109 articles
IN 2003, as part of that year's Intelligence Authorization Act, Congress specifically authorized the creation and funding of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which quickly and simply changed its common name to the 9/11 Commission. Congress mandated that this…
A WASHINGTON MAN died recently from internal injuries he sustained while having sex with a horse. After his body was dropped off at a hospital, police discovered that out-of-towners had rented a rural farm and then made local animals available for use in bestiality. Yes, video taping was involved.
LIKE PRESIDENTS BEFORE HIM, George W. Bush has turned to the lower federal bench, specifically to the appeals court in Washington, D.C., to choose a Supreme Court justice. John Roberts has been a circuit judge for two years, but the more salient aspect of his résumé is the time he spent in another…
VERY FEW MARKETS are as complicated as the housing market, which may be why it so confuses market watchers. One week the New York Times reports "Healthy Housing Market Lifted the Economy in July," the next week the same writer discovers, "July Slowing of Home Sales Stirs Talk of Market Peak."
I'M NOT A HOOSIER MYSELF, but my wife was born and brought up in Fort Wayne, and therefore, under the Indiana Law of Return, our two children are legally Hoosiers as well. Whether this circumstance gives me kibitzing rights, allowing me to second-guess the actions of the Indiana state legislature…
"Terrible News for the U.N."
EVEN BY THE EUROPEAN UNION'S own standards of vaulting futility, the charade it will inaugurate on October 3 will be especially pointless. On that date, to great fanfare, the European Union will formally launch accession negotiations for Turkey. Heads of government will speak solemnly about this…
Tombstone, Arizona
Excelsior, You Fathead!
Rumsfeld v. Kristol
IN THE FOUR YEARS OR so since September 11, liberals have found a new weapon of preference, and that weapon is martyrdom. They have discovered grief as a tactical weapon. They tend to like grief they can use. They use it to arouse guilt and sympathy to cover a highly partisan message, in the hope…
ON THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, in Crawford, Texas, President Bush met with his foreign policy team. At a press conference afterwards, he strongly reiterated the core elements of his war policy: We're engaged in a global war on terror; the central front of that war is Iraq; we're committed to winning in…
No Country for Old Men
JUST A FEW MORE THINGS, Judge Roberts. I don't mean to complicate your life, but let's be clear: The ride's going to get a little bumpy and you would be well advised to keep your tray in its full upright and locked position.
The Secret Man
ON AUGUST 2, CROWN Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, a man in his early 80s, ascended the throne of Saudi Arabia--and all hopes for reform in the Saudi kingdom began to be put to the test.
Bevan
Books in Brief
ON SEPTEMBER 11, THE United States will observe the fourth anniversary of its entry into the war on terrorism. The war has already exceeded by a few months our entire time of involvement in World War II. It's hardly too early to take stock of what we've learned about the nature of the war and the…
LAST MONTH, FOR THE first time in years, a member denomination withdrew from the National Council of Churches (NCC). The spunky, 400,000-member communion is the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, and its decision to quit the reflexively left-wing NCC was based on a…
How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher
UN REFORM - ANOTHER GRAND ILLUSION? THIS SEPTEMBER, the United Nation's 2005 World Summit will debate "an achievable set of proposals," submitted by Secretary General Kofi Annan, to reform the U.N.'s core functions in the areas of economic development, security, and the protection of human rights.…
IF JOURNALISM were a profession, Peter Braestrup's 1977 book Big Story would be required reading in every journalism school. Braestrup's long subtitle is a little dry: "How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington." But his analysis…
"IF A PLAYFUL MOMENT turns into the right moment, you can be ready," Majority Leader Bill Frist quipped on July 1. His "playful moment," an echo of the slogan for Eli Lilly's erectile dysfunction drug Cialis, sobered quickly as Frist revealed his intent: He proposed a voluntary two-year moratorium…
IT IS TIME to rescue The Great Raid.
CRITICS BEGAN USING the "Q" word to describe the war in Iraq two years ago, well before the Sunni insurgency and al Qaeda franchise-leader Abu Mussab al Zarqawi began inflicting serious casualties on U.S. and coalition forces.
THE ONGOING CONTROVERSY over the Able Danger project deepened this week when two more sources from the U.S. Army data-mining project came forward. Navy Captain Scott Phillpott and civilian contractor James Smith joined Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer in claiming that Able Danger identified Mohammed Atta…
ON THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can affirm the following with near certainty: Barring some horrific dissolution of the international order--and/or a direct nuclear threat to the U.S. homeland--America will never again target an enemy population with atomic weapons. Of course,…
ALAN GREENSPAN famously described the failure of long-term interest rates to rise in tandem with the increases he is engineering in short-term rates as a conundrum, a puzzle. The Fed chairman might with even greater accuracy describe the situation in which he now finds himself as a quandary, a…
SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT THABO MBEKI has finally conceded that his "quiet diplomacy" with Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, has failed, and that more aggressive negotiations are required. Although he has yet to make a public announcement to this effect, he has made such statements in private and…
WHAT A PLEASURE it has been to read the excerpts from the Reagan-era memos of John Roberts served up by the mainstream media. First, they confirm Roberts' status as a solid conservative. Insisting, for example, that civil rights laws are about promoting a colorblind society, Roberts opposed racial…
THE CHARACTER of American movies has changed a great deal over the years. To take but one striking example: During the course of earlier wars, Hollywood churned out patriotic films depicting the valor of our troops, the menace of our enemies or simply the pluck of those who kept the home fires…
THE LONG-AWAITED DEATH of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia brought most of his subjects more hope than grief--hope that the new king, Abdullah, might move toward freedom of speech and other democratic reforms. It is hard to imagine that this sentiment is shared by the large and profligate ruling family.…
LAST FRIDAY The Great Raid opened in theaters. The notices that greeted the film weren't mixed; they were almost uniformly negative, as exhibited by the collection of reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. But these reviews are utterly misguided.
THE VICIOUS TERRORIST ATTACKS over the last 18 months--in Spain, Egypt, Great Britain, and Iraq--appear to have Muslim organizations in the West on the defensive. It's not unusual anymore to hear clerics in Europe and America say they're prepared to expel extremists from their mosques. More Islamic…
IMAGINE THAT RIP VAN WINKLE was a Democrat--one waking up from an 18-year slumber.
DEAN BARNETT of Soxblog has penned a couple of crucial essays on the effects of lefty blogs on the Democratic party that remain must-reads (here and here). Barnett is expanding on a theme sounded by Michael Barone in a February column in U.S. News & World Report where Barone asked and answered his…
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.
THE NEWS THAT AIRPORT SECURITY SCREENING POLICIES are undergoing a critical review at the Transportation Security Administration is surprisingly hopeful. The proposed revisions would lift the ban on minimally dangerous items such as scissors and razor blades, as well as relaxing requirements on…
REPRESENTATIVE CURT WELDON dropped a delayed political bombshell with a special-orders speech last June in which he revealed the existence of a data-mining program at the Pentagon named Able Danger, which he claimed had identified Mohammed Atta and three of the other 9/11 hijackers as al Qaeda…
MUCH OF THE SPECULATION surrounding John Roberts concerns the authenticity of his conservative convictions, and much of that uncertainty centers on his views of abortion. His opposition to Roe has so far only been demonstrated by a lonely footnote in a single legal brief--a fact that he moreover…
DAVID O'REILLY has made a big bet--big not only by Las Vegas standards, but by the standards of the swashbuckling oil industry. The Chevron CEO bet more than $18 billion that oil supplies will be tight and prices will stay high when he bought Unocal--after the Chinese authorities yielded to…
THE EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH IN AMERICA ("ELCA") is the nation's largest Lutheran denomination, with nearly 5 million members. The ELCA's highest legislative body is its Churchwide Assembly, which convenes every two years. The ninth such Churchwide Assembly has just ended. Yesterday, the…
Empires at War
Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
SENATORS JOHN MCCAIN AND JON Kyl, both Arizona Republicans, have an unstated agreement not to criticize each other in public. But now each has introduced legislation to reform the immigration system. The two bills are competing head to head. And when the two men appeared together last month at a…
William Pitt the Younger
The Prune of Miss Jane Brody
LAST WEEK IN THESE PAGES we called attention to the John-Kerry-like attempt of some Bush advisers, led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to abandon the term "war on terror." These advisers had been, as the New York Times reported, going out of their way to avoid "formulations using the word…
I'm Free, Freelancing
THERE ARE TIMES WHEN THE president can convert his famed inarticulateness into a charming trait. But more often, the inability to explain and defend his policies causes serious political damage. Somehow, for instance, all the president's men have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in…
Camp
SENATOR TED KENNEDY CHARGES SUPREME Court nominee John Roberts with embracing a "rather cramped view of the Voting Rights Act." The NAACP's Theodore Shaw is "deeply disturbed" by Roberts's record. "Extremely troubling" documents cast him as "a deeply committed ideologue," according to Wade…
LAST MONDAY THE PROSPECTS FOR two men detained at Guantanamo Bay grew somewhat brighter. In a Washington, D.C., courtroom, a lawyer for Abu Bakker Qassim and A'del Abdu Al-Hakim made a persuasive case that the government no longer has legal justification to detain the men because they had been…
WHEN I WAS A KID growing up in Dallas, our summer evenings were punctuated with electronic pops and screeches from my dad's bedroom radio, as he struggled to tune in the St. Louis Cardinals baseball games from St. Louis mega-station KMOX. We were serious Cardinals fans.
Born Fighting
IT WAS ALWAYS A CHEAP shot to accuse the leaders of the antiwar crowd in Britain of working hand-in-glove with the terrorists. True, some of them in recent weeks have sounded remarkably like apologists for al Qaeda, with their talk of "understanding" Islamic rage about Iraq or Israel, and their…
IF YOU WANT A VISION of hell, look here: the national mall in Washington, D.C., at noon on a summer's day. Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis stand on the treeless expanse, baked by the pitiless sun, looking lost. Dad wears a muscle-beach T-shirt stretched over a Cheesecake Factory body, his hair matted…
NOW THAT CONGRESS HAS PASSED an energy bill with incentives for the development of more nuclear power, it remains to be seen whether this will lead to robust investment in nuclear energy and a new generation of nuclear plants. Results will depend on the response of some key players, specifically…
BOOKS IN Brief
CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR BILL SCHNEIDER is many things, but a dispenser of new and original insights he is not. So when even the avuncular cable analyst noticed the rise of the left-wing political blogs last week, it suggested that the ascendancy of the liberal blogosphere has gone from…
Kosovo
AFTER A STRING OF BOMBINGS in London, the British media began peppering Tony Blair and John Howard with questions about the effects of Britain's presence in Iraq on suicide-bomber recruitment. During the hastily-arranged press conference the day of the second series of attempted bombings,…
AFTER AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI released a new videotape on August 4, the media focused on how he placed the blame for the last month's terrorist attacks in London on Tony Blair's shoulders and threatened even greater carnage in the future. Less noticed but no less important is al Qaeda's changed tactical…
PRESIDENT BUSH WENT TO BED at the normal time, roughly 10p.m., on the night the House of Representatives voted on the Central American Free Trade Agreement. But he was awakened by White House staffers to talk to wavering Republicans on the House floor. A cell phone with the president on the line…
ON THE FACE OF IT, the implosion of the AFL-CIO at its annual convention--its two largest member-unions have just quit, and others threaten to follow--is no big deal. When it was formed, in 1955, by the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (which…
With his Friday speech on the Senate floor announcing his support for federal funding of new embryonic stem cell research, Senate majority leader Bill Frist did the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Caracas, Venezuela
IN PRAGUE RECENTLY FOR A journalism course, I made a point of conversing with locals over many pints of pivo (Czech for beer) so as to expand my knowledge of the ancient capital of a young democracy. As luck would have it, the program that sent me to Franz Kafka's hometown also proffered an…
Until I Find You
John Roberts was born in Buffalo, New York, and raised in Long Beach, Indiana, but he spent much of his young adulthood--about six years--in Cambridge, Massachusetts, first as an undergraduate at Harvard College, then as a student at Harvard Law. Roberts matriculated at Harvard in the fall of 1973,…
Mommy Markets
Columbia, South Carolina
GWOT's Up with That?
WHICH NEWSPAPER PRODUCES THE BEST crossword puzzle in the country? Ask 10 people at your next dinner party and all of them will say, "Why, the New York Times, of course," while shooting you a doesn't-everybody-know-that? look.
IT IS INSTRUCTIVE TO COMPARE concurrent productions of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan. This was the first of Wilde's four social comedies that climaxed in his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. The two productions are at Washington's Shakespeare Theatre and at the Williamstown…
BOOKS IN BRIEF
AUGUST MARKS THE TWENTY-fifth anniversary of Solidarity, the Polish trade union that played so central a role in the defeat of communism. Celebrations will take place in Warsaw and Gdansk, the spiritual home of the Polish revolution. Lech Walesa and other heroes of the struggle against communism…
The sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima seems to be shaping up as a subdued affair--though not for any lack of significance. A survey of news editors in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, first among the top one hundred stories of the twentieth century. And any thoughtful…
MONTHS OVERDUE, THE PENTAGON'S annual report to Congress on China's military power is a mix of happy talk, flabby strategic musings, and sobering facts. No doubt this analytic confusion explains the quite divergent news accounts of the report when it was released on July 19. The New York Times, for…
Lou Henry Hoover
A WEEK AGO YESTERDAY President Bush spoke before the more than 30,000 Boy Scouts attending the 16th National Scout Jamboree. The tragic deaths by electrocution of four adult Scout leaders on July 25 dominated news of the Jamboree, and the coverage of Bush's speech was perfunctory at best. Like many…
AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI, the second-in-command of Osama bin Laden, has delivered a video statement, broadcast by al Jazeera, threatening more terror by al Qaeda in Britain and in the United States. His rant must be taken extremely seriously.
WHAT DID AL FRANKEN KNOW, and when did he know it?
THE HEADLINE for the lead story in yesterday's Washington Post was "Iran Is Judged 10 Years from Nuclear Bomb." The story itself is based on leaked portions of a January 2005 national intelligence estimate (NIE) on Iran, whose annex apparently contains a revised assessment by American intelligence…
THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA is often inconsistent in covering stories. They gave us wall-to-wall coverage when George W. Bush's National Guard service came under scrutiny, but suddenly made themselves scarce when over two hundred Vietnam veterans pointed out hole after hole in John Kerry's service…
LATE LAST MONTH an Algerian-born terrorist named Ahmed Ressam received a commuted sentence of 22 years (prosecutors had recommended 35 years) in prison for his role in planning to blow up the Los Angeles airport. His sentence infuriated many since his involvement in the plot against LAX was…
THERE IS LESS HERE than meets the eye--unless there is more. That's the considered reaction of the experts to the recent decision of the Chinese authorities to allow the renminbi to increase in value by 2.1 percent and fluctuate 0.3 percent daily, and to switch from a dollar yardstick to a basket…
KING FAHD BIN ABDUL AZIZ of Saudi Arabia has died in Riyadh at 84, after 10 years in a coma. Crown Prince Abdullah, Fahd's half-brother and himself aged 81, has taken the throne.
A DRAFT AGREEMENT between Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and the Chinese government which would have handed over large chunks of Zimbabwe's mineral rights in exchange for a billion dollars was torn up last week. Mugabe's desperate cling to power requires hard currency to purchase much needed…
STUART TAYLOR has argued that for all the debate over the Supreme Court's ideological, ethnic, and gender balance, the most salient imbalance on the current Court is the one in "the collective real-world experiences of its justices." Taylor and others bemoan the absence of justices who have held…
The American Classics
I OPENED MY MAIL A couple of weeks ago and was surprised to discover that I'm a plaintiff in a lawsuit. The name of the case is In re Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation, and it's been pending since 2000 in the federal district court in Manhattan. According to the legal…
IT TAKES AN INSURRECTION TO change a country. It takes an establishment to govern one. Conservatives want both to change and to govern America. Thus we need our dissatisfied, troublemaking, occasionally splenetic, sometimes raffish anti-establishmentarians. After all, without brave resistance and…
London
Vietnam Chronicles
ZIMBABWEAN PRESIDENT ROBERT MUGABE IS a man of contradictions. He held an election to show the world that Zimbabwe was a modern democracy but sent his army to run the polling stations and make sure everybody voted the right way. He fancies himself a hero in the continuing struggle against Western…
War Against Islamists?
SO, JUST WHO IS John G. Roberts? His brainpower, legal experience, and character duly recognized, what is his judicial philosophy? What is his approach to judging--to interpreting and applying the Constitution and other federal law? What kind of jurist will he turn out to be--20, 30 years hence?
The Kids' Clothes Make the Man?
Khartoum, Sudan
IN THE DAYS BEFORE PRESIDENT Bush picked a Supreme Court nominee, the White House was gripped by Souter-phobia. Bush and his aides desperately wanted to avert the disaster that befell his father's White House in 1990. The elder Bush, on the advice of his chief of staff John Sununu and Senator…
SOME OF US LOOK AT the big picture and some of us, unfortunately, do not. I have myself only recently begun to look at the big picture. And by big picture I mean a picture 42" diagonally across. In plainer words, I just purchased a new large-screen plasma television set, and the size and perfection…
LAST WEEK, PRESIDENT BUSH played a card that President Clinton and, before him, President Carter, had only toyed with: guaranteeing India, a nuclear weapons state that has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), full access to civilian nuclear energy goods. The president did this in…
Books in Brief
Kabul
I Feel Good
CALL IT THE ESTRADA/Bolton strategy. One way Senate Democrats may seek to derail, or at least muddy, the confirmation of John Roberts to the Supreme Court is by asking for confidential case memos the nominee wrote while serving as deputy solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush. The…