QUESTION on Capitol Hill these days: Do Republican senators have the 50 votes needed to end judicial filibusters? Senate majority whip Mitch McConnell thinks so. "I never announce my whip count," he said Sunday on the CBS program Face the Nation. "But I'm telling you there's no…
A SPEECH I HOPE a Republican senator from the classes of 2002 or 2004 makes at the next gathering of the GOP Senate caucus:
SO IT HAS FINALLY HAPPENED, just as the nay-sayers said it would. A memo is leaked suggesting that Korea's central bank is considering switching out of dollars, and the value of the U.S. currency drops. Unexpectedly weak job market and retail figures hit the wires, and the experts scramble to be…
The Dictators
TWO THINGS HAPPENED LAST WEEK that cast a sharp light on the real impetus behind the Democratic/media effort to bring down House majority leader Tom DeLay. The first was House approval, by a huge margin of 110 votes on final passage, of the permanent repeal of the federal inheritance tax. The…
AN OLD WOODEN DESK SITS in my basement, on which I write and edit, with the washing machine on one side and the hot-water heater on the other. It's too square and bulky for a cubicle, a little too large to be carried straight through a doorway. It's also missing a couple of pulls--the screw-holes…
ACCORDING TO WELL-PLACED German sources, the rumors swirling around foreign minister Joschka Fischer are true. He has, in fact, gained a lot of weight. "Have you seen him lately?" asked one German politician. "He is huge!"
The Big Picture
The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy
ON APRIL 7 THE CAMPAIGN for America's Future, a liberal group, bought a full-page ad in the conservative Washington Times. The ad displays photos of Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Dwight Eisenhower, and Tom DeLay. "Once upon a time," the ad begins, "conservatives stood for honest government. . . .…
Brattleboro, Vermont
The West 43rd St. Sausage-Making Plant
PRAs are A-Okay
ORCHIDS LOOK TO BECOME MY next obsession. I do not, I think, qualify as a truly obsessive personality, but I do like to have an obsession going from time to time. For a while I was obsessed with finding the perfect fountain pen, which I believe I've now found. Books were a more enduring obsession,…
IF YOU'RE NOT A DARTMOUTH alum, there are still two reasons to care about this year's alumni trustee election: Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki, who are running as insurgents. Robinson is an author and Hoover Institution scholar best known for penning Ronald Reagan's Berlin Wall speech in 1987.…
THE SENATE MAJORITY LEADER, Bill Frist, and his Republican colleagues, face a momentous decision: Do they allow the Democratic minority to prevent the Senate from voting on judicial nominees, or do they invoke the "nuclear option"--that is, change the rules so a simple majority of 51 can force a…
Books in Brief
San Francisco
MANY COMMENTATORS on President Bush's second-term appointments have linked the nominations of Secretary Rice to her position at State, Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank, and John Bolton to the United Nations as a troika making a particular statement. The Guardian, for example, published a column by…
IN THE POLITICIZED DEBATE over the former Iraqi regime's relationship with al Qaeda, no politician has been a more vocal naysayer than Senator Carl Levin. For almost two years the Democratic senator from Michigan has attempted to discredit the notion that the two could have worked together in any…
Being overweight is nowhere near as big a killer as the government thought, ranking No. 7 instead of No. 2 among the nation's leading causes of death, according to a startling new calculation from the CDC. . . . The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated Tuesday that packing on too…
WITH THE REFERENDUM DATE in France of May 29 fast approaching, Jacques Chirac, one of the most ardent supporters of the proposed European Union constitution, is finding Europe's grand project on the ropes. Eleven straight polls have found that the French would reject the proposed constitution if…
THE MOST IMPORTANT STATEMENT Pope Benedict XVI may ever make was the one delivered before he was elected the successor to John Paul II. Just before he and his 114 colleagues entered the conclave, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger addressed the entire College of Cardinals, the whole Roman Catholic…
A conceit of the modern age is that we're free and independent- thinking people who decide, wholly on our own, how to live our lives. Stereotype plays on this theme. One is the rebellion of children of conservative parents who transformed themselves into counterculture radicals in the 1960s.…
MOST OF AMERICA PROBABLY felt that the Red Sox ending their 86 year drought and winning the 2004 World Series was an immaculate blessing for the city of Boston. But the success of the Sox has not come without its problems. For one thing, parking around Boston's historic Fenway Park has become…
WHAT CAN WE LEARN of Benedict from his first appearance? Much can be gleaned from a first impression, and the eyes of the world are always upon the newly appointed bishop of Rome when he takes his first steps out onto the loggia to address the crowds, urbi et orbi. Benedict's predecessor instantly…
THE MEDIA clichés are already hardening around Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, just hours after becoming Pope Benedict XVI. Will they brook any dissent from the caricature they're drawing?
STATISTICS ABOUND showing that children with absent fathers suffer a much worse fate than those whose dads stuck around. They're more likely to have low birth weight before they're more likely become obese, go to jail long-term, contract diseases, be treated for emotional problems, live in poverty,…
WE DON'T HAVE TO WAIT for the outcome of the battle between American International Group (AIG) and its regulators to predict that it will affect how public companies can be governed in a world in which prosecutors are unconstrained by rules designed to protect the rights of the accused.
LAST WEEKEND, Yale's chapter of the American Constitutional Society sponsored a conference at Yale Law School titled "The Constitution in 2020." The stated purpose of the conference, at which some of America's best-known liberal law professors appeared, was to work toward a "progressive" consensus…
THE FIRST READING OF THE Catholic Church's daily Mass for Friday, April 8, 2005--the day of the funeral in Rome for Pope John Paul II--comes from the Acts of the Apostles. It describes a meeting in Jerusalem of the Sanhedrin, the highest council of the ancient Jewish nation. Peter and several of…
FULL DISCLOSURE (okay, partial disclosure--let's not get carried away with media ethics breast-beating): John Bolton has been an occasional contributor to this magazine. He served in the late 1990s as a director of the Project for the New American Century, which I chair. And he is a friend.
THIRTY-SIX YEARS AGO, Melvin J. Lasky, editor of Encounter, wrote to a Croatian literary translator living in Canada, B.S. Brusar. The subject was a Bosnian poet of Croat origin, Nikola Sop (1904-1982), whose name is pronounced shop.
FRESH FROM THE CHARADE OF his latest rigged reelection, Robert Mugabe, dictator of the disintegrating country of Zimbabwe, had the effrontery to show up in Rome for the funeral of Pope John Paul II. Mugabe was raised a Catholic and still sometimes is seen at Mass, though his record as a political…
HISTORY LABORS--A WORN machine, sick with torsion, ill-meshed--and every repair of an old fault ruptures something new. Or so it seems, much of the time. Our historical choices are limited, constrained by the poverty of what appears possible at any given moment. To be a good leader is, for most…
PRESIDENT BUSH'S PLAN TO CREATE personal retirement accounts for Social Security, which seemed so promising a few months ago, is now officially floundering. Senate Republicans are now crafting a compromise proposal that takes personal accounts off the table. Meanwhile, House speaker Denny Hastert…
The Best Year of Their Lives
RONALD REAGAN'S DEATH LAST JUNE posed a dilemma for much of the press. How do you hash out the posthumous legacy of a man who, in life, you failed to understand? The befuddled fourth estate deployed the principle that says the simplest explanation is best. Reagan succeeded, they reckoned, because…
Saving Terri
The Great Man Theory of Lawbreaking
DAVID BROOKS, OUR FELLOW scribbler, is in torment. The emergence of a home team in Washington is forcing a break with the Mets, his last link to his native New York City. The Mets out, the Nats in, and what David calls "a spiritual crisis" is upon him. But he needn't mourn. The city David remembers…
The Couple Next Door
Rome
I AM AN AMERICAN, Hinsdale-born--Hinsdale, that lily-white suburb. It lies twenty miles west of Chicago, on the old Burlington commuter line, along which trains stop every twenty minutes or so during evening rush hour, coming to rest at Victorian stations with gingerbread trim to unloose a string…
FEVER Pitch sets up a triangle between a 30-year-old Boston schoolteacher and his two loves--one a beautiful business consultant, the other a baseball team called the Red Sox. Lindsay Meeks, the business consultant, falls for the person Ben Wrightman is when the Sox aren't playing--a funny, kind,…
IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE Terri Schiavo case, it seems clear that most Americans are uncomfortable at the prospect of politicians' intervening in family decisions about life and death. This is not only understandable, but usually wise. Americans understand that eventually they will have to make…
[img caption="The Associated Press's anonymous, award-winning photo of an execution on Haifa Street." float="right" width="600" height="419" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8859[/img] ON DECEMBER 20, 2004 newspapers around the world carried a dramatic photograph of an execution of Iraqi election…
WHILE SOON-TO-BE U.N. Ambassador John Bolton patiently endures rhetorical broadsides from Barbara Boxer, Joseph Biden, and their Senate colleagues for his alleged "disdain of the United Nations," it is worthwhile to pause and reflect on the merits and the track record of the U.N. security system.…
TWO RECENT REPORTS in the Lebanese press suggest that there may be less to Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon than meets the eye. First, the daily Al Seyassah (a Kuwaiti paper which carries a Lebanese edition) reported that, according to sources close to the Lebanese Ministry of Interior, tens of…
IN RECENT DAYS I interviewed Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, and Ralph Neas, executive director of People for the American Way. Together these two are the architects of the policy of unyielding obstruction by Democrats of George Bush's judicial nominees. It is difficult to…
THE ASSAULT ON JOHN BOLTON--a collaborative effort of Senate Democrats, the liberal media, and some quasi-Republicans resentful of his success--has now degenerated from an earnest (if misguided) critique of his views to a pathetic attempt at character assassination.
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.
TRADE NEGOTIATORS dance to mood music, and the mood music is decidedly sour. Start with the fact that the constituency that favors free trade is fractured and politically ineffective relative to the constituency seeking protection from international competition. The apparel manufacturer and his…
IN EDWARD ALBEE'S PLAY The American Dream, Mommy proudly delights in her new beige hat until the moment someone refers to it as wheat colored, at which point she hurries back to the store in a fit of pique. Albee, of course, was being ironical, ridiculing his character's weak-mindedness before an…
THE CEDAR REVOLUTION HAS TAKEN so many interesting narrative turns, it is easy to forget that the Lebanese opposition confronts a criminal regime in Syria that is more isolated than ever and for that reason quite possibly more dangerous than before. While some repentant skeptics have grudgingly…
JUST OVER A YEAR AGO, 13 prominent Saudi reformers were rounded up in Jeddah, Riyadh, and Dammam and thrown into prison. They had signed a petition asking for a constitutional monarchy to replace the absolute monarchy now reigning in Saudi Arabia. As is common in the kingdom, no charges were…
IT TAKES A CERTAIN AMOUNT of chutzpah to write a book called God's Politics. But you have only to read a few pages of Jim Wallis's new bestseller by that name to discover that it isn't actually about the politics of an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful deity at all. Instead, it's 384 pages of…
IN THE EPIC UNITED NATIONS Oil-for-Food scandal, we now have a moment of high farce, with what will surely be remembered as Kofi Annan's "Hell, no" press conference--named for the secretary general's belligerent answer on March 29 to a reporter who, quite appropriately, wondered if Annan shouldn't…
Lane Kirkland
THE WORDS OF HUBERT HUMPHREY became the motto of American liberalism almost from the moment he uttered them on the Senate floor in 1977. "The moral test of a government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life--the children; the twilight of life--the elderly; and the shadows…
FR D RIC ENCEL, PROFESSOR OF international relations at the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Paris and a man not known for crying wolf, recently stated that France is becoming a new Lebanon. The implication, far-fetched though it may seem, was that civil upheaval might be no more…
THIS IS THE WEEK THAT Major League Baseball begins its new season. And, as everyone must know, Washington will have its own team for the first time in 34 years.
Ghazni, Afghanistan
Specious on the Origin?
Sandy Berger: Guilty as Charged
Buried by the Times
IT'S A TENET OF THE received wisdom that museums are the cathedrals of our new era, however it is to be called. Who else, after all, can afford the prices? The Metropolitan Museum has just acquired its costliest work ever, at a price of between $45 and $50 million. And the awe-inspiring thing about…
SPEAKING ON FOX NEWS ON March 20, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that he has no timetable for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, reiterating what President Bush himself had said at his press conference just days before. Both men were reacting to the misguided buzz in…
Dishing
THE FINAL OUTCOME OF THE Tulip Revolution--as the political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan has been dubbed--remains murky. But its historic and geopolitical significance is already clear.
TERRI SCHIAVO IS DEAD. But her death by dehydration last week need not be in vain. Great good can still come from the harsh, two week ordeal she--and to a lesser extent, we--were forced to undergo by court order.
Books in Brief
Many Unhappy Returns
ABIGAIL THERNSTROM once described the American college campus as an island of repression in a sea of freedom. The report of Columbia University's ad hoc grievance committee suggests that Columbia is such an island. On its face, the report presents findings and recommendations concerning allegations…
DURING HIS BRIEF AND UNHAPPY tenure as the president of Columbia University, Dwight Eisenhower and the faculty did not always enjoy the warmest of relations. At one particularly contentious meeting, a Columbia scholar proudly informed Eisenhower that the university boasted "some of America's most…
FOR THE PAST TWO AND A HALF WEEKS, Washington has been roiled by controversy over an alleged "GOP talking points memo" that, according to ABC News and the Washington Post, was circulated among Republican Senators on the evening of March 17, when the Senate took up debate on the Terri Schiavo…
HE SAYS he has no plans to run for governor of California, yet there was actor/activist Rob Reiner at an East Los Angeles children's center recently, looking every bit the candidate as he announced a new push to expand preschool enrollment in the Golden State. "We want to build an economy. We want…
"AMEN." With that single word, that simple affirmation of the faith, Karol Wojtyla closed his eyes to the things of this world. It is the hope of every Catholic that in that very same moment his soul at last beheld the vision of eternal life.
TO A CASUAL EUROPEAN OBSERVER, the row over President Bush's judicial picks may seem a bit dippy. Democrats fight tooth-and-nail to block mid-level nominees. Republicans talk of a "nuclear option" to break the impasse. Democrats warn they'll bring Senate business to a halt. Republicans dare them to…
A STUNNING REVELATION buzzed throughout Italy last week. According to two Italian newspapers, German government officials had found proof that the Soviet Union ordered the May 13, 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. The recently discovered documents--which are mainly correspondences…
ON THE EVE of the funeral of one of history's greatest popes, the American media is struggling to absorb the immensity of John Paul II's pontificate. Around every turn is another story, another dramatic trip, another chapter from his prolific writings. The ingrained impulse among much our media…
WHEN PETER MANDELSON slammed the telephone down on Bob Zoellick during a conversation over subsidies received by Airbus, he was applying to the former U.S. trade representative and current State Department number-two the intimidating tactics honed in dealing with Britain's editors and reporters in…
THE MOST IMPORTANT POLITICAL EVENT in Saudi Arabia in the last year may have been the appointment on February 9 of Abdullah bin Saleh al-Obaid, a hard-core Wahhabi, to the prestigious post of education minister. Al-Obaid replaces a secularist reformer at the head of a ministry controlling 27…
Collapse
FOR A PRO-LIFE Democrat, Bob Casey Jr. finds himself wooed by some unlikely backers. New York senator Chuck Schumer, for one. Earlier this year, the unfailingly pro-choice Schumer recruited Casey to challenge GOP incumbent Rick Santorum in the 2006 Pennsylvania Senate race. The very day Casey…
Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country. --George W. Bush, January 20, 2005 WHEN THE LEADING OPPOSITION FIGURE in Egypt was arrested on questionable charges in late January, Condoleezza Rice saw a…
THANK GOD FOR OUR JUDGES. (Oops! Sorry. No offense, your honors. I didn't mean to write "God." Or at least I didn't mean anything specific or exclusionary or sectarian or unconstitutional by writing "God." It's just an expression I occasionally use. It does go way back in U.S. history. I hope it's…
THE STORY OF TERRI SCHIAVO is both peculiar in its details and paradigmatic in its meaning. The legal twists, political turns, and central characters are so odd that one hesitates to draw any broader conclusions. But the Schiavo case is also a tragic example of the moral and legal confusions that…
K.
A DECADE AGO, WHEN I was writing about telecom deregulation (and you think you have a boring job), "video on demand"--the ability to order any movie, any time, directly through your television set--was supposed to be just around the corner. And yet, until recently, I was still waiting on line with…
ASK ANY SOPHISTICATED NEW YORK theatergoer about the current condition of the Broadway musical, and he will turn Ancient Mariner as he begins a raving recitation of everything that has gone wrong. He will speak with disapproving horror of the greatest-hits shows--barely plotted affairs that string…
Canada-Palooza!
AGAINST GEORGE F. KENNAN, who died last week at the age of 101, "there was no official complaint, / And all the reports on his conduct agree / That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint." He was not just "the nearest thing to a legend that this country's diplomatic service…
Peee-ew
I REMEMBER THE HEFT OF the envelope, the thick creamy paper, the name Coudert Bros. printed in the upper left-hand corner. Letters from law firms do not necessarily bring good news; and the very French-sounding name of this one made me think that perhaps someone from the Balzac estate, catching me…
SENATE MAJORITY LEADER BILL FRIST never saw it. Neither did the Senate Republican whip, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. The number three Republican in the Senate, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, didn't get a copy. Nor did the senator with the closest relationship with President Bush, Judd Gregg of New…
THE ARGUMENTS OVER THE FATE of Terri Schiavo have sowed distrust among the courts and the political branches of government, and forced a state legislature, a popular governor, both houses of Congress, and the president of the United States into tight, uncomfortable political corners. The pending…
IN HER 1993 NOVEL The Children of Men, P.D. James depicts the world of 2021. A mysterious infection has rendered humanity infertile--the last baby is believed to have been born in 1995--yet British authorities move forward with their program of "voluntary" euthanasia for the elderly and others who…
ON MARCH 6, THE Drudge Report noted the fact that newsstand sales for the magazine Vanity Fair had plummeted by 22.5 percent during the last half of 2004, attributed by the editor to three successive covers that showed pictures of . . . men. What Drudge did not cite is the parallel fact that this…
WHEN ONE ENTERS THE SPANKING new $199 million, 250,000-square-foot National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, the first objects encountered are two native watercraft. One is a 19-foot Hawaiian canoe of polished koa wood with an outrigger carpentered from the incomparably-named…
AFTER 60 Minutes II broadcast its fraudulent story on President Bush's Air National Guard service on September 8, 2004 holy heck broke loose on the Internet. Virtually anyone with eyes to see the evidence that accumulated during the days after the report came to the conclusion that the documents on…
THE WASHINGTON POST'S COVERAGE of Pope John Paul II today featured on page 1, among other things, a news "analysis" by Hanna Rosin. It had a promising title, "His Legacy: A Papacy and Church Transformed." Yet by the fifth paragraph of her 2,000-word piece, one got the impression that Ms. Rosin…
EVANGELICAL PROTESTANTS loved Pope John Paul II. Many felt more in harmony with him than with the leaders of their own denomination. I attend an Episcopal church and I certainly preferred the Pope. He was the world's greatest defender of orthodox, Bible-based Christianity. The presiding bishop of…
WHAT A MAN! What a life! As a man, John Paul II demonstrated a remarkable combination of deep piety and intellectual curiosity, of moral courage and human kindness. But what made John Paul II an extraordinary historical figure--one of the giants of the last half of the 20th century--was his central…
THIS SUNDAY, the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees will open the Major League Baseball season as they renew hostilities at New York's hallowed Yankee Stadium. When the two teams last met, the occasion was marked by the Red Sox celebrating on the Yankees' home field after winning the American…
IN A SENSE, all movies are "gimmick" movies. We pay money to see dinosaurs walk the earth, or Pacino and De Niro on screen together, or Meg Ryan take her shirt off. Even so, there are gimmick movies and there are gimmick movies.