October 2005

-- "a kind of American fascism"

In the foreword to the just released "National Intelligence Strategy of the United States," the Director of National Intelligence says democracy promotion is the "stoutest pillar" in strengthening U.S. national security. And far from enhancing U.S. security, realist notions, where stability trumps…

THE ONE THING people seem to know for sure about Samuel Alito is his nickname: "Scalito." The name is meant to denote Alito's similarities to associate Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, whom the Senate confirmed, on Ronald Reagan's urging, to the Court in 1986. It's a catchy moniker, and rolls…

WELL, THAT'S MORE LIKE IT. In Judge Sam Alito, President Bush has chosen a more plausible High Court nominee. Make that a much more plausible nominee. His legal qualifications are exceptional, his character widely attested. And having spent 15 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third…

OCTOBER, 2005 will turn out to be the left's cruelest month since . . . well, in a long time. A couple of weeks in, it seemed so promising. October was going to be the month that would mark the meltdown of the loathed Bush presidency. Iraq was failing, gas prices were rising, a weak Supreme Court…

WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH ANNOUNCED THE nomination of Harriet Miers, he said she was the "one person [who] stood out as exceptionally well-suited" for the Supreme Court. Bush cited her character and "distinguished legal career." What Bush didn't mention was Miers's assistance in helping him pick federal…

Baghdad

THE NATURE OF THE CONFLICT in Iraq has shifted over the past 30 months. A basic assumption of the war plan executed in March and April 2003, and of the counterinsurgency campaign waged since then, was that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis would welcome the establishment of democracy in their…

Shalimar the Clown

Away Down South

LET ME START ON A positive note. For a film made in the present climate that dramatizes the 1953-54 clash between Edward R. Murrow, the broadcast personality who pioneered the TV news magazine, and Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator who gave anti-communism a bad name, Good Night, and Good Luck…

AS I WRITE, ON Friday afternoon October 21, no one outside special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's office--and perhaps not even Fitzgerald himself--knows what, if any, charges he'll ultimately bring in the Valerie Plame leak inquiry. Public understanding of the events in question--the disclosure of…

Love My Rifle More Than You

KARL ROVE, PRESIDENT BUSH'S virtuoso adviser, is the most influential White House aide in decades, maybe longer. His departure, if compelled by an indictment in the Valerie Plame investigation, would be demoralizing and a blow to Bush's prospects for a successful second term. Could he be replaced…

RICHARD DICKER OF THE NEW York-based international monitoring outfit Human Rights Watch remembers how "distressing" it was, in those first weeks and months after the liberation of Baghdad, to watch nightly news footage of ordinary Iraqis "desperately uncovering and excavating mass graves and…

Remember, Remember

FOR FOUR YEARS, A slow-motion war between the CIA and the Bush administration has been unfolding over America's airwaves and on its front pages. A principal weapon in this war has been the deliberate leaking of information to the media.

The Republican War on Science

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION CLAIMS THE authority to stop Oregon physicians from using prescription drugs to implement that state's unique program of physician-assisted suicide. But the administration's effort to use an ambiguous federal drug statute to undermine Oregon's assisted suicide law is a…

Decade of Reed (cont.)

IF YOU'RE IN THE REPORTING game long enough, old stories start repeating on you like a bean pie past its freshness date. So it felt as we gathered in Washington, D.C., last week to celebrate the Millions More Movement, Louis Farrakhan's sequel to his 1995 Million Man March. It seems like only a…

BOOKS IN BRIEF

A PITY THAT ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE didn't wait 15 years or so, after baseball had been invented, to visit America. Much impressed as the penetrating Frenchman was by what he termed America's penchant for "voluntary associations," he would have been at first utterly baffled by that looniest of all…

WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH nominated Harriet Miers, conservatives who balked at her lack of conservative credentials were assured by some that they should infer Miers's conservatism from the president's confidence in her. The skeptics generally responded with the maxim "trust but verify," and suggested…

For example, Rich writes: Murray Waas reported Thursday in The National Journal that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby had refused to provide the committee with ''crucial documents,'' including the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell's notorious presentation of W.M.D. ''evidence'' to the…

Sunday's frontpage article by Elizabeth Bumiller and Eric Schmitt is a classic -- essentially an editorial masquerading as news. Naturally, Lawrence Wilkerson is quoted but only the nasty ones about "the cabal." His other remarks made in the same "cabal" speech aren't quoted. Guess they don't quite…

Gee, it must have been pure hell for Joe Wilson doing that glamorous photo spread in Vanity Fair

Yesterday, the National Journal publicized an "online exclusive" on the Bush administration's pre-war intelligence claims. Last night, Chris Matthews cited the Murray Waas piece and today its contents are pinging around the blogosphere. But the piece has one passage, in particular, that doesn't…

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has an excellent piece today on the "realism" of Brent Scowcroft. Even today Scowcroft says, ``I didn't think that calling the Soviet Union the `evil empire' got anybody anywhere.'' Tell that to Natan Sharansky and other Soviet dissidents for whom that…

LATE LAST MONTH, and with little fanfare other than a brief mention in a press release, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law making it a $250 fine to pierce the body of someone under the age of 18 without parental or guardian consent. It was a law which had expired the previous January;…

ON AUGUST 30, with the flood waters rising in New Orleans, Harrah's CEO Gary Loveman appeared on CNN to reassure a battered nation. "We hope to work with Gov. Barbour in Mississippi in particular to get at least temporary casinos open as quickly as possible and get everybody back to work," he said.…

THE FOLLOWING isn't about Harriet Miers or the collapse of an administration weighed down by scandal. Rather, it's about why I'm planning on moving to Montana in about 10 years. At this point, you have every reason to wonder what this has to do with your life. I'll tell you: I'm going to convince…

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal a short time ago, the French ambassador to the US wrote, "Opposing a military intervention in Iraq at a time when U.N. inspections were working and Iraq was not an imminent threat to peace was a decision my country is proud of, one based on principles and…

THE WITHDRAWAL of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers is the first step on the road to political recovery for President Bush. It gives him the opportunity to select a well-known judicial conservative for the Court vacancy, rally conservatives who opposed or were skeptical of Miers, and rebuild his…

Here is another example of bogus information on the issue of Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from Niger that is circulating on liberal web sites that may make its way into some sloppily researched editorial. The web posting claims the following: It's [the British government's July 2004 review of…

PRESIDENT BUSH knew exactly what he wanted when he picked a successor to Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He sought a nominee as risk-free as possible, someone with little chance of either encountering a bitter confirmation fight or, once in office, of opposing his economic…

ON SEPTEMBER 6 AND 7, Pastor Daniel Scot, who last year was found to be in breach of Victoria, Australia's Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, met with human-rights lawyers and policymakers in Washington, D.C. In these meetings, Scot described his experience defending himself in Victoria's courts…

Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, unleashed lots of vitriol in his Los Angeles Times piece yesterday, which was inspired, he says, by the speech have gave last week in Washington, DC. But what Wilkerson left out of his Times piece was the answer he gave…

Today, Senator Kerry called for the president to begin the withdrawal of troops from Iraq "over the course of the holidays." Military historian Fredrick Kagan explains why Kerry has it exactly wrong here, and Senator John McCain is expected to soon deliver an address on Iraq that will respond, in…

Yesterday, Democratic Senators Byrd, Kennedy and Leahy took to the Senate floor to honor the sacrifice US troops have made in Iraq by launching a broad assault on the Bush administration. Invoking Vietnam repeatedly, Vermont's Leahy offered the most detailed attack that touched on all the talking…

OVER THE PAST DECADE, Republicans have ridden a wave of success that has carried them to a powerful position in a remarkably short period of time. While post-World War II America split White House time fairly equally between Republicans and Democrats, the Congress spent most of that period under…

ABC'S NEW SHOW, Commander in Chief, starring Geena Davis as the first female president of the United States, along with new books by Democratic political consultants Dick Morris and Susan Estrich, is fueling the notion that a woman can lead America. No one need guess who the liberals in Beverly…

IF YOU'RE A REPUBLICAN and already worried about your party's prospects in 2006, pollster Frank Luntz, a Republican himself, has a message for you: It's worse than you think.

Senator John McCain today: I would hope that the sacrifice made by young Americans would not be used for political reasons…. I still believe they have sacrificed in a noble cause, and I believe that they and their family members, the majority of them, believe so as well…. But to somehow use the…

Weekly Standard contributor Dan Twining offers his insight on the push for democracy east of the Black Sea: In the new 'Great Game' underway in the Caucasus and Central Asia pitting the United States, Russia, and China in a bid for strategic influence and access to natural resources, not only…

ON JUNE12, 2003, when he first published a story about the matter, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus became the second journalist to have been used by Ambassador Joseph Wilson to peddle bogus information about his February 2002 trip to Niger.

In the latest New Yorker, Jeffrey Goldberg has a revealing profile of Brent Scowcroft in which the former national-security advisor defends his foreign policy "realism," which, Goldberg writes, holds that "America should be guided by strategic self-interest, and that moral considerations are…

Frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard Tom Joscelyn sends along this piece, "Report alleges rebels trained in Venezuela," from Sunday's Miami Herald: An Ecuadorean military intelligence report alleges that leftists from Ecuador and seven other Latin American nations received guerrilla training…

AT LONG LAST IT'S COME, the day of reckoning for the U.S. economy. That's what some experts are saying as they study the data that have been published since Katrina struck the oil, gas, and shipping industries. True, those data contain more good news than bad. It is now clear that the economy was…

Saturday's Post ran this piece under the headline, "Hughes Misreports Iraqi History Envoy Vastly Overstates Fact in Justifying War to Indonesian Students." Unfortunately, such vigilance by the Washington Post to keep its readers well informed doesn't apply here or here or here. Of course, the Post…

Reuters France said on Monday it was too early to seek sanctions against Syria, whose officials have been implicated by a U.N. report in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.

Nowhere in Frank Rich's column yesterday or Bob Herbert's today will you find these comments made by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, last week. He said that French and German intelligence believed what Powell presented to the UN was "the truth" and that…

USA Today reports that six months after announcing a plan to give $3 million to promote democracy in Iran, the State Department has yet to spend the money…. Tom Casey, a State Department spokesman, said the delay is bureaucratic. "There are no outside political considerations affecting these…

PRESIDENT BUSH'S NOMINATION of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has divided the conservative movement. Initially, most conservatives, but not quite all, expressed disappointment with the nomination. Since then, paths have diverged. Some conservatives, having gone on record as wishing that Bush…

THESE ARE HISTORIC TIMES FOR Germany. Angela Merkel is set to become the nation's first female chancellor. She'll also be the first chancellor from the former East Germany. So how excited are her constituents? "She's a cold fish," says one of her fellow Christian Democrats (who asked to remain…

Richmond

THE MOST EFFECTIVE CONSERVATIVE LEGISLATOR of--oh--the last century or so, Congressman Tom DeLay, was indicted last month for allegedly violating Texas campaign finance laws, and has vacated his position as House majority leader. The Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, is under investigation by the…

Nelson

THE MAGNITUDE OF THE KATRINA disaster and the subsequent failure of local, state, and federal agencies to react in a timely manner have led some to call for an expansion of the military's role in domestic affairs. "The question raised by the Katrina fiasco," writes Daniel Henninger of the Wall…

I ATTENDED A MEETING OF about 40 Syrian exile oppositionists in Paris last week. It was a bit surreal. There was the Syrian-Kurd who lives in Germany, for instance, a sweet, grandfatherly fellow with a big white mustache. The guy introduced himself to me, I glanced at his name tag to make sure I…

Pinkos' Poor Sportship

WORKING AT THE WEEKLY STANDARD, which I joined some eight months ago, has been an unalloyed pleasure. With one somewhat disconcerting exception. My office is located in a corner where I find myself surrounded by twentysomethings, and for the first time in my life, I am not only one of the older…

Moscow Memoirs

AP's Preposterous Scoop

Does God Belong in Public Schools?

ON OCTOBER 10, A lawyer and three assistants traveled from Beijing to Linyi, a city of 10 million roughly 400 miles southeast of the Chinese capital, to participate in a historic class-action lawsuit. Organized by the charismatic blind activist Chen Guangcheng, 34, the lawsuit targets local…

BOOKS IN BRIEF

FOR TWO YEARS, THE political class in Washington has followed with intense interest the story of Joseph Wilson and the events that led to the compromising of his wife's identity and undercover status as a CIA operative. The rest of the country seems to have responded with a collective yawn. That…

Seize the Fire

LIFE IS TOUGH for the stalwart pioneers on biotechnology's cutting edge. "U.S. scientists studying human embryonic stem cells face unprecedented political, regulatory, and financial barriers," Dr. Susan Okie, M.D. complained last week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The "national debate…

Today, on NBC's Meet the Press, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York said that he did not regret having voted for the Iraq War resolution. Tim Russert: Based on what you now know today, do you regret having voted for the war? Sen. Schumer: Well, no, Tim, because my vote was seen and I still…

Yesterday, in an address at Tufts University, former UN inspection chief Hans Blix harshly criticized the Bush administration over Iraq and then added something quite interesting and very much at the heart of the debate over the March 2003 decision to remove Saddam from power. According to the…

But will the Security Council Act ?

The speech delivered yesterday by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, got a lot of press attention. But while all these reports highlighted the negative remarks he made about the Bush White House, they didn't mention Wilkerson's other seemingly newsworthy…

The BBC has an interesting piece on China's "village elections." China's tough handling of recent protests by villagers in Taishi, southern Guangdong province, has thrown into fresh doubt its claims to be introducing genuine democracy "from the bottom up".

ON SEPTEMBER 12, 2001, the day after the deadliest attack ever perpetrated on American soil, job security--not homeland security--was foremost on the minds of California lawmakers. State senators in Sacramento that day passed a redistricting bill purposely designed to protect both parties'…

WHAT DOES MODERN HISTORY have to teach us about the age of American empire? The final chapters of the British Empire offer lessons and parallels aplenty. Empires don't last forever, and the combination of martial victory, popular ennui, and liberal anti-patriotism is a dangerous mix for a…

WHEN THE LARGEST INDUSTRIAL BANKRUPTCY in American history happened more than a week ago, Washington barely noticed. But the fight between the automotive parts giant Delphi Corporation and its unions could take a big bite out of taxpayers' wallets.

The media distortions and outright falsehoods just keep on coming. For example, the New York Daily News claims that Joe Wilson debunked a key claim in a speech by President Bush that Iraq sought nuclear materials in Africa…. When Wilson was sent by his wife to Africa to research the claims, he…

Here's what the chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell had to say yesterday at a Washington, DC think-tank: When you cut the bureaucracy out of your decisions and then foist your decisions on us out of the blue on that bureaucracy, you can't expect that bureaucracy to carry your…

ON SEPTEMBER 24 the International Atomic Energy Agency passed a resolution that, in part, called on Iran "to observe fully its commitments and to return to the negotiating process that has made good progress in the last two years." The resolution is just the latest chapter in the ongoing dispute…

WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH nominated John Roberts for the Supreme Court, he was widely praised by conservatives. Roberts had such impeccable credentials that even his foes conceded Bush had chosen a top-notch nominee. But deep in John Roberts's past lurked a secret that threatened to undermine his…

WHY have so many conservatives suddenly revolted against President Bush, nearly five years into his presidency? I think their split with Bush is ill advised, counterproductive, and in some ways childish. But there's no doubt it's happening and it's serious. And there's more to it than…

William Kristol writes: Condoleezza Rice's testimony today could be a major step forward in the Administration's implementation of an Iraq victory strategy. It's certainly a major step forward in the presentation of that strategy -- as Gary Schmitt points out, the first comprehensive statement of a…

Commenting on Rice's testimony today, Gary Schmitt writes: This is the first comprehensive statement made by a senior administration official that lays out a sensible counterinsurgency strategy and accepts the fact that we will be deeply involved in the business of helping build a state. For that…

In testimony today before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary Rice outlined a bold strategy to "break the back" of the insurgency. She rejected largely Democratic calls (like the one delivered this morning on the Senate floor by Sen. Durbin of Illinois) to soon begin troop withdrawals…

"China has reacted angrily to a decision by the internet search engine Google to stop calling Taiwan a Chinese province," reports the BBC. Of course, the Google folks got off easy. In 1997, the Danish government sponsored a United Nations resolution calling attention to the poor human rights record…

ALTHOUGH NEW YORK CITY police announced last week that they would scale back the increased security measures that followed the recent terrorism scare, the subway terror alert highlighted two basic facts. The first is that the terrorists would like to strike our mass transit system; the second, is…

ONE CAN DRAW CONCLUSIONS about the values of society by the places of worship it builds and the gods they revere in them. Ancient Aztecs built temples to gods requiring bloody human sacrifices, while Zoroastrians largely concerned themselves with less murderous and more deeply spiritual centers of…

WRITING IN the Wall Street Journal, editorial board member Melanie Kirkpatrick counsels her "friends on the right" to "brew themselves a cup of chamomile tea and go back and review the roster of Bush judges." Such an exercise may help them "sleep better" with the nomination of Harriet Miers to the…

WHEN SHE RAN for the Dallas City Council in the spring of 1989, Harriet Miers sought the endorsement of Texans United for Life, according to its president, Kyleen Wright. Miers's interview with TUL's Political Action Committee was scheduled for April 11, 1989, and in preparation for the interview…

The same Washington Post frontpage article that pushed the "imminent threat" myth today also reports the following: Before the war, he [Vice President Cheney] traveled to CIA headquarters for briefings, an unusual move that some critics interpreted as an effort to pressure intelligence officials…

In today's Washington Post, Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus write, "Cheney, a longtime proponent of toppling Saddam Hussein, led the White House effort to build the case that Iraq was an imminent threat because it possessed a dangerous arsenal of weapons." This statement is not true and just one…

A Syrian national has been arrested in France in connection with the assassination of the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik al-Hariri, and this week a UN report is "expected to implicate Syrian officials in [the] assassination that plunged Lebanon into its worst security crisis since a…

Today's Financial Times reports on "a scathing denunciation of the US portal Yahoo for its role in helping Communist authorities to prosecute an independent-minded local journalist, jailed for 10 years for 'leaking state secrets.'"

Courtesy of The History Channel 1989 East Germany and Hungary move toward democracy On October 18, the Hungarian constitution was amended to allow a multiparty political system and free elections (which took place in 1990). Many of the state controls over the economy were removed and Hungary moved…

THE IMAGES OF MISTREATMENT and outright sadism that emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year shocked America and the world. The cruel acts illustrated by the photos reflected poorly upon the U.S. military: How, many wondered, could America win support for the war on terrorism--a war…

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal today, the French ambassador to the US writes, "Opposing a military intervention in Iraq at a time when U.N. inspections were working and Iraq was not an imminent threat to peace was a decision my country is proud of, one based on principles and shared by many…

In today's New York Times, the editors write, "Washington helped produce first, in January, a constituent assembly in which Sunni Arabs were drastically underrepresented…." Actually, the Sunnis boycotted the January election, so THEY are responsible for their current numbers in the assembly. Many…

AT HIS PRESS CONFERENCE ON October 4, President Bush took a question about the number of Iraqi military units engaged in fighting insurgents and terrorists. Bush, the reporter noted, had once said there were 100 Iraqi battalions in combat "across the nation." But in an appearance on Capitol Hill,…

IT WAS EARLY ON THE first Monday in October, two hours before the Supreme Court heard its first case of the new term, that President Bush announced the nomination of Harriet Miers to succeed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. That evening, James Dobson, the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, a…

Like a Rolling Stone

Blackpool

Union City, New Jersey

THERE AREN'T MANY GOOD PLACES to get lost anymore, but I know of one near where I live. It's deep in southern Maryland's Calvert County, past the steamed-crab stands and empty tobacco barns, which are fast losing ground to tanning salons, "Embroid Me" shops, and other strip-mall abscesses. Just…

IN THE WAKE OF THE embarrassing Harriet Miers nomination, it is time to ask: Shouldn't feminists--the source of the mandate for a female Supreme Court justice--be disqualified from any influence on public affairs? An exchange in the Yale alumni magazine provides the perfect vehicle for analyzing…

Charles W. Colson

F. X. TOOLE made excellent copy. He was, for starters, a study in persistence--an ambitious fiction writer who plugged away for more than 40 years without notching a single publication. In the meantime, he also compiled a rather varied curriculum vitae: actor, bullfighter, cabdriver, bartender.…

Moses as Political Leader

Academic Disputations

CELEBRITY AT THIS MOMENT IN America is epidemic, and it's spreading fast, sometimes seeming as if nearly everyone has got it. Television provides celebrity dance contests, celebrities take part in reality shows, perfumes carry the names not merely of designers but of actors and singers. Without…

IN AUGUST THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION fired its director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in a dispute over a press release about a report on racial profiling. Newspaper editorialists and Democrats in Congress charged the administration with suppressing painful truths. In response, Republican…

Exorcism and Enlightenment

Greenspan Chooses a Successor?

BOOKS IN BRIEF

THE FURY OF RADICAL ANIMAL liberationists is growing, leading them to acts of brazen lawlessness and flagrant vigilantism. In the United Kingdom, a farm family that raised guinea pigs for medical testing was subjected to years of personal threats and property vandalism by animal liberationists. The…

IT'S BEEN A BAD WEEK for the Bush administration--but, in a way, a not-so-bad week for American conservatism. George W. Bush's nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court was at best an error, at worst a disaster. There is no need now to elaborate on Bush's error. He has…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, in a stunning rebuke to the school's administration, Dartmouth alumni elected two insurgent petition candidates to the college's board of trustees--Hoover Institution fellow and former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson and George Mason University Law School professor Todd…

During a news briefing in London today, Secretary Rice responded to those demanding a timetable for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq: I just want to emphasize again the President's point is that when the Iraqis are ready, they'll be ready. Our goal is to provide the kind of support for Iraq…

On Meet the Press Sunday, Secretary Rice acknowledged that the Syrian government has apparently ignored the warning President Bush delivered in his recent speech at the National Endowment for Democracy. She stated: What we have focused on is getting a Syrian -- getting the Syrian regime to change…

As the Iranian government moves forward on its "peaceful" nuclear program, President Putin is there to lend a hand to help Tehran build better missiles and acquire enriched uranium.

Tom Joscelyn sends in the following: Upon reading Brzezinski's recent piece, I was reminded of a similar article he wrote for the New York Times on December 6, 1981 entitled: "What's Wrong With Reagan's Foreign Policy? In his first major statement since leaving office, President Carter's…

Maureen Dowd, New York Times, June 19, 1994 At the end of the day in Normandy, Bill Clinton walked down to the beach with three veterans of Omaha Beach -- Joe Dawson, Walter Ehlers and Robert Slaughter. The tableau was appealing: the young President enjoying the company of the aging heroes. But…

Last Sunday, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Carter, wrote a harsh critique of the current president's foreign policy. Historian Victor Davis Hanson responds here. He notes the "unintended irony" that such criticism comes from a high official of an administration that…

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has posted a translation of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's endorsement of the constitutional referendum that will be voted on tomorrow. Sistani is Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric. Terrorists are also not pleased that "two prominent Sunni Arab…

THERE HAS BEEN some rather harsh treatment in the media of George W. Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers. It has been said that she is an underqualified crony of Bush's, and that as a middling corporate lawyer, with no experience on the bench, she has never offered much in the way…

IT'S A BILLBOARD OF THE TIMES. Paid for by the California Nurses Association and posted along highways east and west of Sacramento, the billboards depict three images of Arnold Schwarzenegger--a full head shot, followed by a partial facial image, then finally just the man's hair and…

PRIOR TO THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, John Calhoun and Abraham Lincoln articulated two very different ideas of equality. Each idea was powerful, and if followed, would lead to radically different outcomes. Calhoun's organizing principle can be boiled down to two words: state sovereignty. He believed in…

AS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION has faced growing pressure to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, the Pentagon has claimed that as greater numbers of Iraqi forces are able to assume the task of defending their own country, American troops will be able to leave.

The full text of the October 13, 2000 New York Times article may be found here. …The 1995 agreement allowed Moscow to fulfill existing sales contracts for specified weaponry, including a diesel submarine, torpedoes, anti- ship mines and hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers. But no…

SWEDEN HAS A REPUTATION for a high suicide rate. But a psychological crackup striking an ordinary Scandinavian, brooding in the long, dark winter, is merely a personal tragedy. By contrast, the moral suicide of a whole institution, like the Swedish Academy--which has responsibility for awarding the…

Newsweek's Howard Fineman's latest piece, "The Conservative Crack-up," is an interesting read but it could use a bit more fact. Take, for example, his first line that it was "the 'neocons' who convinced him to go to war there [in Iraq]" as if no others supported the president's action. Fineman, of…

Soxblog.com's Dean Barnett comments on a recent speech delivered by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (see Romney profile here) that "triggered a spasm of activity from America's grievance industry," including "the tolerant progressives at the Daily Kos." Appalled by Romney's insensitivity to…

Dan Darling, counter-terrorism consultant for the Manhattan Institute, writes on what the Ayman al-Zawahiri letter tells us about the enemy. He states: The letter does not suggest a man cut off from outside information ("More than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the…

ON SEPTEMBER 14, MASSACHUSETTS GOVERNOR Mitt Romney stood before the Heritage Foundation to outline his thoughts on how to best wage the war on terror. In addition to being widely considered a likely candidate for president in 2008, Romney brings impressive credentials to a discussion on battling…

IN A NEW REPORT bishops of the Church of England have urged Western Christians to apologize for the Iraq War as an "act of truth and reconciliation." The committee of bishops, chaired by the bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, also linked U.S. "imperialism" to the influence of U.S. evangelicals, who…

THE FULL TEXT of the just-released letter from al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri to Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, dated July 9, 2005, makes it clear that not only are al-Zawahiri and bin Laden symbolic leaders to the global jihad, but they are still active in running their…

WHAT DOES A PRESIDENT owe his followers, especially on issues that may have caused them to back him in the first place? And what do followers owe their president, particularly on matters where his commitment to their common agenda is unclear? These questions need to be considered in light of the…

The full text of Ayman al-Zawahiri's letter to the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, may be found here.

Under the frontpage headline "Review Faults Pre-War Plans," USA Today reports on a CIA analysis completed in July of 2004, a portion of which has just been made public. Reading the article one gets the distinct impression that this latest CIA report is another attempt to put the agency in the best…

The Financial Times reports that "two of NATO's most respected retired generals will on Wednesday issue a stinging indictment of European military capabilities…and argue that European leaders have 'lacked the political will' to improve military capabilities." Of course, this indictment isn't a…

English Translation of Ayman al-Zawahiri's letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

IT HAS NOW BEEN ALMOST TWO WEEKS since George W. Bush touched off a conservative civil war by nominating his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court. Miers, who has worked with Bush for over a decade, received the appointment based, we're assured, on the confidence the president…

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.

Looks like Ayman al-Zawahri hopes the Out of Iraq Caucus gets its way.

Secretary of State Rice is now in the midst of a trip that will take her to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and finally to Afghanistan. UPI reports that during a stopover in Ireland Rice said that "one of the elements of a strong and deep relationship with the United States these days is moving…

MICHAEL LERNER was back on campus at Berkeley. But this time he is a portly Jewish rabbi leading 1,200 mostly middle-aged "spiritual progressives," and not the young Students for a Democratic Society agitator targeted by J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s.

IT TAKES A LOT to get Alan Greenspan on an airplane these days. He has enough to do at home: tend to the economy, develop monetary policy that can cope with the profligate fiscal policy concocted by the president and Congress; and begin packing his office so that he can be out the door when his…

Today's New York Times reports on just how bad relations were between the head of the FBI and the counterterrorism chief. Settling a score, Louis J. Freeh, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under President Bill Clinton and in the first six months of the Bush presidency, asserts in a…

A onetime terrorist now works on a new television show airing in the Middle East that directly challenges al Qaeda's claims of Quranic justification for their attacks. A few don't like it and want it taken off the air. Will they get their way?

LEON KASS HAS STEPPED DOWN as chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics. On one level, I am happy for Kass. For four years he has broiled in the pressure cooker of Washington politics, subjected to vituperation and vicious calumny from the bioethics and science establishments for his…

AT FIRST GLANCE, ARIZONA State University hardly seems like fertile ground for a religious awakening.

WITH TOM DELAY ON THE sidelines, things will be different on Capitol Hill, especially for President Bush. The White House will no longer command an automatic majority in the House of Representatives--that is, the votes of nearly all 231 Republicans--on any bill the president endorses. In the…

Damascus

Smearing Bill Bennett

THE RELATIVE STAR POWER OF the authors at the National Book Festival on the Mall in Washington was easily discerned from the lines of people waiting to have their books signed.

I GOT AN EMAIL FROM my friend Mike Luke last week. His real name is Mike Lukaszewicz and, though he lives in Los Angeles, we stay in touch throughout the year. We correspond almost daily during football season, when the two of us, along with a handful of other friends from Wisconsin, email back and…

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Brighton

Worth a Do-Over?

ROBERT NATKIN IS A PAST master of American painting, a national treasure in his mid-seventies who is still inventing new ways to paint while enjoying his position at the pinnacle.

A WEEK AGO WE SUGGESTED in this space that a beleaguered President Bush was "poised to rebound by getting back to basics, and getting back to a core, winning agenda." Sure enough, USA Today reported a week later that Bush's poll ratings had rebounded to 45 percent approval/50 percent disapproval…

IT SEEMS LIKE ONLY A few months ago that commentators were blithely babbling about how much relations between Beijing and Washington had improved since the start of the Bush administration, which was marred by China's downing of an American EP-3 surveillance plane and the detention of its crew. The…

JUDGING BY LETTERS to the editor and furious Internet circulation, the New York Times struck a collective nerve the other week with its front-page story announcing that "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood." According to the article, surveys of 138 female students at Yale…

"You've got to have ethics and integrity in everything you do. Especially here in D.C. It's such a small town that if you gain a reputation as someone who does not play by the rules, that does not do things with integrity, your career is ended." --David Safavian ON OCTOBER 7, the former head of…

LITERARY REPUTATION IS AS FRAGILE in crime fiction as anywhere else, but the precipitous decline of Ellery Queen may be unique, one of the most total, and in some ways inexplicable, cases of devalued stock in the annals of American letters. From the 1930s into the 1970s, Frederic Dannay (1905-1982)…

Rogue Regime

ON SEPTEMBER 24, the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued its most harshly worded resolution to date on the Iranian nuclear program. The resolution says that "some important outstanding issues" remain unclear despite "two and a half years of intensive…

CHIEF AMONG THE MARVELOUS QUALITIES of liberalism is its ability to see the good in human suffering--and make a good thing of it. How like the early Christians, if the early Christians had been in politics. Hurricane Katrina was a blessing to liberals, a consecrated opportunity to make advocates of…

THE DISAPPOINTMENT many conservatives feel over the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court will not vanish unless and until Miers begins writing solid conservative Supreme Court opinions. In the absence of such opinions, there is little reason to believe that the Miers nomination fulfills…

Carter national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski pens a scathing op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times that is highly critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy. In the same pages, William Shawcross takes a different view. He writes: Thanks to the coalition Iraqis have more confidence in…

During the Reagan years, the Tory party was riding high with Margaret Thatcher at its helm. Today, as Irwin Stelzer writes in the current Weekly Standard, the party has seen its vote total sink from 14 million in 1992 to 9 million earlier this year. This decline is particularly galling to a party…

Michael Goldfarb on the Nobel winner: Mohamed El Baradei interpreted the Nobel Prize as a "strong message [from the Norwegian Nobel Committee] to keep doing what you are doing." So what has El Baradei been doing? After 6 months on the job, in May of 1998, both India and Pakistan conduct nuclear…

On Wednesday, the Senate overwhelmingly passed, 90-9, an amendment to the Defense spending bill that would "establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for the interrogation of Department of Defense detainees." Opponents of the McCain amendment are expected to try to gut the…

Dan Twining writes in that China isn't the only big story in East Asia these days: China's rise in Asia is real, and is transforming Asia's strategic landscape. But breathless scholars and analysts already heralding a new political order in Asia centered on Chinese power and influence are missing…

Senator Joe Biden took to the Senate floor yesterday to respond to the president's speech earlier in the day. Biden spoke of the "many fundamental mistakes this administration has made over the past four years." The first? According to Biden: "This administration took our eye of the ball in…

IT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN a Jetsons future for Seattle. A gleaming new monorail would silently skim along above the rooftops, whisking contented commuters into the city so smoothly that not a ripple would mar the surfaces of their $4 Tully's mint mochas. Seattle was so in love with this…

IF THERE IS A CONSTANT in Arnold Schwarzenegger's overlapping careers as film and political star, it would be his ability to choose the right foil to play the bad guy.

Journalist Michael Yon's latest dispatch from Mosul, Iraq is a must read. Tactics based on faulty assumptions often backfire. The insurgents apparently were expecting that their strategy of targeting the police would make those who survived less committed. But the new cops were cut from stronger…

The president gets a solid "B" for his remarks on the War on Terror today. There's much to like about the speech. First the basics: Two months ago, the Bush Administration was publicly considering a move from the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE).…

Is it pure coincidence that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair singled out Iran's terrorist activities on the same day? In his address, the president cited Iran's "long history of collaboration with terrorists" and stated that the U.S. "makes no distinction between those who commit acts of…

In his address today before the National Endowment for Democracy, the president made the case that "by standing for the hope and freedom of others, we make our own freedom more secure." Stanford professor Michael McFaul's The Liberty Doctrine, published in Policy Review, further explains why "the…

NEARLY SIX YEARS LATER, Elián Gonzalez remains as ineffably cute as ever. Sunday night's 60 Minutes piece on the Cuban boy plucked from the sea taught us that--and not much else we didn't already know.

Warsaw

The Iranian regime adds a new twist to its rope-a-dope strategy employed against the U.S., EU and IAEA over its nuclear program. An official with the British Foreign Office says that Iranian-supplied weapons have been used to attack British forces in southern Iraq. The same official says that Iran…

Perhaps the Saudis could pay for this by spending less money on this.

Today, the Iraqi parliament did an about face on its recent rule change that would have made it more difficult to defeat the constitutional referendum on October 15. But even with this reversal, are Sunnis still likely to reject the constitution at the ballot box? Not necessarily, says one Iraqi…

The Post's Kennicott continues his coverage of the upcoming vote in yet another test of what Secretary Rice describes as "the forward march of democracy."

MARK ZAID has a full schedule these days, working on behalf of his beleaguered client, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer; media appearances, tilting at Department of Defense windmills, correcting poorly-written AP stories, and handling late-night interview requests. If anyone has an excuse to beg off an…

WITH RECENT U.S. and British allegations that shipments of explosives similar to those used by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) are being shipped into Iraq from Iran for use by the insurgency, it is long past time for American policy-makers to examine the role of Iranian Brigadier…

Yesterday, in an address to Marines at Camp Lejeune, Vice President Cheney stated that the lesson of the last two decades is not that the U.S. responded too aggressively to terrorist attacks but that it didn't "hit back hard enough." Although we've been in the struggle against terrorism for four…

The European Union has slapped an arms embargo on the authoritarian regime in Uzbekistan for its refusal to allow a legitimate investigation into the shooting of hundreds of protestors there last May. But Moscow will not honor it. Southwest of Uzbekistan, Moscow will not stop selling its nuclear…

The Democratic Leadership Council has released a statement on the Iraq war and rejected calls to begin withdrawing US troops from groups like the Center for American Progress and the "Out of Iraq" Democratic caucus in the House. Following such a course, the DLC writes, would "give the terrorists a…

THE STORM CLOUDS that darkened the skies over New Orleans and Houston have lifted, but those that are darkening the economic outlook remain threatening. Some related directly to Katrina and Rita will pass sooner rather than later. But other clouds might, just might, prove to linger far longer, long…

FOOL ME ONCE, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. When it comes to detaining prisoners seized in Iraq, Afghanistan and on the other fronts of the terror war, the Pentagon's "just-trust-us" mentality continues to undercut American strategy. Thankfully, Congress is at last on the verge of doing…

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY that the government is presented with an opportunity to educate the nation, fortify national security, and enhance public diplomacy, and to do so with a simple program that can be administered with a tiny staff and implemented at bargain prices. Yet the establishment of a program…

The Washington Post's Jackie Spinner reports that the Syrian-Iraq border area serves as a key crossing point for foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria. Hussain Ali Kamal, the head of intelligence for the Iraqi Interior Ministry, said in an interview Sunday that Syria had failed to keep promises…

Weekly Standard contributing editor Irwin Stelzer offers his thoughts on Prime Minister Blair's speech to Labour Party delegates last week: I have seen him leave a trade union conference in mid-session and head directly for the United States after September 11, and then stand with President Bush in…

IF ALL GOES WELL, Harriet Miers will turn out to be a less impressive version of John Roberts: that is, a judicial conservative, or constitutionalist, who will cause the ideological balance on the Supreme Court to shift to the right. She's not likely to have Roberts's gift for describing and…

I'M DISAPPOINTED, depressed and demoralized.

Philip Kennicott has a piece in the Washington Post on the upcoming parliamentary election in Azerbaijan scheduled for November 6. With neighboring Georgia to the east and Iran to the south, the election is a critical test of whether the Bush administration's democracy promotion can establish…

The Vital Center:

LAST WEEK, ON THE terrace of the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill, a crowd of demonstrators from around the country held aloft catchy signs saying things like "Rescue Taxpayers from Floods of Red Ink" and "Deficit Spending is Disaster Pending." Members of the conservative Republican…

The Fate of Africa

Detroit

George W. Bush was reelected almost a year ago with more than 62 million votes-the most ever cast for a presidential candidate. Bush won 51 percent of the vote-the first presidential candidate to win an absolute majority of the popular vote since 1988. Bush's agenda for his second term was…

State of the Revolution

The Treehouse

THE JOURNAL Science late last month published the results of research conducted at Harvard proving that embryonic stem cells can be produced by a method that does not involve creating or destroying a living human embryo. Additional progress will be required to perfect this technique of stem cell…

Berlin

WITH ALL THE ATTENTION FOCUSED on the aftermath of Katrina and the coming destruction of Rita, a small gathering on a perfect early fall day in Washington went largely unnoticed. That's understandable, but too bad.

Clinton Revisionism

Coral Gables, Florida

SMALL GOVERNMENT CONSERVATIVES HAVE REVOLTED against President Bush and the Republican leadership of the Senate and the House. Their goal, with hurricane recovery costs soaring, is what it's always been: to hold down spending and restrain the growth of government. It is an impossible dream or close…

100 People Who Are Screwing Up America

I HAVE BEEN READING, with immense pleasure, the first four volumes of The Letters of George Santayana in the handsome edition published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. I read them with my first cup of tea before breakfast, usually in short takes, between ten and twenty pages at…

ON SEPTEMBER 7, PAUL Volcker's inquiry into the Oil-for-Food program issued its "definitive report" on the biggest relief program--also the biggest scandal--in the history of the United Nations. The investigation alone cost $34 million, took over 16 months, and employed some 75 staff from 28…

Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus

MORE THAN 16 MILLION STUDENTS are now enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States, the largest number ever. In two years, the figure will exceed 17 million, and it will continue to grow, as the high school graduating class of 2008 will be the largest in history. Today nearly 70…

BOOKS IN BRIEF

THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT that our terrorist enemies keenly watched both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. One clear lesson they will seize on is the inadequacy of the governmental response to Katrina, which suggests that we're unprepared to handle the effects of a major terrorist attack. Another…

This week marks THE DAILY STANDARD's four year anniversary and, as you may have noticed, we've done a bit of an overhaul. In addition to the cosmetic changes is one big addition: the Worldwide Standard.

LAST SUMMER, New York Times reporter Judith Miller went to jail rather than reveal to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald the identity of the source who told her that Valerie Plame was an employee of the CIA. Or so she said. But there was always some doubt as to what motivated Miller. It has been…

The Secretary of State delivered a forceful address on "the forward march of democracy" during an event celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.