127 articles
WITH 17 PEOPLE DEAD and anti-American sentiment even higher than usual in the Muslim world, people are looking for someone to blame for the riots that flowed from Newsweek's Koran story. So far, it has been pinned on everyone from Mark Whitaker to the U.S. military. But the real villain is…
"SOME ARTIFACT or some development, seemingly new and desirable--tulips in Holland, gold in Louisiana, real estate in Florida . . .--captures the financial mind. . . . The price of the object of speculation goes up. . . . This increase and the prospect attract new buyers; the new buyers assure a…
AFTER THE CELEBRITIES AND GOODWILL ambassadors have gone home, the campaign to bring low-priced drugs to HIV/AIDS sufferers in poor countries has met unexpected resistance: Governments receiving discounted essential medicines are taxing these products before selling them to the individuals for whom…
NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV ONCE COMMENTED WRYLY that the only trouble with free elections is that you never know who's going to win. The old shoe-banger's words have been echoing around Europe these last few weeks, as the continent prepares for a democratic exercise that could alter the entire political…
Estate Planning
Patton
CONSCIENCE IS A SLIPPERY THING. In 2001, during the first few months of the Bush presidency, America engaged in a debate about the ethics of embryo research. The policy question was narrow: Should the federal government use public funds to support stem cell research that involves embryo…
THE GREATEST PLEASURE OF RUNNING a country (although no politician will admit it) is getting to tax people. We Republicans decry exactions and imposts and espouse minimal outlay by the sovereign power. But we control all three branches of government. This won't last forever. Let's have some fun…
ON A RECENT SATURDAY, I attended a brief memorial service for Fred Stone, the late, longtime master of the Wolver Beagles, a private pack in Middleburg, Virginia, that has hunted the rolling Loudoun County farmland since 1913. Fred, who died at 72 this past March, had been master for some three…
Liberty for Latin America
Dissing the Koran
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning
IN THE WEEKS AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, as Washington prepared for a difficult war to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan, the neighboring former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan became a particularly useful ally. Indeed, Uzbekistan was the first country to offer military assistance to our government…
WHEN UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY GENERAL Kofi Annan quipped several years ago that he could "do business" with Saddam Hussein, he meant it figuratively. In light of the substantive charges coming out of the ever-expanding Oil-for-Food scandal, the throwaway line seems revealing or at least ironic.
London
WHY IS ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ALMOST universally seen as a left-wing issue? A lively debate within the "environmental community" makes one reason clear. Many professional environmentalists want it that way. Sound evidence--and the actual needs of environmental protection--come second to that…
Books in Brief
REMEMBER THIS NAME: BAHMAN Ghobadi. He is a Kurdish director/writer living in Iran. His third and latest film, Turtles Can Fly, is festooned, and justly so, with tributes and honors from international film festivals, as well as having been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's…
EVERY JOURNALIST HAS A LIST of regrets: of stories that might have been. Somewhere on my personal list is an invitation I received several years ago, from a then-Labour member of parliament named George Galloway. Would I care, he inquired, to join him on a chartered plane to Baghdad? He was hoping…
Sneaking into the Flying Circus
IF YOU FIND YOURSELF yearning for a bit of real magic after sitting through Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas's computer-generated confection, you should keep an eye on your local theater for Deep Blue.
Harare
CUBAN DISSIDENTS have never had a Lech Walesa or a Václav Havel. Nor is there a pro-democracy force on the island comparable to Solidarity or Charter 77. But that might be changing.
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND begins the high season at Main Beach in California's Laguna Beach. Two-player beach volleyball is never gone completely from the beach, but during the summer it is always in play during daylight.
Harare
ON MAY 14, 2005, PAX-TV's Faith Under Fire broadcast a debate that I took part in against Mahdi Bray, the executive director of the Muslim American Society's (MAS) Freedom Foundation. Bray had selected the debate topic in advance, and chose to argue about "The United States of Islam?"--that is,…
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.
A PERFECT STORM. That's what one of Washington's top lobbyists tells me is brewing. It might blow away the decades-long consensus in favor of free trade. It is not only that the Treasury used its latest report to Congress on exchange rate policies to warn China to unpeg its currency, or else. The…
A REPORT JUST ISSUED BY the Bible Literacy Project (more on this later) suggests that young Americans know very little about the Bible. The report is important, but first things first: A fair number of Americans don't see why teenagers should know anything at all about the Bible.
HOW DID THE THEME SONG from the great TV show of my youth go? "There's a hold-up in the Bronx, / Brooklyn's broken out in fights. / There's a traffic jam in Harlem, / That's backed up to Jackson Heights. / There's a scout troop short a child, / Khrushchev's due at Idlewild / . . . Car 54, where are…
The Dartmouth Insurgency (cont.)
London
FEW ARE HAPPY WITH A U.N. Human Rights Commission that has routinely welcomed into its ranks some of the world's most monstrous regimes. But Secretary General Kofi Annan's plan to overhaul the dysfunctional commission is no solution. It hinges on a crucial, flawed premise--that member states are…
Filibuster, Be Gone!
SINCE I WAS GOING TO the hardware store to buy some house paint and brushes, my wife asked me to pick up a bag of manure for our plants. A half hour later, I was standing in line in the gardening department with manure on my hands. Farmers must have this problem all the time, I told myself, working…
Morning in America
A FEDERAL DISTRICT JUDGE IN Maryland has jolted the local liberal establishment in Montgomery County by blocking a pilot program in sex education. The program was designed to sweep away the "myths"--the lingering moral inhibitions and retrograde theological teachings--that apparently feed…
THE FINAL Star Wars is, as writer-director George Lucas promised, a tragedy--but it's not the tragedy Lucas thinks it is.
Red Star Over Hollywood
CANDIDATES FOR IRAN'S JUNE 17 presidential election recently began registering to run. The entry into the race of three candidates linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the praetorian force created after the 1979 revolution, exemplifies the distinctly military tone the country's…
PAUL KRUGMAN HAS BEEN USING his space on the New York Times op-ed page for weeks now to discuss America's "real crisis"--not Social Security but health care. Krugman deplores the horrid state of American medicine, the large number of uninsured, and the high cost of it all. He claims that "the…
Books in Brief
THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE--Richard Lugar, chairman--met in room 419 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building last Thursday, May 12, to decide the fate of John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and President Bush's nominee to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United…
Lost for Words
AS AN ADOLESCENT, I regularly watched professional wrestling on television. Showing early geek tendencies, I usually enjoyed the ring-side interviews more than the matches themselves. My favorite interviews were the ones where a villain with a thick foreign accent hurled invective at America,…
Russell Senate Office Building, May 19
IT IS A VENERABLE TRADITION AMONGST SPORTS FANS, especially old and cranky sports fans, to lament the modern era's absence of athletic heroes. In The New Bill James Historical Abstract, author James hilariously lampooned this trait. Under the heading "Old Ballplayers Never Die," James would…
IF DENIS LEARY'S PERFORMANCES came with stage directions, they might say something like: Exhales smoke to punctuate tirade. Flicks cigarette butt as if littering is his right and duty. Chews gum tortuously, trying to exact punishment for every time gum has let him down by revealing alcohol on his…
IT IS NOW SAFE to declare the Star Wars prequels a failure. Whatever their merits as films, the three panels of George Lucas's new triptych, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith have failed to add permanently to the Star Wars mythology. Try to name one character or…
TERRY MORAN has been ABC's Chief White House correspondent since September, 1999. On Tuesday, Moran challenged White House spokesman Scott McClellan on the appropriateness of the call from the White House for Newsweek to do more to repair the damage from the Isikoff report. The New York Times's…
I LOVE WHOLE FOODS. I love the Austin-based boutique supermarket chain so much I find ways to go there almost every day. Sometimes I go for the Siciliano sandwich (rare roast beef, caramelized onions, Gorgonzola spread on a toasted French roll); sometimes I go for the trail mix and dried fruit bins…
(1) In its May 9 "Periscope" item, Newsweek claimed that "sources tell Newsweek" that "interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a Qu'ran down a toilet. . . ." In its May 23 "The Editor's Desk" note, editor Mark Whitaker explains that Michael Isikoff's and John Barry's "information…
MAY 5 WAS A DARK, DOUR DAY as some 180 men out of the 1946 class of 1,000--500 members having passed away in the intervening years, including my late husband, Richard in 2002--made their early morning way into the chapel of the U.S. Naval Academy for a memorial service.
DON'T BE MISLED by the collapse of GM and Ford's credit ratings and market shares--or the impending bankruptcy of Delta Airlines--or America's trade and budget deficits. Or even by the turmoil in America's financial markets, so worrying that Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Federal…
CERTAIN WORLD EVENTS, which at first seem obscure, have the peculiar capacity to illuminate the hidden contradictions of world politics. But the glare they produce often confuses most spectators. The collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991 was such an event. So was the uprising in the Uzbek city of Andijan…
THE UNITED NATIONS has been in the news of late. As usual, most of the news is negative: evidence suggesting that one or more members of the Security Council were bribed by Saddam; an inability to deal effectively with various crises in Africa; the embarrassing presence of nations such as Iran,…
Question: Mr. President, under the law, how would you justify the practice of renditioning, where U.S. agents . . . [send] terror suspects abroad, taking them to a third country for interrogation? . . . Answer: . . . We operate within the law and we send people to countries where they say they're…
Finally, a Profit Center in the War on Terror
So it turns out Madrid was the exception, not the rule. On March 14, 2004, the party of Spanish prime minister José María Aznar was defeated at the polls after an al Qaeda attack in Madrid and after a campaign in which the opposition fiercely criticized Aznar for Spain's involvement in the war to…
London
Editor's Note: Bob Dole will be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on Wednesday, January 17, 2018. To mark the occasion, we are sharing this piece from our archives.
And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out)
Rahm Emanuel, the new head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has a familiar name, a knack for fundraising, and a robust agenda for the 2006 House elections. Emanuel made his reputation in the 1990s as a shrewd White House adviser and campaign strategist for President Clinton. He…
Kingdom of Heaven may be the single most anachronistic motion picture ever made. Director Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan would have you believe that there was once a utopian moment when the city of Jerusalem was a multicultural and multiethnic paradise, run by wise men deeply…
IF THE UNITED NATIONS Oil-for-Food scandal brings down Kofi Annan, historians might fix the start of his fall at December 1, 2004. That's when Minnesota senator Norm Coleman published a blistering Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for the secretary general's exit. "As long as Mr. Annan remains in…
Vindication
Benedict's Challenge
Laura Bush delivered a lot of jokes during her now-famous stand-up routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, but one of them touched a real sore spot. Not the joke about milking the horse. This one: "I said to him the other day, 'George, if you really want to end tyranny in the world,…
Philadelphia may be the City of Brotherly Love, home of Rocky, and birthplace of the nation, but its greatest accomplishment in my book is producing the nation's finest beer, the Yuengling Lager (you pronounce that YING-Ling--no relation to Ling-Ling, late of the National Zoo). Of course, the city…
Los Angeles
Books in Brief
On January 6, 2005, the U.S.-funded Arabic satellite network Al Hurra broadcast an explosive exposé detailing the financial links between Saddam Hussein's regime and the Arab press. Al Hurra's documentary--so far overlooked in the West--aired previously unseen video footage, recorded by Saddam…
THE PETITION CANDIDATES DID IT. In a stunning--at least to their critics--upset, Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki each won an alumni seat on Dartmouth College's board of trustees. The results were made public yesterday afternoon, following two months of electronic and mail-in voting.
HILLARY CLINTON'S reelection campaign for the United States Senate in 2006 may be tougher than expected. On Monday, May 2, the New York Observer reported that Clinton might face a challenge from Richard Nixon's son-in-law Ed Cox.
VLADIMIR PUTIN, in his effort to restore the Stalinist legacy in Moscow, exceeds himself as a defender of Russia's totalitarian and genocidal past. In the wake of President George W. Bush's tour of the new post-Soviet democracies, Putin has attempted to revise history.
CRANKY CONSERVATIVES often dismiss symbolic pro-democracy legislation as so much claptrap. Of course everyone supports the flowering of liberty on foreign soil, they insist. Of course everyone wants to nourish oases of civil society in the deserts of despotism. So why bother with all these vacuous…
WHEN THE WORD "IMPEACHMENT" was uttered in March and April as an option for dealing with renegade judges, the guardians of conventional wisdom were quick to denounce "ideologues," who, in the words of the New York Times editorialists, "are trying to bully judges into following their political…
SOFT PATCH or the beginning of a downturn--that's the question that divides America's economy watchers. Last week the Federal Reserve Board's monetary policy makers enlisted in the soft-patch camp, and kept to their program of "measured," repeated, one-quarter point increases in interest rates.…
SEVERAL CENTURIES AGO, some "very light-skinned" people were shipwrecked on a tropical island. After "many years under the tropical sun," this light-skinned population became "dark-skinned," says Biology: The Study of Life, a high-school textbook published in 1998 by Prentice Hall, an imprint of…
SUDDENLY DEMOCRATS ARE WRAPPING THEMSELVES in the Constitution. Emphasizing his commitment to maintaining the filibuster as a way to stop President Bush's judicial nominees, Senate Democratic whip Richard Durbin said last week, "We believe it's a constitutional issue. . . . It's a matter of having…
Faculty Towers
SEVERAL YEARS AGO I SUGGESTED in these pages that it would be good conservative policy to raise, rather than lower, inheritance taxes. After all, American conservatives, traditional and neo, believe in a meritocracy in which material success should depend mostly on our own efforts and…
London
MILLIONS OF CHINESE FAMILIES SUFFERED during the invasion and occupation of the mainland by Imperial Japanese armies in the Second World War. But President Hu Jintao's and Premier Wen Jiabao's family tragedies came at the hands of fellow Chinese, not Japanese--and occurred rather more recently.
THERE THEY GO AGAIN, our friends the Democrats, eager to use the social issues as low roads to power, isolating the right as religious fanatics, outside of the mainstream of American life. "We're going to use Terri Schiavo," vowed Howard Dean at a breakfast in Hollywood, pledging to exploit the…
'Kicking Down' (cont.)
Luckiest Man
My Life So Far
JOHN KERRY BORE A GOOD deal of mockery for his sports gaffes during the 2004 campaign. First he botched the details of Bill Buckner's famous '86 World Series error--after claiming to have been at the game. Then the Boston native praised Red Sox all-star "Manny Ortez" (he pronounced the surname…
DAVID BRODER, THE POLITICAL columnist for the Washington Post, wrote last week that President Bush "has become the victim of overreach." Former vice president Al Gore has said Bush and congressional Republicans have a different problem, their "lust for power." Both are wrong. Bush's biggest…
THE LEGAL LEFT IS DANGEROUSLY close to winning the political war it has been fighting against the Bush administration over the future direction of the federal courts. The evidence of this is that whenever rumors are floated of possible Bush Supreme Court nominees, there are some very prominent…
Isolation Ward
AN OFFICIAL REPORT DEALING WITH religious expression in French schools has become a must read for anyone interested in the Islamization of France. Written under the auspices of the top national education official, Jean-Pierre Obin, the report was not initially released by the Ministry of Education.…
Books in Brief
IT WAS ONLY 7:15 a.m. on October 26, 2003, and Paul Wolfowitz was already thinking about Saddam Hussein. The deputy secretary of defense had been awake for just over an hour when he and two civilian Pentagon advisers walked into a large office for a briefing on electricity.
AS WESTERN NATIONS SHUN THE Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, less scrupulous nations are filling the void. China, North Korea, and Iran are lending financial, military, and commercial support. Two weeks ago, Zimbabwe announced the purchase of six fighter aircraft from China with another six on the…
Beirut
Speaking out of both sides of one's mouth is an occupational hazard, if not an occupational necessity, for politicians seeking elective office in competitive races. It's not a pretty sight, and it supports a cynicism about democratic politics that is unbecoming. Catering to such cynicism, the…
"Onward to victory! Fatherland or death! We will win!"
WHEN ELVIS PRESLEY STROLLED onto the stage for his last performance, there was something different about him. His face had swelled, and his gut was pregnant with obesity. His hair and signature sideburns overran his head and face, and his movements, karate kicks, and hip swivels, were no longer…
London
Barry Lynn is the top guy at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and a cartoonish presence on talking head television, ever-ready to declare the imminent threat of theocracy in the land. It should come as no surprise to anyone, then, that the organization Lynn leads last week…
Kuwait City, Kuwait
STEVEN D. LEVITT CLAIMS that physically he is the "weakest human being alive." He may also be one of the most courageous.
IF THERE WERE EVER any doubts that the National Academy of Sciences is pursuing an "anything" goes approach to biotechnological research, they were erased by the organization's recently published tome, Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research. The purported purpose of Guidelines is to…
London
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.
Where Shall I Wander
PRESIDENT BUSH NEEDS AN EXIT strategy on Social Security. With luck, he may never have to use it. There's still a chance a sweeping reform bill will pass this year. But despite Bush's valiant efforts to sell Congress and the nation on the idea of modernizing Social Security, the prospects are dim.…
I RECENTLY ADMITTED TO MY wife that I'm battling an addiction. The terrible irony of it is that she was the one who put me in temptation's path. Ever since she introduced me to Sid Meier, I've been hooked on Civilization, a computer game he created in 1991.
Springfield, Illinois
Blink
HERE'S AN EASY POP QUIZ: What's the name of the first cloned mammal? If you answered, "Dolly," that would be . . . wrong.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICANS READ the Federalist Papers, their 19th-century grandchildren, the Lincoln-Douglas debates. To learn about the momentous struggle over the future of the U.S. judiciary, 21st-century Americans can watch "Save Phil," an Internet cartoon currently showing at…
NOT LONG AGO, THE belligerently-mannered New York radio personality Jonathan Schwartz confided in his listeners that he could not go on living without being able to hear Frank Sinatra's memorable version of "Our Love Is Here to Stay" at least one more time.
The Confederate Battle Flag
"THIS CONSTITUTION," SAID French president Jacques Chirac in mid-April, "is in its way, a daughter of French thought." He was talking about the 448-article constitutional treaty (the U.S. Constitution has 7 articles) that is meant to bind the 25 countries of the European Union into something like a…
WHEN FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA, businessman Howard Dahl boards a plane for the East Coast or flies to Europe and beyond, he is often struck by the views of the people he encounters, especially their preconceptions about his part of the country. "There's a lot of condescension. You'd think no one here…
AFTER A LONG AND DISTINGUISHED career as a lawyer, an arms negotiator, a think tanker, and a diplomat, John Bolton may see his nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations hinge on whether or not he was mean in Kyrgyzstan in 1994.
Seymour Hersh's Other Reality
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. --Karl Marx THE MISREPRESENTATION of Robert Bork's views and character in 1987, and his subsequent defeat by the Senate…
Khartoum, Sudan
THIRTY YEARS AGO, SYDNEY Pollack made Three Days of the Condor, a complicated thriller about a conspiracy inside the Central Intelligence Agency that unravels because of an unanticipated slip-up. An innocent CIA employee played by Robert Redford is out of the office--a Manhattan townhouse in which…
A FAILING CIVILIZATION CAN'T BE argued out of its failing. It can be led, perhaps, or inspired, or converted and reformed. But argument requires the application of universal truths to the particular facts of the moment, and when a culture is tumbling downward, all its truths and facts--indeed, the…
Great Moments in Acknowledgments
Papal Legacy
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY professor Alex Hinton has warned that our government's prosecution of the war on terror may be causing us to resemble the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal gang that once ran Cambodia. In a piece titled "Lessons from killing fields of Cambodia--30 years on," published in the Christian…