Andrew Ferguson

What it was like to work for the man.

With Gary Hart, political journalists went from covering “the issues” as a public service to servicing the public with prurient material.

Political dysfunction as far as the eye can see.

Andrew Ferguson reads the Trump-era bestsellers so you don’t have to.

I’m not dropping a heavy hint to book publishers when I say I’ve been daydreaming this week about what it would be like to ghostwrite Michael Cohen’s inevitable memoir, set to appear—I’m guessing—in the fall of 2020.

The Catholic League president is doing more to discredit the Catholic church than perhaps anyone else.

When potential clients crossed the threshold into his dark and paneled office not far from the White House, Clark Clifford would give them a little speech. Yes, he told them, he could offer them his “extensive knowledge of how to deal with the government on your problems.” And certainly he could…

They may not be true, but they feel true.

When President Trump announced last Monday that he had chosen Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy, his little speech rang out like a starter pistol. Instantly every activist, party hack, and ideological mainchancer bolted from the blocks, issuing petitions and press releases and formal…

This Fourth of July, as is my wont, I will bring down from the shelf my well-thumbed copy of What So Proudly We Hail and therewith touch off a semi-controlled bacchanal of patriotism in my little household. I do this as a civic duty and to set an example for my countrymen. The indispensable Karlyn…

Andrew Ferguson’s boon companion in Rome.

A futile and stupid gesture from Starbucks.

With the death of Barbara Bush, much, though maybe not enough, has been made of her once-famous commencement address to the Wellesley College class of 1990. Read today it has the feel of an antique. But her voice is strong in it, and she was always worth listening to.

New documentary series pushes back at Kenneth Clark’s 1969 classic

It is a fact of history that we Americans believe all kinds of dumbass things. Different Americans believe different dumbass things at different times, but each of us must sooner or later fall for an urban myth, a lunatic philosophy, an obvious exaggeration, a prophecy of doom, or some other…

I don’t know the book acquisition budget of the public library in the town of St. Michaels, a quaint little tourist trap on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I hope it’s large enough to buy several copies of Ryan T. Anderson’s new book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.…

Quinn Norton is an engaging, funny, and stylish writer on technology and the odd communities that inhabit our digital world and make it so scary. She is also, to quote her own description, “a bisexual anarchist pacifist, prison abolitionist, & vegetarian. Currently I’m fretting about fair trade…

I write of cats as a dog person. For most of my life, an extreme allergy fueled my aversion to cats in general, but the individuals I got to know didn’t help their cause. In college, thanks to a roommate who owned her, I lived with a cat named Sophie. I appreciated Sophie as an aesthetic object:…

A story for our times: It took place, of course, on Twitter, though it was first written up in the trade publication Inside Higher Ed.

The new documentary The Final Year records the ups, the downs, the smiles, the frowns of President Obama’s foreign policy advisers during their last months in office. It was made for HBO but it won’t hit the small screen until later this year. For the moment it’s playing in a few theaters in Obama…

Years ago, during the long-forgotten administration of George H.W. Bush, I looked in on a friend of mine who had been “tasked”— the military jargon was just then creeping into civilian life – with writing the president’s State of the Union address.

Imagine being repudiated by Stephen Bannon, the most repudiated man since Rasputin. Any ordinary person would feel obliged to slink off to the remotest mountains of Madagascar, never to be heard from again. But Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart News blogger whom Bannon disowned as a colleague 15…

Joe Hagan has written what promises to be the standard biography of Jann Wenner—standard, because it’s hard to imagine anyone working up the energy to take another stab at it. Fifty years ago, at the age of 21, Wenner founded Rolling Stone magazine, and he’s been editor in chief ever since. Thanks…

It’s not always easy to sympathize with reporters for the New York Times, because so many of them act like .  .  . how to put it? .  .  . like reporters for the New York Times. But there are exceptions, and to their list we may now add the name of Richard Fausset. He writes (especially well) from…

We call it the Nobel prize in economics, but the Nobel that Richard Thaler won last week is technically a prize in “economic sciences,” and that bit of self-puffery (Oh, we’re scientists now, are we?) is fitting. Thaler is a pioneer of behavioral economics, the latest craze to sweep a trade not…

We call it the Nobel prize in economics, but the Nobel that Richard Thaler won last week is technically a prize in “economic sciences,” and that bit of self-puffery (Oh, we’re scientists now, are we?) is fitting. Thaler is a pioneer of behavioral economics, the latest craze to sweep a trade not…

When George Will was being packed off to graduate school, his father, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, asked him what, or who, he wanted to be in life: Ted Sorensen, Isaiah Berlin, or Murray Kempton? All three men were closely identified with a public trade. Sorensen, as…

When George Will was being packed off to graduate school, his father, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, asked him what, or who, he wanted to be in life: Ted Sorensen, Isaiah Berlin, or Murray Kempton? All three men were closely identified with a public trade. Sorensen, as…

 A friend sent me news that E. B. White’s saltwater farm on the coast of Maine is up for sale, and my mind leapt back nearly 20 years—an impressive leap for a mind in my condition—to a visit I’d made there to mark the 100th anniversary of White’s birth in 1899. I was on assignment for a magazine, a…

San Francisco.

San Francisco

San Francisco

When an admirer once asked Harry Jaffa, the political philosopher who died earlier this month at the age of 96, what led to his interest in Abraham Lincoln, he answered without a moment’s hesitation, in a ferocious bark: “Plato!”

In the introduction to A Subtreasury of American Humor, published in 1941, E. B. White told of the various disappointments and disillusionments he and his wife had encountered in gathering the pieces that would make up the anthology. They had hoped to include a section of “newspaper humor” and…

In the introduction to A Subtreasury of American Humor, published in 1941, E. B. White told of the various disappointments and disillusionments he and his wife had encountered in gathering the pieces that would make up the anthology. They had hoped to include a section of “newspaper humor” and…

The news that Bob Dylan cribbed parts of his Nobel speech from SparkNotes, of all places, serves one excellent purpose: It has quieted down the high-brow Dylan fans who were competing to see who could overpraise the lecture most. (Don't worry, they'll be back.) The first cheerleader was the Nobel…

So there I am Tuesday morning, wheezing away on my exercise bike, trying to stay alert to telltale signs of the inevitable coronary thrombosis, when, for the first time in many, many years, I switch on the TV to watch Morning Joe.

So there I am Tuesday morning, wheezing away on my exercise bike, trying to stay alert to telltale signs of the inevitable coronary thrombosis, when, for the first time in many, many years, I switch on the TV to watch Morning Joe.

Many mistaken beliefs left over from the 1960s are embedded in mainstream, which is to say liberal, American culture. As an earnest young lefty I was taught that generals like war, that businessmen like free markets, that Christians think everyone else is going to hell, and that Republicans are…

Many mistaken beliefs left over from the 1960s are embedded in mainstream, which is to say liberal, American culture. As an earnest young lefty I was taught that generals like war, that businessmen like free markets, that Christians think everyone else is going to hell, and that Republicans are…

Arlington, Va.

Philadelphia

Editor's note: This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of Chicago newspaper and syndicated columnist Mike Royko, a fixture of the Windy City's media for more than three decades. The Chicago Tribune, Royko's final professional stop, called him the "voice" of the city in its obituary;…

"Just who does they think they is?” That's the question that raced through the language snob community late last month. Maybe not phrased in those exact words.

"In any election,” Tom Coburn often says, “you should vote for the candidate who will give up the most if they win.” All things being equal, we should prefer politicians who have accomplished something in their lives beyond government work—and who are willing to sacrifice it, at least temporarily,…

A few years ago, an adjunct professor and disability-rights activist named Stacy Nowak went to take a look at a college course offered online by the University of California, Berkeley. The course was called "Journalism for Social Change." Nowak is deaf. She has no connection to UC Berkeley; she…

A few years ago, an adjunct professor and disability-rights activist named Stacy Nowak went to take a look at a college course offered online by the University of California, Berkeley. The course was called "Journalism for Social Change." Nowak is deaf. She has no connection to UC Berkeley; she…

Every few weeks, it seems, a new crack appears in the seemingly impenetrable wall of social-science dogma. The latest appeared last month with the publication of a paper by the well-known research psychologist Scott Lilienfeld, a professor at Emory University and coauthor of the indispensable…

Singles Awareness Day is fast approaching, which will probably be news to those of you who are already dragging the old ball and chain. On February 14—though some authorities cite February 15—single people across the globe will pause to contemplate their sorry, pathetic lives or to celebrate their…

Friday's edition of the indispensable Inside Higher Ed brings news of the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, just in case you were wondering. According to Colleen Flaherty's report, an air of apprehension hangs over the event, which is being held, where else,…

A good way to look at the Obama era is as a giant experiment in misdirection—the Age of Missing the Point. When a huge majority of Americans told pollsters that they were happy with their health care, the administration decided to remake the entire system of delivering health care. When vast,…

We shouldn't doubt that President Obama will read the new book by the liberal journalist Jonathan Chait. The title alone will be enough to grab him: Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail. He will read it slowly and carefully, Montblanc at the ready to…

We shouldn’t doubt that President Obama will read the new book by the liberal journalist Jonathan Chait. The title alone will be enough to grab him: Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail. He will read it slowly and carefully, Montblanc at the ready to…

For several years I enjoyed an affiliation with a "lifestyle" magazine that specialized in the toys and enthusiasms of the well-to-do. As a result my email address fell into the twitchy fingers of several thousand—or so it seems to me—public relations firms with names like Chill Strategics and…

For several years I enjoyed an affiliation with a “lifestyle" magazine that specialized in the toys and enthusiasms of the well-to-do. As a result my email address fell into the twitchy fingers of several thousand—or so it seems to me—public relations firms with names like Chill Strategics and…

Perhaps you too have been wondering why it is that President Obama is always, always telling us who we are as Americans and who we are not. Obviously, why he does this is a complicated question. And I guess “always” is an exaggeration. Frequently, though—he does it very frequently.

Among the many offenses that modern architecture has committed against Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Washington—America's main street, we like to call it—is a glass 'n' stone 'n' steel box that houses a museum about news gathering called, unfortunately, the Newseum. Funded by the New York Times,…

Among the many offenses that modern architecture has committed against Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Washington—America's main street, we like to call it—is a glass 'n' stone 'n' steel box that houses a museum about news gathering called, unfortunately, the Newseum. Funded by the New York Times,…

After all the wild stories in an unpredictable year, we are now at last moving into a news cycle that is reassuringly predictable, with discoveries as foreseeable and unstoppable as the coming of the cherry blossoms in April or the choking of the Caps in May. Suddenly, we are told, The Presidential…

After all the wild stories in an unpredictable year, we are now at last moving into a news cycle that is reassuringly predictable, with discoveries as foreseeable and unstoppable as the coming of the cherry blossoms in April or the choking of the Caps in May. Suddenly, we are told, The Presidential…

I skipped out the door of the polling place last Tuesday as I usually do after voting, filled with patriotism and awe and reverence and gratitude for such a privilege—and a tinge of regret that so many of my fellow voters weren't going to share the experience, because they were too stupid or too…

I skipped out the door of the polling place this afternoon as I usually do after voting, filled with patriotism and awe and reverence and gratitude for such a privilege—and a tinge of regret that so many of my fellow voters won't share the experience, because they were too stupid or too lazy or too…

We mastodons who still receive our daily dose of New York Times when the dead-tree version lands on our doorsteps with a dull thud got a special treat Tuesday, a textbook case of the way "the newspaper of record" goes about its business these days. The front page headline read: "Comey Role Recalls…

We've heard some weird political arguments this year. The strangest of them is raging in California, where else? There the hotly contested question revolves around an electoral initiative known as Proposition 60.

We’ve heard some weird political arguments this year. The strangest of them is raging in California, where else? There the hotly contested question revolves around an electoral initiative known as Proposition 60.

There are many admiring things to say about Bob Dylan. While he may not be the hardest-working man in show business—the title once held by the martyred James Brown—he's still pretty close, recording and touring continuously at the age of 75. He's probably written more publishable songs, music and…

There are many admiring things to say about Bob Dylan. While he may not be the hardest-working man in show business—the title once held by the martyred James Brown—he's still pretty close, recording and touring continuously at the age of 75. He's probably written more publishable songs, music and…

One of the weirder aspects of anti-Trump mania is its sniffy tone. And it's especially weird coming from card-carrying liberal Democrats. For two generations our culture and its institutions have been living under a liberal ascendency. The country's elites—the Bigs of the news media and Hollywood…

The most read story on the Washington Post website Thursday was a little number called "Enabler or family defender? How Hillary Clinton responded to husband's accusers." As a piece of explanatory journalism it was weirdly imprecise and incomplete.

One step forward, two steps back—so goes the sorry arithmetic of the fight against political correctness on college campuses. The now-famous letter from John "Jay" Ellison, dean of students at the University of Chicago, has provoked a response from more than 150 faculty members. They are not happy.…

Press releases from the federal government aren't the most exciting documents around, as a general rule, and those from the National Archives are even less promising than most. But they're getting more interesting all the time, as the Archives continues its exciting transformation from a dusty…

From Simon Oxenham's excellent weekly column in New Scientist comes word of another social psychology study that will undermine our faith in social psychology studies. We can never get enough of those.

I spent a couple weeks this summer museum-hopping. Art museums, mostly, and while I don’t know much about painting or sculpture, I know what I like, and I know what I don't like, and I don't like people who go museum-hopping. Present company excluded.

The Washington Post is excited by a new poll of economists got up by the National Association for Business Economics. It shows, says the Post, "overwhelming support" for Hillary Clinton. "Overwhelming" might be a slight exaggeration on the Post's part—Clinton had 55 percent support, meaning that 45…

I guess all the flacks in the vast Obama administration public relations apparatus are at the beach. What else would explain this inelegant quote from Robert Pear's story today in the New York Times?

You might have mixed feelings if you heard the news from the Charleston Post and Courier the other day. Either a hero has exposed his feet o' clay, or a wronged man is getting his comeuppance.

For generations now, "If They'd Only Listened to Me" has served as the mythical title of the ultimate Washington memoir. The staffer/speechwriter/advisor/ex-close friend of a president/senator/ambassador lands a book contract and agrees to look back over his government service more in sorrow than…

A bit past the midpoint of the last century, roughly from early 1967 to late 1969, a sizable number of human beings believed that Paul McCartney was the coolest man who ever lived. Compared with your average world-historical claim, this one was not unreasonable.

After the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts approved a revised design for the Eisenhower memorial last month, a New York Times reporter asked Anne Eisenhower, Ike’s granddaughter, whether the controversial design could now, at long last, get built, despite the objections of her own family and countless…

It was easy to mock Alvin Toffler when he was riding high in the saddle, back in the 1970s. A self-described "futurist" (precise job description still TBD), he was part Jeremiah and part Arthur C. Clarke, warning us all about the dizzy pace of technological change even as he got giddy describing…

The invention of the smartphone has resolved a primeval fear of our species: What do you do when you’re out in public and forgot to bring something to read? Until a few years ago, the thought of facing a subway train, or the line at an ATM, or the waiting room at the Jiffy Lube, launched a…

The literary critic Edmund Wilson was ambivalent about the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, but he didn't doubt Lincoln's genius as a writing man. "Alone among American Presidents," Wilson wrote, "it is possible to imagine Lincoln, grown up in a different milieu, becoming a distinguished writer of a not…

Few things in life are more fascinating than other people’s money. As the New Hampshire phase of the presidential campaign draws to a close, those of us who are tired of comparing the details of Jeb Bush's plan for medical savings accounts with Bernie Sanders's plan to enroll everybody in Medicare…

The sad news came today of the death of Forrest MacDonald, one of the greatest intellectual historians America has produced. McDonald’s specialty was the Founding Fathers and he was unapologetically conservative. He once said the two facts were closely related, because a proper understanding of the…

If you weren’t lucky enough to see it for yourself, it's hard to describe how charming—how reassuring and inspiriting—the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Monica was in the middle 1970s. The neighborhoods spread from the bluffs above the beach through a low-rise business district and then along avenues…

I never save anything—or rather I save lots of stuff that I don't want while I throw away an equivalent amount of stuff that someday I will. Improbably I've saved a sheaf of letters I got from Florence King, the great journalist and memoirist, and when I heard the other evening that she'd died, at…

In the city where I live, one of the pop music radio stations shifts to an all-Christmas music format beginning in .  .  . oh, I don't know, late August?

"Some idiot just flew his plane into the World Trade Center," a friend told me over the phone, so I turned on the TV in time to see the second plane go into the south tower, and I watched the TV more or less constantly until late in the afternoon, when I took a break for a couple of hours before…

This article originally appeared in the February 4, 2008 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD and is being published today in memory of Fred Thompson who passed away Sunday.

One morning in August, the social science reporter for National Public Radio, a man named Shankar Vedantam, sounded a little shellshocked. You couldn’t blame him. 

The conservative movement, along with numberless friends of every political coloration, lost a stalwart this weekend when John Von Kannon died, after a long wrestling match with cancer. Most of those friends knew him as “Baron,” though when he was mentioned in the third person, the definitive…

Like Lazarus, or maybe Frankenstein’s monster, the appalling plan for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., appears to be sputtering to life once more. Only two months ago it seemed safely kaput. 

‘It’s as if he never existed,” a friend of a certain age (same as mine) said to me not long ago. He was referring to William F. Buckley Jr. When he died in 2008, at age 82, Buckley was eulogized as the most consequential American journalist of the second half of the last century: editor for 35…

Whenever the annual Clinton Global Initiative convenes, as it did in Denver last month, and I watch the billionaires and their hired policy experts rearing up to compliment one another for their plans to bring our troubled species ever closer to perfection, my mind detaches itself from the windy…

When news broke this spring about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s appetite for other people’s money and their indifference to other people’s rules, I was rereading my way through a shelf of old Hillary biographies. My memory thus was doubly stimulated. In the fresh revelations, as in the books, the…

When a new study came out late last year proving​—​scientifically!​—​how easy it is to turn opponents of gay marriage into supporters, the political scientist Andrew Gelman managed to summarize his reaction in a single unscientific word: “Wow!”

Nowadays when you mention the book Profiles in Character to Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida and, as it happens, the coauthor of Profiles in Character, he immediately cracks wise.

Des Moines

Boy, that didn’t take long. Over the span of a few short days in late January and early February, three members of the top tier of Republican presidential candidates demonstrated why they’ll never be president. They didn’t do anything to disqualify themselves directly, just revealed the traits that…

Like all charming and physically imposing persons, Ben Bradlee had an enormous head.

Cambridge, U.K.

As far as newspaper corrections go, it was a whopper. On August 24, the editors of the New York Times sucked the air out of a windy essay that had blown through its pages a few days before. The original article bore the headline “Generation Nice.” It was adorned with color photos of fresh-faced…

Teaneck, N.J.

You don’t have to be an Eisenhower Memorial groupie—yes, there are such people—to enjoy a new 56-page congressional report called “A Five-Star Folly.” But it helps. The mound of detail will bury all but the sturdiest student of what is shaping up to be one of the most memorable Washington fiascoes…

It wasn’t so long ago that visitors to the National Archives, in Washington, D.C., were expected to ascend. A trip to see the nation’s founding documents was an uplifting experience, literally. A broad flight of stone steps drew visitors up from the summer glare and clamor of Constitution Avenue to…

It has been five years now since America got the news, or was supposed to: Henceforth our children would enjoy a revolutionary new approach to learning in the public schools, in the form of national educational standards. They’re called the Common Core State Standards, or Common Core for short—or…

You can tell George Will is a serious baseball fan because—I wish I could find another way to put this—he is serious about baseball. The statement isn’t (quite!) as fatuous as it sounds. Lots of people who profess their love of baseball are mere romantics and mythologists. They’ll well up at the…

Was Andrew Wyeth so celebrated because he was so misunderstood, or did it work the other way around? His reputation seems ill-fitting, whether you consider him one of the great American painters of the last century, as many laymen and a few professionals do, or a kitsch monger and conman, as many…

A raft of new Education Department regulations has been bobbing among the roiling waters of American higher education for nearly a month now, and perhaps the most sensible reaction to the controversy comes from Sen. Lamar Alexander—a former governor, college president, and secretary of education.…

The tangled tale of the proposed Eisenhower Memorial next to the National Mall in Washington gets more complicated by the week. On April 3, the National Capital Planning Commission stunned just about everybody by rejecting the memorial design submitted by “celebrity architect” Frank Gehry and…

It's hard to find nice things to say about economists. Their detachment from the real world of human activity is matched only by their enormous influence over it, and by their unearned assumption that this arrangement is well deserved. That all changed last month, however. Now we can say something…

Partly because I’m a guy, partly because my professor insisted on holding our Feminism and Culture class at 8 a.m., making it impossible for me to attend, I find myself now, decades later, far behind the curve of gender empowerment. The curve is shifting heavily to the distaff side. Can I still say…

For reasons too boring to go into, I have recently inherited custodial duties of the family dog. When Buster first arrived, more than a decade ago, we spent a fair amount of time together. I took responsibility for training him with a rigorous program lasting several weeks. To this day, if you ask…

Herblock: The Black & the White, a documentary about the editorial cartoonist Herbert Block, had its cable premiere on HBO last week, and we can expect repeated showings for many weeks to come, creating a low-buzz Herblockfest interspersed dizzily among re-airings of Girls. 

It's been more than a week now and I’m beginning to suspect she’s not going to call, so here I will offer Janet Yellen the advice I’ve been hoping to give her privately since the Senate confirmed her as the new chairman of the Federal Reserve. My advice is: Think about John Cowperthwaite. By this I…

One golden autumn morning 100 years ago, a few blocks from where I’m writing these words in northwest Washington, D.C., Ambrose Bierce said goodbye to his secretary, turned the key in the door to his apartment on Logan Circle, and went off to God knows where.

Everybody has an opinion about the pope these days and, what’s worse, feels compelled to express it. Rush Limbaugh has an opinion about the pope. He says he finds the pope “upsetting.” And he’s not even Catholic!

Stephen Jimenez sounds remarkably chipper on the phone when he calls in from Portland, his thirteenth city on a seemingly endless book tour. He’s plugging The Book of Matt, and the reason he’s chipper is that he hasn’t been burned in effigy, yet, or heckled mercilessly, yet, or denounced, at least…

Several times a day, especially if he’s out travelin’ and talkin’ to folks, as he always is when the U.S. Senate isn’t in session, Ted Cruz will stand before an audience and reflect, seemingly for the first time, about the generational shift taking place in the Republican party. 

I'm showing my age again, but I can remember, just barely, when we had the war between men and women. Not a war, but the war: eternal and (of course) metaphorical, a fight without massed ranks of infantry or elaborate flanking maneuvers or formal parleys among belligerents. The opening salvo dated…

It's a thankless job, being a political aide. Your every prerogative and responsibility derives like planetary light from the combustion of your supernova, the Great Man or Woman who has brought you into his (or her!) orbit and whose gravitational field guides and sustains you. The connection isn’t…

The beleaguered Eisenhower Memorial Commission holds its next public gathering later this month, and before its members duck-walk into the hearing room, huddled in a hoplite phalanx against a shower of eggs and rotten vegetables unloosed by an audience of neo-classicist fuddy-duddies, they should…

The workings of Washington sometimes attain a kind of purity in their illogic. This happens most often after a particularly jarring event, when the frenzy to do something, anything, becomes irresistible to the beehiving journalists, legislators, lobbyists, and regulators who constitute the…

Oral arguments on gay marriage take place before the Supreme Court the last week of March, and the pile of amicus briefs filed by interested parties long ago passed the point of redundancy. We prefer briefs filed by disinterested parties, such as the one put before the Court earlier in the month by…

Last fall, a few days before Halloween and about a month after the publication of Mind and Cosmos, the controversial new book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, several of the world’s leading philosophers gathered with a group of cutting-edge scientists in the conference room of a charming inn in the…

Many, many thoughts crossed my mind as Richard Blanco finished reading his inaugural poem at President Obama’s swearing-in last week. Well, I guess it could have been worse was not one of them. But now I know: It could have been worse.

Ken Myers grew up in a conservative Christian household in Beltsville, Maryland, during the 1960s. When he was in tenth grade, two important things happened to him.

Twenty years ago an editor for the Chicago Sun-Times told Neil Steinberg—at the time a young reporter for the paper—that he might someday become the next Sydney J. Harris, and Steinberg, for reasons unclear, did not punch him in the kneecaps. Harris was dead by then, but from the 1950s to the 1980s…

A dedicated libertarian, William Niskanen was also a dedicated pot-stirrer. For him the two vocations—pressing the case for small government and, at least intellectually, making trouble—were inseparable. He was best known as an original member of Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, one of…

The news readers from NPR were mum-mum-mumbling in the background the other morning as I was putt-putt-puttering around the house when .  .  . all of a sudden .  .  . running counter to every fiber of my being .  .  . pulling against my every natural inclination .  .  . I began to pay attention!…

A website called 90days90reasons.com went online this summer, after the writer Dave Eggers got worried about the diminishing enthusiasm for Barack Obama among people like him. Eggers is a hipster, I guess you’d call him. He lives in San Francisco. He’s best known as the author of A Heartbreaking…

Journalists often play dumb as a way of drawing information from a reluctant source. But they are just as quick to act smart—to assume an air of authority over a topic with which they have been only briefly acquainted. Michael Lewis, the financial journalist and author of many bestsellers, is now…

Did you know that bitching about President Obama is now considered a “tradition” among liberals? It is. Things move so fast with those guys. One person has a gripe, another person chimes in, a third grouses about this or that, and the next thing you know—it’s a “tradition.” Very progressive.

Now that he’s officially the Republican nominee for president and has an excellent chance of becoming the most powerful man in the world, I feel free to admit, in the full knowledge that nobody cares, that I never liked Mitt Romney. My distaste for him isn’t merely personal or political but also…

There’s a DVD that’s been sitting in its jewel box on my desk for a few years (I’ve been busy​—​no time to tidy up), and the other day, after reading through two brand-new books about Barack Obama, one admiring, the other ferociously disapproving, I snapped the cellophane at last and slid the disk…

We were struck last week by a pair of instances of Republicans doing what Republicans do—one encouraging, one not so much. On the encouraging side, we had Sen. Tom Coburn, who never fails to lift a faltering conservative heart. He gave an interview to a blogger for the Washington Post, though we…

We are entering the age of the psychopundit (we can thank the science writer Will Saletan for this excellent word). Thomas Edsall, for example, is a veteran political reporter widely admired by people who admire political reporters. He has become very excited by social science, as so many widely…

He had gone public with his ideas. He had written a book​—​difficult but popular​—​a spirited, intelligent, warlike book, and it had sold and was still selling in both hemispheres and on both sides of the equator. The thing had been done quickly but in real earnest: no cheap concessions, no…

On the list of the world’s most unnecessary occupations—aromatherapist, golf pro, journalism professor, vice president of the United States​—​that of medical ethicist ranks very high. They are happily employed by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other outposts of the vast medical-industrial…

The aging fops and dandies who edit Esquire magazine—yes, it still comes out, check a newsstand if you don’t believe me—devoted a chunk of their issue this month to Bill Clinton. It was an unusual move. Typically, under the motto “Man at His Best,” the editors concentrate their attention on those…

To the long list of constituencies at whom President Obama is righteously cheesed off​—​millionaires, billionaires, international terrorists, those sorts of people​—​we may now add the bursars of America’s colleges and universities. He devoted a passage of his State of the Union address last week…

We have good news for all you skeptics who’ve been wondering whether you should trust the gossipy stories in the new book The Obamas: You can stop worrying. The author of the book, which was published to much hoo-ha this month, is a journalist named Jodi Kantor, and here’s what I read about her…

After he almost won the Iowa caucuses earlier this month, Rick Santorum was instantly dubbed a “Washington outsider,” even an “antiestablishment candidate.” It was a convenient tag that made it easier for reporters to keep all these strange Republicans straight: Newt Gingrich, Washington insider;…

If I thought of Dwight Macdonald every time I came across a PBS pledge drive, I would think of Dwight Macdonald much more often than I do. But I do think of him now and then, and the pledge drive is usually the occasion for it. When America stares wide-eyed as its intellectual public TV network…

Is it possible that the people who run the Obama administration aren’t as smart as we’ve been led to believe?

Lots of cultural writing these days, in books and magazines and newspapers, relies on the so-called Chump Effect. The Effect is defined by its discoverer, me, as the eagerness of laymen and journalists to swallow whole the claims made by social scientists. Entire journalistic enterprises, whole…

As a reader who has compulsively consumed the ever-expanding body of Beatles literature for 40 years, I have trouble picking out a favorite anecdote or most memorable quote. Is it John’s “If there is such a thing as a genius, I am one”? Or the note Paul sent John one day in the waning days of the…

Is there a more empathetic person in the world than Diane Sawyer, the top newsreader at ABC TV? I’m sure there must be—around seven billion of them, probably. But is there anyone who looks more empathetic than Diane Sawyer? Not a chance. When she peers at you through the camera she has the look of…

If you want a glimpse of the way Rick Perry operates as an executive and a politician, consider the issue of higher education reform in Texas, which no one in Texas knew was an issue until Perry decided to make it one.

Charleston, S.C.

Among the many surprises of Barack Obama’s presidency, perhaps the most unexpected have been his appointments to the federal government’s egghead agencies—the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Even his ardent admirers might admit that the current…

Covering political campaigns can be a dull, remorseless duty, but at least the reporters who gathered in Liberty State Park, New Jersey, on June 21 to see Jon Huntsman announce his presidential candidacy have this compensation: Someday they’ll be able to chuck their grandchildren under the chin and…

If I were smarter than I am I might be able to argue myself into believing that there’s hope for the Washington Nationals. If I were more realistic than I am I would define “hope” downward to mean merely the possibility, however remote, that the team could win almost as many games as they lose this…

As with Christmas form letters and amateur poetry, I don’t take kindly to friends sticking books in my hand that lie outside my areas of interest, then insisting that I must read them. When one recently did just that with Born to Run, it was nearly cause for excommunication. Sure, I subscribe to…

Santa Monica

Book of the Week

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, stop whatever irrelevant busywork you're engaged in and take a moment -- well, half an hour -- to read one of the greatest of presidential utterances. If your busywork won't wait half an hour, skip to the last paragraph. It's…

“On the first nine levels, Reagan is the least interesting of men. But if you postulate a tenth level, then he’s suddenly fascinating.”

How not to understand Obama

So maybe Americans aren’t so different from Europeans after all? If you read a lot of the opinion press—poor lamb—you might be getting the idea that we’re all social democrats now. This would be sad news for Republicans. 

It’s starting to dawn on me that my personal campaign to eliminate the use of the word issue to mean difficulty, misapprehension, disturbance, irritation, objection, and a dozen unrelated words is doomed. My parallel campaign against reaching out is probably in trouble too. Reach out is a cant…

You can never be sure when or why one industry or another will draw the attention of the Mr. Fixits of our federal government. Just imagine: There you are, Mr. or Ms. Businessperson, walking along, making money, minding your own business, and then wham: They pop up out of nowhere, wheeling around…

Before Scott Brown rudely burst in with those big burly biceps of his, the attention of Washington’s political professionals had been fixed for ten days on Game Change, the new book about the 2008 presidential campaign. Think of it: ten days. In excitable, ADHD Washington, where the Internet…

"America is grateful to Brian Lamb,” said President Bush a couple of years ago, when he awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to the founder and CEO of C-SPAN. The network Lamb founded more than 30 years ago may be the greatest boon to American…

Almost all presidential speeches are too long, and President Obama could have shaved 60 percent from his address tonight, since he had approximately 15 minutes of content stretched over 35 minutes of talking. The excess came in platitudes about the economy, his own irenic intentions, and much else.…

He is one of the great artists of the century. --Andrew Motion, England's poet laureate, 2000

I read that the moviemaker Ken Burns spent six years filming his new PBS documentary, which is roughly twice as long as it takes to sit through it. I started to watch it last week but lost interest pretty quickly and moved on to other things. For all I know it's still on. Every time I wander by the…

In his speech to the United Nations last week, President Obama really broke the presidential pattern. At a glance these annual turns before the General Assembly are all alike. The president stands alone, dwarfed by the absurdly outsized dais angled together from blue-green granite, while the…

"Oh my," said Dorothy Gale, waving off the candy-colored cloud that trailed some departing witch, "people come and go so quickly here." As it was in Munchkinland, so it is in Washington, D.C. Less than a month has gone by since the death--I guess we're supposed to say "passing" nowadays--of Edward…

The House Committee on Education and Labor is having a busy summer. (Everybody in Washington is having a busy summer!) Earlier this month, for example, one of its essential subunits--the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education and Healthy Families and Communities, or…

Renegade

I looked for them--looked hard--but I don't think Jon Meacham or Maureen Dowd made it to the gala dinner last week where Helen Thomas gave Katie Couric the Helen Thomas Award for Excellence in Journalism. They should have been there. Everybody else was, it seemed. And we deserved a gala.…

William Strunk and E. B. White's Elements of Style turned 50 last month, and the most interesting thing about the anniversary, which came and went with a smattering of notices and a chinpull here and there, was what it revealed about the book's reputation. Half a century into its reign as the…

One Saturday morning this month, a quarter million kids or more will slump their way into the fluorescent tomb of a high school classroom, slide into the seat of a flimsy polypropylene combo chair-desk, and then, with clammy palms dampening the shafts of perfectly sharpened number two pencils, they…

A. Lincoln

In the long, long list of presidential directives that President Obama handed down to his countrymen in his televised Day of Reckoning speech last week, one was more far-reaching than it appeared at first glance. "Tonight," he said, "I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of…

The most surprising thing about the recent revelations concerning Bill Moyers is that anyone should be surprised. For those of us who care--and those of us who care, care deeply--detailed accounts of Moyers's career as a political bottom-feeder have been publicly available since the mid-1970s.

Chris Myers Asch, who came up with the idea, says the U.S. Public Service Academy would be just like a military academy, "but without the guns." If you too can imagine such a mind-bending concept--a bull without horns, a sow without teats--then this, as the president says, is your moment; now is…

The best store in Washington recently changed its name from the P&D Souvenir Factory to the classier-sounding Obama Biden Collectible Merchandises. The ex-P&D is on Tenth Street N.W., next door to the Peterson House, where Abraham Lincoln--remembered today as one of Barack Obama's big…

On December 15, the city council of Binghamton, New York--every member a proud progressive--unanimously passed an ordinance making it a crime to discriminate against fat people. The next day, David Paterson, the famously progressive governor of New York, proposed a special "fat tax" on soda pop…

The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, which squats like an immense, unopened crate of machine parts on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., closed its doors for a two-year renovation in September 2006, and here's the interesting thing: Hardly anybody seemed to notice,…

"To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn--I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too."

It was a bright, breezy morning of drifting sunlight and chorusing birds, so I decided to ruin it by taking the SAT. The SAT used to be the Scholastic Aptitude Test. In the early 1990s, at the height of political correctness, the name was changed to Scholastic Assessment Test, "aptitude" having…

Maybe you've noticed: These political blogs can be so gabby. Yap yap yap. You go to some website--democretin.com, republicreep.net, whatever--and there will be a new post for you to read, and the blogger goes on for one, two, sometimes three paragraphs, and each paragraph is a huge heap of…

Time magazine, the superannuated newsweekly, seems to reinvent itself every few years with slackening energy, in one vain attempt after another to postpone its inevitable, rapidly approaching, and much-anticipated demise. Its most recent incarnation has largely dispensed with the snoozy business of…

In the Shadow of Progress

"When I think of California, I like to believe that WE [sic] are one big family," says Maria Shriver. She is the state's first lady and wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the beefcake governor who is expected to do another of his star turns at the Republican convention this week. Maria has acted on…

Anyone who wants to understand Barack Obama would do well to stay away from the radio and the TV. Obama is a theatrical presence. That's what it means to be "charismatic": To an unnerving degree his appeal relies on sight and sound rather than sense. Better, in my opinion, to stick to the printed…

Former Texas senator Phil Gramm ran for president in 1996. He raised $20 million, spent nearly all of it, and won zero delegates. Political observers had long thought such a feat was impossible, and it remains astonishing even in hindsight. Recently we were reminded how he managed to pull it off.

Oh, terrific. Now we have two of them--two presidential candidates, presumptive nominees of their respective parties, who insist they will not rest until they have inspired all of us stick-in-the-mud Americans to reach celestial heights of personal fulfillment by committing ourselves to a life of…

I was with my kids at Zuma beach, in Malibu. It was night. We were alone. A full moon had risen over the Pacific. As far as you could see into a scrim of mist and scattered light, a succession of breakers rolled up the beach, cresting and cresting again, throwing crowns of silvery foam before them,…

Hyde Park, Chicago

I 've been wondering: Can you push back if you're reaching out? It seems impossible, doesn't it? How about if you're going forward? Pushing back while you're going forward would probably make it impossible to reach out, especially if you're pivoting at the same time. But that's how things are in…

If Walter Cronkite's mom was going to put together a scrapbook of her son's career--well, it would be a miracle, because she'd be about 125 years old by now. But if she did, I doubt that it would contain more admiring images of the former CBS newsreader than you'll find in the Newseum, the new…

There's still room for whimsy at the New Yorker magazine, I don't care what you've heard. Just the other day two of the New Yorker's bloggers (now there's a phrase to send Harold Ross spinning) were chewing over the widely noted eloquence of Barack Obama. They were struck by "Obama's wonderful…

I came to him when I was still a teenager, through television. You might be surprised at how many people found him this way. He published millions of words of commentary and rumination, on a startling range of subjects, in high-circulation newspapers and the slickest magazines. He pulled off a…

You probably have your own favorite, which is fine, but for my money the most revealing moment of the presidential campaign (so far!) came during the last debate among the Republican candidates, on January 24. Ron Paul briefly alighted on our fragile planet and challenged John McCain, if elected,…

For history buffs, there's something about banisters. I don't know what it is. But whenever I tour a historic house--Mount Vernon, Lincoln's home in Springfield, Madison's Montpelier--sooner or later there's a flight of stairs to climb and somebody always asks about the banister.

In his recent memoir, Alan Greenspan says he's been pushing a constitutional amendment of his own devising. It reads: "Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office." If the Greenspan amendment is ever enacted, it will at…

"Your torch has been lit!" read the email I got last summer. And now my torch has guttered out! Yours too, maybe.

It began with a trickle. That's why I didn't notice anything at first.

On December 19, President Bush signed an energy bill that will, among many, many other things, force you to buy a new kind of light bulb. He did this because environmental enthusiasts don't like the light bulbs you're using now. He and they reason, therefore, that you shouldn't be allowed to have…

Okay, if he won't mention it, I will: The year just ending marks the 25th anniversary of The McLaughlin Group, the landmark public affairs TV show founded by John McLaughlin. It's odd that McLaughlin himself hasn't made a bigger deal of it. A shameless showman, he's celebrated his earlier…

Promises to Keep

The Age of Turbulence

Like a lot of you, I wasn't able to make it to Liverpool for International Beatles Week this August, though I hear it was fab; indeed, gear. In consolation I bought myself a pass to the annual Fest for Beatles Fans held outside Chicago, at the O'Hare Hyatt, in Rosemont, Illinois--a site less…

There used to be a lot of school kids crowding the Surratt House Museum in Clinton, Maryland, a few miles south of Washington. Their teachers would haul them in by the busload--more than a thousand a year. The museum is housed in the homestead of one of the conspirators who was hanged for the…

In 1917 and 1918, while World War I raged across Europe, the citizens of Kansas City, Missouri, raised more than $2 million to support the war effort. Bad luck, though: The horrific slaughter ended too soon to disburse the money.

"You ought to talk to your publisher," said the radio host. "They're really overselling you."

According to writers with a weakness for self-pity--which is to say, writers--writing a book is a dispiriting, unhappy enterprise. "No one who ever did it would willingly go through it again," said George Orwell, who nevertheless managed to get out eight books before the last one finished him off…

"Astonishing," said a friend of mine--like me, a former smoker who holds only fond memories of our old habit, along with the occasional tug of nostalgic yearning. He had just seen the news last week that movies featuring characters who smoke will risk a more restrictive rating, from PG-13 to R, for…

They only had two and a half hours to settle some knotty questions--Does reality have an ultimate, metaphysical foundation? Is there content to the universe?--so they had to talk fast. But not fast enough. By the time the formidable panel discussion was over last week, I, as a member of the…

Not long after I came to Wash ington to work as a junior editorial flunky, I went to a cocktail party at a think tank. (Attending cocktail parties at think tanks, I thought then, was one of the great perks of my job, which tells you all you need to know about the life of a junior editorial flunky.)…

Washington

Dreams from My Father

Tuesday, January 2, 2007, 12:30 P.M.

AT LEAST you have to give John Fortier credit for trying. Last week, while every other political scientist and scandal-sniffing, goo-goo reformer was lamenting run-of-the-mill Election-Day difficulties--long lines, hiccuppy voting machines, bullying and incompetent poll workers--Fortier was trying…

The culture so dramatically symbolized by the Southern redneck [is] the greatest inhibitor of the plans of the activist Left and the cultural Marxists for a new kind of society altogether. From the perspective of the activist Left, [rednecks] are the greatest obstacles to what might be called the…

The movie star Warren Beatty, like so many people these days, is getting old, and with the hot breath of mortality on the back of his wattled neck he has undertaken the large project of reclaiming his reputation as a maker of movies. And not a moment too soon, either. Beatty's last several pictures…

Fields of Honor

NOTICE: The material in this "Casual" (COLUMN) has been prepared by an individual or individuals (referred to hereafter as PREPARER) in the employ of THE WEEKLY STANDARD magazine LLC (MAGAZINE) and not by MAGAZINE itself. COLUMN therefore does not constitute work product transferable for any…

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…

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…

EXTRAVAGANCE OF LANGUAGE, SWELLING sometimes to full-throated verbal hysteria, is a defining quality of today's politics. Even so, we confess to being surprised at the cascades of abuse that have recently fallen about the ears of Kenneth Tomlinson, the chairman of the Corporation for Public…

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,…

Springfield, Illinois

The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy

I AM AN AMERICAN, Hinsdale-born--Hinsdale, that lily-white suburb. It lies twenty miles west of Chicago, on the old Burlington commuter line, along which trains stop every twenty minutes or so during evening rush hour, coming to rest at Victorian stations with gingerbread trim to unloose a string…

San Francisco

CONSERVATIVES FROM ALL OVER DESCENDED upon the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on the evening of February 16 to witness a gala celebration marking the second annual Bradley prizes. As it happened, only a few weeks before, the newspaper Crain's Chicago Business published an eye-opening report on…

ON THE EVENING OF FEBRUARY 10, the board of directors of WETA-FM, the only commercial-free classical music station in Washington, D.C., voted overwhelmingly to eliminate its music and arts programming. At the end of this month, someone will flick a switch and--thud!--WETA will fall to earth as just…

LIKE AN IDIOT, I once took a break from the journalism business and spent a year writing presidential speeches. I wrote talking points for the annual Thanksgiving Day Turkey Pardon, a couple of commencement addresses, and long, meaty disquisitions on fiscal policy, regulatory reform, the health…

DISCOUNTING FOR AN UNDERWATER EARTHQUAKE that sent 40-foot-high waves traveling thousands of miles across the open sea to inflict death and destruction on an unimaginable scale, it was kind of a sleepy holiday for the Washington political community, newswise. So you can understand the titillation…

IN HONOR OF THE TENTH anniversary of the fabled Republican Revolution--for precisely a decade has flown by since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, following forty years of Democratic darkness--let us pause from our noise-making and silly-hat-wearing to ponder the story of…

"Always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself." --Michael Moore WAIT. I'm wrong. Michael Moore didn't say that. (Where's that fact-checker?) No, it was Richard…

Austin

The Family

ACCORDING TO a monograph I read a while back, called "The Rise and Fall of the Televised Political Convention," television networks used to cover political conventions for 10 hours a day, sometimes more. Then they gave up, and you can't really blame them. The all-news cable channels, it was…

FOR THE PAST couple weeks Republican activists have bent themselves to the task of proving that John Kerry, who was awarded five medals during four months of service in the Vietnam war, isn't a war hero, and the marvelous intensity of their exertions started me thinking.

Arlington, Virginia

Why Lincoln Matters

MY FAVORITE BOOK TITLE of all time is Sukarno: An Autobiography As Told To Cindy Adams, which was published by Bobbs-Merrill in the 1960s and later, so I've heard, reissued as Me and Sukarno by Cindy Adams. Not even Sukarno and Me. Ms. Adams, of course, is as highly respected a gossip columnist as…

IF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BLACKSMITHS AND BUGGYWHIP MANUFACTURERS had held a convention in 1910, in those last sullen moments before the Horseless Carriage put them all out of business, then this is what it must have felt like--the same forced cheerfulness laid over the same defeated air, the…

EVEN THOUGH ROUGH WINDS do shake the darling buds thereof, I think we can all agree that May is a fabulous month, flush and lusty as the poets say, a time to gather knots of flowers, and buds and garlands gay. It is the month above all of Mother's Day, made doubly so by the decision of the United…

WASHINGTON WENT THROUGH one of its Woodward spasms last week. It unwound in the usual manner. First came the faint, premonitory rumors, gaining force as the publishing date approached, about what might be in Bob Woodward's latest book; then the suggestive news reports dribbled out over the premiere…

"A MILCH COW with 125 million teats" is how H.L. Mencken once described the United States government, but that was 70 years and 165 million teats ago. And anyway, I think he might have been wrong. Back in Mencken's day it was still possible to imagine an American citizen who had not yet affixed…

Things Worth Fighting For

WE DIDN'T ARRIVE here overnight, all at once--here at the tail end of this hallucinatory primary season, when politics slipped down the rabbit hole of postmodernism and became an activity that is only about itself. Scanning back through the last few years and my own meager experience, I can find…

I LIKE DOGS in the abstract, as a class. I like dog-lovers, too, and think them superior to other men, because I admire their capacity for fellow feeling and their willingness to claim the mantle of stewardship to which all of us are called, so the Bible says. I like movies about dogs. I can watch…

Tour of Duty

Greenville, South Carolina

Eugene McCarthy

1.

7.

4.

Had Enough?

One-Car Caravan

I DIDN'T SEE the big debate among the Democratic presidential candidates last Thursday night, held on a college campus in lower Manhattan, but I did read a transcript. I read every syllable, dammit. It came to more than 20,000 words. And such words! Reading my way through, I was struck again by the…

I WAS OUT OF TOWN on a reporting trip a couple months ago, hanging around with a group of people I thought might make a good story. They had gathered near dawn on a bluff by a river. It was a striking site and I wanted to record its details in my notebook, as a way of splashing a little color into…

Scotty James B. Reston and the Rise and Fall of American Journalism by John F. Stacks Little, Brown, 372 pp., $29.95 JOURNALISM is a character defect. I think most non-journalists would agree with this. It is life lived at a safe remove: standing off to one side of the parade as it passes, noting…

WE LIVE IN A FREE COUNTRY, thank God, so we are each of us entitled to celebrate Richard Nixon's birthday in our own way. Out in Yorba Linda, California, at the Nixon Library & Birthplace, the hardiest of the nation's merry-makers assembled on January 9 to toast the former president's 90th birthday…

I

Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity The Challenge for Bioethics by Leon R. Kass Encounter, 313 pp., $26.95 WE LIVE in a very rich country (in case you hadn't noticed), and from the heaping surplus of our prosperity we have carved a number of professions that--to put it as kindly as…

WHEN THE President's Council on Bioethics released its report on cloning last Thursday morning, in a gilded meeting room at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Washington, Sean Tipton made himself available to reporters in a hallway outside. But he wasn't sure whether he should be upset. "Let's be clear…

I ONCE LIVED across the street from Mr. Perfect. That wasn't his real name, of course. I don't think I ever knew his name. I called him Mr. Perfect because of his yard. I had moved from an apartment in the city to a house in the suburbs, and Mr. Perfect's yard was just the kind of thing a man used…

THE PRESIDENT'S COUNCIL ON Bioethics began its first public session on January 17, in a dreary ballroom of the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel, a pre-postmodern pile of orange stucco set astride an expressway off-ramp in southwest Washington, D.C. Leon Kass, the University of Chicago bioethicist selected by…

[img nocaption float="right" width="144" height="194" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8795[/img]Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse Overlook, 224 pp., $ 15.95 The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse Overlook, 220 pp., $ 15.95 Pigs Have Wings by P. G. Wodehouse Overlook, 230 pp., $ 15.95…

IN HER RECENT not-quite-a-memoir, "An Old Wife's Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War," the great social critic Midge Decter gives an episodic account of her life as a New York intellectual and devotes more space, as it turns out, to discussing her children than her books. What kind of social…

I WAS SURPRISED TO READ in the newspaper the other day that the movie star Russell Crowe has just concluded a month-long tour with his rock ’n’ roll band, a group of Australians called "30 Odd Foot of Grunts." I was surprised for reasons that had nothing to do with the stupid name. I didn’t know…

ONCE AGAIN, The Very Hungry Caterpillar has wormed its way into the news. Rousing himself from the sweltering torpor of his Texas vacation, President Bush earlier this month made his customary visitations to a classroom or two, where TV cameras as usual recorded him perched before an array of…

OFFICIAL WASHINGTON is a city of the sly evasion, the artful misdirection—spin, we like to call it—but seldom of the outright misstatement. You don’t often see a public official rise in his official capacity to make an official statement that is flatly, demonstrably, unmistakably contrary to the…

IF EPISCOPALIANS DREAM OF PRETTY CHURCHES-and believe me, they do-then one of the pretty churches they dream about is Christ Church, in Accokeek, Maryland, 20 miles south of Washington, D.C. Built during the Revolution and renovated before the Civil War, it stands today in a grove of towering…

THE JUNE ISSUE OF THE NEW CRITERION arrived last week, and I can’t tell you just how really, truly . . . ambivalent I am about that. It looks, once again, like a wonderful issue. It includes a review by Mark Steyn of The Producers, and a long essay on journal-writing by Joseph Epstein. There’s a…

ONE MARK OF A SON OF A BITCH is the pleasure he takes in pointing out how many people think he's a son of a bitch. By this measure, to judge by his new memoir Staying Tuned, the former CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr is one first-rate, top-of-the-line, gold-plated -- but let him tell it.…

DAVID SATCHER, the United States surgeon general, has another ten months to serve in his term, and President Bush has said he'll let this particular Clinton appointee -- by all accounts a competent and inoffensive public servant -- run out the clock. Even so, all of Washington has been buzzing…

THE SOPRANOS airs the fourth, or maybe the fifth, episode of its television season this Sunday. Or is it the sixth? It's very hard to keep track. In any case, the show is still sailing along on an updraft of favorable publicity that is extraordinary even by the standards of television, where…

It's become commonplace to point out that of modernity's three most influential thinkers -- Marx, Freud, and Darwin -- only Darwin enters the twenty-first century with his reputation intact. But Darwin has troubles of his own. The troubles come not only from the right, where creationists and other…

To THE SURPRISE of everyone but his speechwriters, George W. Bush has shown in the last seven weeks that he's a president who can rise verbally to the occasion, having delivered an extravagantly praised inaugural address and then a well-turned speech to Congress last month. But the note he struck…

Reagan, In His Own Hand

Editor's note: A look back at President Reagan, from the February 5, 2001 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

THERE'S A STORE in the wealthy Washington suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, that calls itself "Three Dog Bakery." I read about it the other day. In addition to offering "pooch pretzels," "mini beagles," and other "all-natural pet pastries," it throws birthday parties for dogs. Rich dog owners (I mean,…

"Kings live in park enclaves," Thomas Jefferson said, in one of his Jeffersonian moods, "presidents live on streets." Not nowadays. Nowadays the American president lives in a very nice house on a two-block stretch of abandoned roadway in downtown Washington, D.C., with imposing concrete blockades…

I could hardly wait to sit down and finally get to work writing this little essay -- the deadline is fast approaching and I have a delightful subject this week that I think you'll enjoy -- in fact it's the kind of small, delicate subject that a skilled writer likes to hold up to the light as he…

I could hardly wait to sit down and finally get to work writing this little essay -- the deadline is fast approaching and I have a delightful subject this week that I think you'll enjoy -- in fact it's the kind of small, delicate subject that a skilled writer likes to hold up to the light as he…

I could hardly wait to sit down and finally get to work writing this little essay -- the deadline is fast approaching and I have a delightful subject this week that I think you'll enjoy -- in fact it's the kind of small, delicate subject that a skilled writer likes to hold up to the light as he…

IT WAS THE DEFINING public policy dispute of the 1990s, and Andrew Card, president of the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, wanted to make sure his voice was heard. President Clinton had offered up his health care reform in late 1993, and by spring of the following year it was in…

Right Ho, Jeeves

Every few election years, some presidential candidate gets tagged as an intellectual. The evidence is usually thin. Adlai Stevenson claimed to write his own political addresses, and his speechwriters declined to contradict him. John F. Kennedy hired the diminutive Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to slip…

Burlington, Vermont

THE RECENT BICKERING over the role of religion in presidential politics -- brought on by a sudden and unexpected eruption of Bible-thumping from Sen. Joseph Lieberman -- has of course alarmed the enlightened classes. "I was appalled," read a typical letter last week to the Washington Post. "Mr.…

Carthage, Tenn.

The hell with journalistic objectively -- I'm a dot-com delegate to the 2000 Republican National Convention and proud of it. I think you should be too, by the way, but I'll get to that in a moment. Being a dot-com delegate is like being a real delegate but much better. You don't have to spend any…

Every American over the age of fifteen remembers Bob Hope, and I suppose everyone under the age of fifty remembers him in a particular way. We might see him in army helmet and flak jacket, waggling his golf club at the troops from a massive outdoor stage in Khe Sahn. Or maybe we can unspool a few…

How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace)

President Clinton isn't often asked about his impeachment these days, for many reasons -- the main one being, of course, that nobody cares about it. Another reason has to do with the president's own way of answering questions about unpleasant subjects, on those rare occasions when such questions…

The Operator

ALL OF US HERE in the vast media-politico-windbaggio-academic complex are feeling blue these days, and have been at least since early March, when it became clear that the presidential campaign had entered a period of quiescence from which it would not emerge for many months. If ever. Within the…

There was an uptick in the unemployment rate last week, which sent stock prices tumbling. Well, maybe I don't have that exactly right. I may have it backward -- there might have been a down-tick in the unemployment rate last week, which sent stock prices soaring. In any case, it was one or the…

Grand Rapids, Mich.

After New Hampshire, W. decides imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

PRESIDENT CLINTON gave his final State of the Union address last week. Watching it and then reading it, one couldn't help but recall that many, many years ago, in the dimly remembered recesses of time that historians call the pre-Clinton era, presidential speechwriters faced an annual dilemma.…

THE CAMPAIGN SEASON is young, so I could still be proved wrong, but for the moment this much seems likely: History will record that the most revolting moment of the election year came during a recent debate among the Republican presidential candidates, held in the otherwise inoffensive city of…

When a writer's imagination fails him, and he runs out of things to write about, he often turns to writing about writing. This explains the large number of books that have been produced over the years about the New Yorker magazine, most of them by former contributors who have pretty much played out…

THE GAME OF "GOTCHA," as we practitioners of gotcha journalism call our craft (we call it a "craft" too), is getting way out of hand, people now tend to agree. The turn in the road seems to have come with George W. Bush's famous interview several weeks ago with Andy Hiller, a "television…

In George W. Bush's autobiography A Charge to Keep, which arrived in bookstores last week, there is a photograph that reveals far more about the governor than the thousands of words that come before and after it. It shows Bush in the front row of Arlington Stadium in Arlington, Texas, chatting with…

Hampton, New Hampshire

Everyone who reads this marvelous memoir -- and it deserves to have many, many readers -- will have a favorite anecdote among the countless tales that Jack Germond piles up, so I might as well begin this review with mine.

Until fairly recently, my morning movements had a kind of ritualistic purity -- the quick, business-like ablutions while the household slept, then the quite descent to the dark kitchen to switch on the coffee marker, the brief detour to gather the newspapers from the front lawn, and then a quick…

It's hard to imagine a book more misconstrued than The Elements of Style, or a writer more misjudged than E. B. White, who co-wrote "the little book" with William Strunk Jr. This year is the centenary of White's birth, and looking through the handful of news articles that have marked the occasion I…

Belle Plaine, Iowa

WITH THE LONGUEURS OF SUMMER pleasingly upon us, the demand for beach reading is brisk, and so the Federal Trade Commission's Report to Congress: Cigar Sales and Advertising and Promotional Expenditures for Calendar Years 1996 and 1997 arrives just in time. The report was released last Thursday,…

The thing you have to understand about Nicole Kidman is, she's shy. Really shy. And private -- this is a woman who jealously guards her privacy, thank you very much. Her husband Tom Cruise is the exact same way. Sometimes, Nicole recently told an interviewer, Tom will go to party and just stand in…

Two things may be said right at the outset about Francis Fukuyama's new book, The Great Disruption. The first is that it is a learned and impressive work, ranging easily across disciplines, combining fact and argument in subtle and unexpected ways, in the much-praised manner of Fukuyama's two…

After several decades of planning, fund-raising, and other forms of bureaucratic back-and-forthing, the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden opened the other day on the Mall, across the street from the National Archives in our nation's capital. As art lovers know, Washington already had a…

The personal may not be the political, as the feminists used to say, but it's still true that the political is often purely personal. I once made the mistake of working for the federal government, and the only insight I took away from the year's unpleasantness was an understanding, small but…

THE LAST THING any of us has a right to expect from politicians is a dignified silence, and this is true even in the face of a transcendent horror like the murder of schoolchildren. But the initial reaction to the Littleton shootings was unexpectedly promising. "I don't know how you stop it," said…

People used to rag on poor Bob Dole -- the pre-Viagra Bob Dole -- for his verbal tics as a presidential candidate. For instance, he used to say "Whatever" whenever he was stumped for something to say, which was often. Another tic, on display hourly on the campaign trail, was "That's what it's all…

Davenport, Iowa

I was sitting in the Senate press gallery last Monday afternoon, waiting for the final day of the impeachment trial to begin, when suddenly the future became real to me -- the pall of the post-Lewinsky world. Before me lay a copy of Congress Daily, an indispensable, exhaustively reported,…

UNITED STATES CAPITOL, JAN. 14, 11:00 A.M.

THE CAPITOL, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18

RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, TUESDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 8

I'm not an expert in these matters, but here's my guess. Historians of the future will date the demise of conservatism in America to the summer of 1996, when it was revealed that the Clinton White House had obtained the secret FBI files of several hundred Republican politicos.

"Emotion is what life is all about for me," Tony Campolo has written, as if we couldn't have guessed. Though he is a large and consequential figure in evangelical circles, the wider world was unfamiliar with Campolo until September 11, when television cameras broadcast pictures of him wracked,…

Several commercial publishers have now come out with their own editions of the Starr Report, and none of the book covers contains blurbs. You can only wonder at the missed opportunity. The newspapers and magazines are chockfull of stirring possibilities. "It's raw!" -- Time. "Excruciatingly vivid!"…

Good thing the British novelist Kingsley Amis is dead, because I want to write about his sensibility -- just the kind of lit-crit buzzword that would have caused him to hurl this article across the room and denounce its writer as a F -- ING FOOL (his favorite epithet, always capitalized but without…

In this important and provocative new book, a respected college president looks at the crisis in American higher education, and if this sentence doesn't make you want to stop reading right now then there's something wrong with you. But wait. Josiah Bunting III is not an ordinary college president,…

AMERICAN JOURNALISM REACHED a landmark of sorts last month, and the moment shouldn't be allowed to pass without suitable fanfare, however tardy. On Late Edition, CNN's Sunday-morning political talk show, three of the show's regular panelists gathered as usual to chew over the week's news. The…

SHRINKS LIKE TO SPEAK OF "Stockholm Syndrome," to denote that scary psychological condition in which captives begin to "bond" -- another shrink term -- with their kidnappers. It is seen, for example, among battered wives, whose love for the men who abuse them may only deepen with time. "Why, if you…

The United States Senate in its infinite wisdom effectively killed federal tobacco legislation late on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 17, and an hour or two after the final vote, the bill's sponsor, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, was sitting in his office, looking happy.

WHEN THE NEWS BROKE THAT Johnny Chung had told Justice Department prosecutors he did indeed funnel Chinese government money to the Democrats during the 1996 elections, Sen. John McCain pounced on the story. "I think there's a number of people that owe Fred Thompson an apology," McCain said.

The East Building of the National Gallery of Art turns twenty on June 1, and in honor of the occasion let us throw caution to the winds and do something unheard of in a story about an art museum. Let us quote Jimmy Carter.

We all mark the arrival of spring in our own ways. For me, the season has officially sprung when the cherry blossoms bloom, George Will writes his first-of-the-year baseball column (like the cherry blossoms, he burst forth early this year), and I decide, on some happy, unexpected afternoon, to lift…

LAST WEEK I TOOK A TRIP BACK IN TIME -- way, way back, to the distant days when James Carville seemed a refreshing, colorful rustic instead of a sputtering psychotic. I rented The War Room, a documentary about the 1992 Clinton campaign, which made stars of Carville and his diminutive sidekick,…

Howard Kurtz

FINALLY! WE'RE TWO WEEKS INTO the most sordid presidential scandal in memory, and people have at last roused themselves to a state of moral indignation. A villain has been found -- a suitable target for ethical outrage. Is it the president who allegedly used the Oval Office to cheat on his wife…

JUDGED AS RHETORIC, STATE OF THE UNION addresses are always failures, and the great flopping mess that President Clinton dropped on a joint session of Congress last week was no different. Like all previous efforts in the form -- and indeed like his own presidency -- the speech was themeless,…

Lately I've been reading the new book from the always-discerning journalist Michael Fumento, an essay into the question of why Americans are such fatties. And we are, of course; even our foremost advocate of diet and exercise, Richard Simmons, is a fatty. Fumento's The Fat of the Land, published…

The year 1997 was a big one for Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at MIT and a celebrated popularizer of science. His most ambitious book so far, How the Mind Works, was published to enthusiastic reviews, which is good news for him. And he was accused of advocating infanticide, which is not.

The performance artist Anna Deavere Smith is the Walter Cronkite of the nineties, if you see what I mean. Of course, Walter Cronkite is the Walter Cronkite of the nineties, as he was of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. But as the great anchorman sails into the sunset, Smith is taking on…

Tom Wolfe wrote the first draft of his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine, in 1984 and 1985, and he was only halfway through before his story was, as the phrase goes, overtaken by events. Novels are not supposed to be overtaken by events, of course. We're used…

Let's stipulate right at the outset that there's no people like show people, but I don't think it's a news flash to point out, in addition, that show people are pretty dumb. They can be magnificent at dancing, singing, telling jokes, or emoting; wildly creative at lighting a tableau or making the…

Let's stipulate right at the outset that there's no people like show people, but I don't think it's a news flash to point out, in addition, that show people are pretty dumb. They can be magnificent at dancing, singing, telling jokes, or emoting; wildly creative at lighting a tableau or making the…

Tuesday, October 7

Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and one of the foremost "communications" advisers to Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, has just posted a bulletin to congressional Republicans. It is a 222-page bulletin, a bulletin with 24 chapters and six appendices. It comes in a three-ring binder as white as…

Tom Hiney

As a proud baby boomer I feel it is my right -- indeed my generational obligation -- to shove my personal tastes in music, food, and clothing down the throat of every person who has the misfortune to be either older or younger than I. This is what baby boomers do, what we are called to do. And so…

Tuesday, July 29

Tuesday, July 22

Tuesday, July 15

Tuesday, July 8

It is a curious way for an American hero to end a long career. But there it is: John Glenn -- decorated veteran of World War II and Korea, first American astronaut to orbit the earth, and for 22 years a popular senator from Ohio -- seems determined to spend his final days of public service…

EXCUSE ME FOR ASKING, but do you feel Bloated? Callous and Vain, perhaps? How about Schizo and Talky, Robotic and Obvious and Cutthroat? No? Not even the teensiest bit Powerless and Shortsighted? Then the patriotic editors of the New York Times Magazine have a simple question for you: You call…

John Kasich, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the primary architect of this spring's federal budget agreement, wants to talk off the record for a while. We're sitting in the living room of his small clapboard bungalow on a leafy street in Westerville, just outside Columbus, Ohio, and…

Rob Long

Alec Baldwin gets paid millions of dollars to be photographed having sex with his wife, Kim Basinger; he is, after all, a movie star, an artist who works in film. (See, for example, their movie The Getaway.) But he is also a man of substance, of strongly held political convictions, as the ever-…

In case you were wondering what he's been up to, Newt Gingrich has been thinking hard lately, and thinking large. In fact, he has been thinking about nothing less than how to "create a new vision for the Republican party," as he recently told several fellow Republicans. One fruit of all this…

First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

For many days leading up to its actual delivery, the White House staff took pains to keep a waiting nation informed of the president's preparations for his second inaugural address. The president, we were told, was drafting and re-drafting, night after sleepless night, greeting the dawn. He read…

Dick Morris

"You have to see it to believe it," said my wife. She had just returned from one of her trolling sessions at our nearby mall, and what I had to see to believe was a new restaurant -- a "theme restaurant," called Rainforest.

YOU REALLY DON'T WANT TO HEAR about this, and I don't blame you, but Lamar Alexander was in Washington last week, less than two weeks after Election Day. The former governor and presidential candidate was making the rounds, giving speeches, granting interviews, meeting with former and future…

Barring some unforeseen occurrence -- such as his staying alive for six more years -- this fall marks Strom Thurmond's last campaign. So let's get this over with right at the beginning:

It was one of the two or three oddest developments of the presidential campaign, if anyone is still keeping track Suddenly, sometime around mid- April, Bob Dole uncorked a new bit of rhetoric. "If something happened along the way," Dole announced at a campaign rally, "and you had to leave your…

Chicago

President Clinton has published a new book, Between Hope and History: Meeting America's Challenges for the 21st Century (Times Books, $ 16.95). By all accounts, it had a remarkably brief gestation, a few months from conception to birth. You can't blame him for wanting to get it out as quickly as…

As the presidential campaign enters its final phases, I'm struck by something I didn't expect to get struck by: Everybody likes Bob Dole!

WHO SAYS THE Republican congressional leadship is brain-dead? Well, sure, a lot of peoe do, but the point is: those people are wrong.

Journalists like to think of themselves as skeptics, but when it comes to their own trade they lean toward romance. TV journalists are especially susceptible, since their particular subclass of the profession, where the reach can be so vast, the depth so shallow, and the pay so large, carries with…

Journalists like to think of themselves as skeptics, but when it comes to their own trade they lean toward romance. TV journalists are especially susceptible, since their particular subclass of the profession, where the reach can be so vast, the depth so shallow, and the pay so large, carries with…

HERE IN WASHINGTON we mark life in weeks -- good weeks, bad weeks, weeks that end in a draw -- and when the Whitewater verdicts came down last Tuesday, everyone had to agree that the president was in for a bad week. Nothing could change that. A carload of Redskins cheerleaders could cruise up to…

HERE IN WASHINGTON we mark life in weeks -- good weeks, bad weeks, weeks that end in a draw -- and when the Whitewater verdicts came down last Tuesday, everyone had to agree that the president was in for a bad week. Nothing could change that. A carload of Redskins cheerleaders could cruise up to…

THE DAY AFTER BOB DOLE RESIGNED his Senate seat, he made his first post- resurrection campaign appearance, at a rally in Chicago. That evening in Washington I happened to be at a gathering of Republicans who could barely contain their delight. Conversations went like so:

The life of a United States senator was not so long ago thought to be a thrilling thing. Any teenaged visitor to the Capitol could imagine it in the gaudiest terms -- a glamorous adventure played out beneath the vaulted and gilded ceilings of that ancient building, across the blue-and-gold carpet…

This has been a long week for those of us who loved Ron Brown."

Now more than a week old, the Don Imus affair shows no sign of weakening its hold over Washington's moralists. This means that as an inside-the- Beltway obsession it has outlasted the North Korean nuclear crisis, the Steve Forbes surge, and the debt ceiling extension combined. Only a true outrage…

You keep hea,ing that Bob Dole has trouble 'articulating' -- articulating his message, his vision for America, the reasons he wants to be president. It seems to be the one enduring consensus to have emerged from the general electoral chaos of the past several weeks.

With the disastrous showing of the Forbes campaign in the New Hampshire primary on February 20, different political soothsayers have reacted in different ways. Some have asked: "What will Steve Forbes do now?" Others have asked: "What will the pro-growth, low-tax, social moderates do now?" And…

Not so long ago, media criticism was a discipline of the right wing and the right wing alone. For years conservatives scoured the morning papers and studied the evening news, on slomo video playback if necessary, for evidence of liberal bias. The method has yielded an Alexandrian Library of data,…

A few months before the 1964 New Hampshire presidential primary, the political columnist Stewart Alsop took to the pages of the Saturday Evening Post to lament that primary's primacy in American presidential politics. New Hampshire, he wrote, is a "small, totally atypical state," consisting "almost…

Frank Sinatra turns 80 on December 12, setting off one of those familiar convulsions in the vast publicity machine of American show biz. The smoke has barely cleared from the last convulsion, concluded only a week or two ago for the Beatles, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their breakup as " the…

WELCOME, MY FELLOW DEMOCRATS!" hollered ayor Marion Barry. It was meant to be an plause line, but the audience fell silent. Several of them looked as though they didn't want to be on the same planet as Marion Barry, much less in the same party.

WELCOME, MY FELLOW DEMOCRATS!" hollered ayor Marion Barry. It was meant to be an plause line, but the audience fell silent. Several of them looked as though they didn't want to be on the same planet as Marion Barry, much less in the same party.

A FEW MONTHS AGO I was on a TV talk show I used to appear on fairly frequently. The host is a friendly, mild woman who tosses the assembled pundits softball questions and then ducks while we swing at them wildly. I liked being on this show a lot, and this particular day I didn't suspect trouble.…

If you picked up October's GQ magazine, the one with John Travolta on the cover, you probably assumed, reasonably enough, that you could read an article about John Travolta if you wanted. You would have been only half- right.

Since the end of the Cold War . . . Is any opening sentence dreaded more by readers of newspapers, magazines, and journals of opinion? After the fall of the Berlin Wall. . . . Synapses freeze, eyes glaze, brain cells die one by one. Where do we find ourselves six years after the breakup of the…

Like all actors these days, Elizabeth Berkley is a student of the human condition, engaged in diligent research that might deepen her artistic understanding. And so when she won the role of the professional stripper Nomi in Showgirls, the big-budget "adults-only" movie that opened to much fanfare…

This is a country with Big Problems. But it is also a country with Big Tax- Exempt Foundations, and each year they underwrite the task forces and working groups and advisory committees that in turn produce the conferences and studies that tackle the Big Problems -- the same problems, year after…

NOt since Mary Matalin's famous fax from Bush campaign headquarters in 1992- "Sniveling, Hypocritica! Democrats," was the demure Miss Matalin's choice of headline -- has a political press release seemed so disproportionate to its subject. It was an attack fax, launched in mid-July, from the…