David Tell was a senior writer and opinion editor at The Weekly Standard, contributing nearly 300 pieces over the magazine's full run from 1995 to 2016. He wrote extensively on legal affairs, politics, and public policy, with particular focus on judicial matters, Democratic Party politics, and national security issues including the Iraq War. His work combined sharp editorial analysis with deep reporting on some of the most contentious political debates of the era.
Even as the sky was falling Tuesday morning, September 11, visitors to the Nation magazine's website could find a freshly posted essay by Edward Said on the intellectual's role in the modern world. A true intellectual, Said declared, now makes it his mission to publicize those injustices that are…
At a January 30 National Press Club luncheon in Washington, House and Senate minority leaders Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle announced a major 1997 legislative priority for their respective Democratic caucuses. National politics, Gephardt mournfully noted, have never been "more alien to the lives…
We'll stipulate at the outset that the conventions governing received political opinion in Washington are unfair to congressional Republicans.
We'll stipulate at the outset that the conventions governing received political opinion in Washington are unfair to congressional Republicans.
WHAT IF THE CIA OR FBI should catch wind of an imminent plot to blow an American airliner out of the sky? "Should the government disclose terrorist threats to the public and let passengers make their own decisions about how to react?" Not all that many years ago, the New York Times editorial page…
Since shortly after September 11, 2001-and under the terms of a formal order signed by the president of the United States sometime early the following year-the Pentagon's giant signals--intelligence division, the National Security Agency, has monitored "the international telephone calls and…
LAST TUESDAY THE SUPREME COURT heard oral argument in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights. Rumsfeld, of course, is the secretary of defense. FAIR, as it's more commonly known, is a coalition of 36 law school and faculty groups, backed by friend-of-the-court briefs from…
FOR A BRIEF MOMENT AT a think-tank speech here in Washington a few weeks back, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared to be unholstering the same, classic loose-lips-sink-ships argument that wartime White Houses have been firing at their critics since the Royal Marines burned James Madison's wartime…
THE SENATE-APPROVED VERSIONS of next year's Defense authorization and appropriations bills each contain an amendment sponsored by Arizona's John McCain that would, as the commonplace newspaper shorthand has it, "make torture illegal" at Pentagon facilities throughout the world. The House-approved…
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…
AND IN other baseball news . . .
TO SOME EXTENT it was probably inevitable that the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States--the "9/11 Commission" lately so much in the news--would deal unfairly with those individuals and agencies who were "supposed to" defend us against the attacks in question. Modern…
Advocacy Groups Permitted to Use Unlimited Funds . . . Ruling Favors Democrats
Manchester, New Hampshire
LET US BEGIN by acknowledging the many and various respects in which Howard Dean's presidential campaign isn't weird. I visited New Hampshire on January 2, the traditional stretch-run kickoff date for that state's primary, intending to see four of the candidates, Dean among them, all in a single…
Manchester, New Hampshire
Manchester, New Hampshire
Manchester, New Hampshire
Claremont, New Hampshire, Thursday, January 22
Manchester, New Hampshire
Manchester, NH
Manchester, NH
WE DON'T CLAIM to understand the mind of Howard Dean. With back-room assistance from a small army of Democratic party foreign policy brahmins, Dean recently produced a long, formal speech on "Meeting the Security Challenges of the New Century." The speech was advertised as a reassuring…
South Central Iowa, December 7
EARLY ONE EVENING this past March I found myself struggling for balance in the den of a well-appointed, upper-middle-class home in suburban Bedford, New Hampshire, a half-dozen miles or so southwest of Manchester. I was worried about teetering over because not ten feet away from me Howard Dean had…
IT WAS A TOUGH AND TRICKY CROWD. When Joe Lieberman took the stage, on October 17, and politely reaffirmed his commitment to the security of a Jewish state in Israel, he was booed and heckled for it. Yet the next day, when it was his turn to address the Dearborn, Michigan, candidates' forum…
NOT UNTIL SOMETHING like the first of August did conventional Washington opinion finally wake up to the possibility that this mad-as-hell, antiwar Howard Dean fellow might just have a realistic shot at the Democratic presidential nomination. But after that it was off to the races. In no time flat,…
Waterloo, August 13
LAST TUESDAY IN CHICAGO, for only the second time, all nine candidates for next year's Democratic presidential nomination appeared together--at an event billed as a "working families forum" by its AFL-CIO sponsors. C-SPAN broadcast the session live. Most WEEKLY STANDARD readers no doubt watched all…
"REPORT ON U.S. Antiterrorism Law Alleges Violations of Civil Rights"--so read the headline on the July 21 front page of the New York Times. It was a scoop of sorts: The report in question, prepared by the office of Justice Department inspector general Glenn A. Fine, hadn't yet been released. It…
WE ARE LIVING IN another low, dishonest decade, it seems--at least where the intersection of race and American electoral politics is concerned. Following the 1990 census, the Republican National Committee--determined to press its partisan interests in forthcoming state-by-state congressional…
EARLY LAST WEEK, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals here in Washington, refereeing yet another legal skirmish over the civil liberties implications of Bush administration anti-terrorism policy, handed down yet another ruling favorable to the government. This is what usually happens: With fewer…
THE QUESTION raised by our editorial in last week's issue--whether the American Association of University Professors would "censure" the University of South Florida for having fired indicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad chieftain Sami Al-Arian--has been resolved. Sort of. Temporarily. Winding up their…
MEETING THIS WEEK here in Washington, our nation's scholarly community, through the American Association of University Professors duly assembled, stands poised to commit an act of self-betrayal the depth of which is without obvious precedent in the history of American higher education. It's not a…
IT'S BEEN AN EPIC, "Bleak House"-worthy court case: 77 different plaintiffs suing 17 named defendants, thousands of pages of pleadings and motions and briefs, and more than 100,000 pages of additional expert-witness reports, deposition transcripts, and fact exhibits. On May 2, the hybrid judicial…
HERE ARE the first few grafs of a dispatch from Baghdad yesterday by Carol Rosenberg of the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service: The Iraqi capital these days appears to be awash in gunmen waving or shouldering automatic rifles. Members of a Sunni Muslim-led exile force suddenly set up checkpoints…
Manchester, New Hampshire
ON MONDAY the Supreme Court released its ruling in Virginia v. Black, et al., a constitutional free-speech challenge to a 50-year-old Richmond legislative enactment that bans Klan-style cross burnings specifically designed to "intimidate" their victims. And here's the lead sentence of Tuesday's New…
FIVE MONTHS AGO, on September 24, 2002, an FBI electronic surveillance team recorded a telephone conversation between two Tampa, Florida, residents: a woman named Fedaa Al-Najjar and her friend Hatim Naji Fariz, the manager of a local medical clinic. The subject was Al-Najjar's husband, Mazen, a…
A FEW WEEKS BACK, a Washington-based "investigative research" outfit called the Center for Public Integrity announced that it had recently "obtained" a large and significant set of confidential legal papers from someone inside the Justice Department--a someone whose name the Center for Public…
Editor's Note: Earlier today Sami Al-Arian was arrested for supporting the terrorist group Islamic Jihad (you can read the news account here).
COURSING THROUGH THE post-SOTU cable news chatter last night, I notice that most "analysts" are "struck" by the extent to which "this president," agree with him or not, has "become" a "decisive" leader. What's all that striking about it, I wonder? That Bush, even now, halfway through his first…
Behind Every Choice Is a Story by Gloria Feldt University of North Texas Press, 272 pp., $19.95 The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928 edited by Esther Katz, et al. University of Illinois Press, 512 pp., $65 Roe v. Wade The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History…
NEEDLESS TO SAY, everyone in Washington politics and journalism is accomplished and popular and physically attractive. But even here, there are some among us whom Allah has clearly singled out for special blessing. And Adel al-Jubeir is one of them. He's the 40-year-old "foreign policy adviser" to…
EARLY ONE EVENING in September 1986, a 17-year-old local girl was walking along West North Street in Wooster, Ohio, a rural town about 50 miles southwest of Cleveland, when Joel Douglas Walton Yockey, 30, also of Wooster, rolled up next to her in a pickup truck and asked if she'd like a ride.…
AN INTERESTING THING happened in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia last Thursday, as the nation woke up to the news that two people thought to be responsible for the Washington area's recent wave of sniper murders had finally been arrested.
THIS YEAR it's really, really bad--so bad that I'm going to admit it publicly and ask our readers for help.
"A few weeks ago, we were doing some work on my back porch back home, tearing out a section of old stacked rocks, when all of a sudden I uncovered a nest of copperhead snakes. . . . A copperhead will kill you. It could kill one of my dogs. It could kill one of my grandchildren; they play all the…
IN LAST WEEK'S EPISODE, much of respectable Washington was aghast that the Bush White House had "politicized" the possibility of war by questioning the patriotism of congressional Democrats who opposed the president's Iraq policy. Respectable Washington was mistaken about all this. First off, war…
THE NEW YORK TIMES has lately come under a barrage of media criticism, not all of it from "the right," about the extent to which editorial bias has infected the paper's hard news columns. And already some of that criticism has been directed specifically against the paper's A-section reporting on…
MR. DURBIN: As I return to Illinois, people tell me over and over again: Senator, when you go back, please go to the floor of the Senate and express our feelings that we do need a coalition of force, not just for the principle and value of it, but for the military significance of it . . . MR. REID:…
1 Who is Steven J. Hatfill?
A FEW DAYS AGO on this page, I posted links to some of the documents released to reporters, at an August 25 press conference, by lawyers for anthrax-investigation "person of interest" Steven J. Hatfill. I also promised to make available the remaining such documents before this week was done. And so…
A LITTLE DOCUMENTARY appendix to my cover story about FBI "person of interest" Steven J. Hatfill in this week's issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD (The Hunting of Steven J. Hatfill). On August 25, Hatfill called a second press conference here in Washington (the first was on August 11) to deny all…
Part 1 6 Let's get out of Africa. Hasn't it been established that Hatfill had experience with and access to anthrax while he was working at Fort Detrick?
ABROAD IN THE LAND, needless to say, there is plentiful criticism of the Bush administration's purported tendency to deny terrorism suspects the judicially supervised civil liberties protections of the regular criminal law. Also abroad in the land--in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal district…
BACK IN APRIL, having marinated myself in a decade's worth of published microbiology research and whatnot, I wrote a longish story for the Standard expressing near total bewilderment about the FBI's investigation of last fall's anthrax terrorism. Specifically, I couldn't understand why the Bureau…
THERE'VE BEEN SOME developments over the past few days in the case of Professor Mona Baker, director of the Center for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in England. Turns out she's a native Egyptian, for one thing.
DURING THIS JULY FOURTH SEASON, the two hundred twenty-seventh year of American democracy now dawning, just how secure--under the temporary stewardship of President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft--are the basic constitutional rights that democracy was founded to assert? One or another version…
"Our biggest problem is we have people we think are terrorists. They are supporters of al Qaeda. . . . They may have sworn jihad, they may be here in the United States legitimately, and they have committed no crime. And what do we do for the next five years? Do we surveil them? Some action has to…
IF THERE WERE JUSTICE in the universe, the Middle East Media Research Institute would already have been awarded some kind of special-achievement Pulitzer Prize. MEMRI has pioneered the careful translation, and dissemination to European and American audiences, of print and broadcast news sources in…
HEARINGS on the government's pre-September 11 counterterrorism efforts begin this week on Capitol Hill. These earliest sessions of the House and Senate intelligence committees will be conducted behind closed doors. But it is a fair bet which official lapses will principally occupy the panelists'…
IN RECENT WEEKS THE WEEKLY STANDARD has published a number of articles concerning the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). These have contained a large number of serious inaccuracies and misinterpretations. Among these articles were David Tell's The U.N.'s Israel…
AT 7:53 A.M. local time on August 21, 1995, a Number 26 bus filled with Monday morning commuters slowed to a stop in front of Rene Kassem High School in the northern Ramat Eshkol suburb of Jerusalem. Rene Kassem just happened to be out of session that day; its students owe their lives to a fluke of…
THE CURRENT NEWSWEEK has a long, cover-story retrospective on the siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity. The piece is invaluable for its detail--but exasperating for the filter of "objectivity" through which correspondent Joshua Hammer apparently feels obliged to view his otherwise excellent…
AT 7:53 A.M. local time on August 21, 1995, a Number 26 bus filled with Monday morning commuters slowed to a stop in front of Rene Kassem High School in the northern Ramat Eshkol suburb of Jerusalem. Rene Kassem just happened to be out of session that day; its students owe their lives to a fluke of…
IN 1948, when the armies of five surrounding Arab dictatorships invaded tiny, newborn Israel--in what the secretary general of the Arab League announced was a "war of extermination" against "the Jews"--the United Nations sat on its ass. And did not send a fact-finding mission. But, oh, how the U.N.…
UN SECRETARY GENERAL Kofi Annan's plan to send a high-level commission of inquiry to the West Bank Palestinian refugee camp at Jenin--where local UN officials and spokesman for a variety of terrorist organizations allege Israel has recently conducted a "massacre" of unarmed civilians--appears on…
1) OVER THE PAST SIX MONTHS, have federal authorities altered their working theory of last fall's anthrax murders? No, not much. On November 9 last year, even before the anthrax outbreak's fifth and final fatality had been recorded, the FBI called a press conference to unveil its "linguistic and…
6) What's going on here? Is it Ames or isn't it? Insofar as any of them feels sure of the answer, none of the scientists now working with the government will state it unambiguously, in part because they are concerned for the security of a massive ongoing investigation. Even were security not a…
MANY A bone-dry political science disquisition has by now been written about the institutional combat between White House and Congress during the first year of the Bush administration. Our current president is a man who seems especially determined to protect the authority and prerogatives of his…
Starr A Reassessment by Benjamin Wittes Yale University Press, 256 pp., $24.95 Final Report of the Independent Counsel Regarding Monica Lewinsky and Others by Robert W. Ray United States D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, March 6, 2002 FALSEHOOD has never been popular, exactly, but there are those who…
JUST FOR FUN, fellow students of journalism, let's count up all the mistakes New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas D. Kristof has recently made about Sami Al-Arian, that University of South Florida computer engineering professor The Weekly Standard has been following on and…
THERE'S BEEN a great lot of hand-wringing these past few weeks over the "axis of evil," President Bush's State of the Union coinage for hostile foreign dictatorships that cultivate weapons of mass destruction and make sponsorship of terrorism a conscious policy. The president's critics wonder: Do…
IN FEBRUARY 1998, after an American team won the first Olympic gold medal ever awarded for women's hockey, there was a brief rainshower of patronizing media coverage, as is customary in such matters. Weren't they a great bunch of gals? And didn't they really deserve it? And--forget about…
COULD BE, back a year and a half ago, when Judy Genshaft was being recruited for the presidency of the University of South Florida, they simply forgot to mention it. You know: that Palestinian computer scientist fellow over in the College of Engineering. The one who had certain, oh, issues, let's…
REMEMBER Lemrick Nelson? He killed a man and got away with it. Now he's back in the news because he may get away with it again.
Dear Sirs: Thank you for your recent "Notification of Assessment and Pending Civil Action" wherein I am informed that unless I make good a $3.53 tax debt by January 25, the State of Maryland will send "the sheriff" to seize my house and sell it "at [my] expense." That seems a reasonable plan to me,…
NEXT WEDNESDAY, January 23, Rep. Dan Burton's House Committee on Government Reform will hold a hearing on the "history of congressional access to deliberative Justice Department documents," Burton having served a subpoena for certain such documents on Attorney General Ashcroft in early September,…
LAST WEEK the White House made a down payment on President Bush's promise that due-process protections would be extended even to the most fanatic current enemies of U.S. policy. No, we don't mean the Justice Department's December 11 indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged "twentieth man" in…
OF ALL the myriad criticisms lately leveled against President Bush's November 13 "military tribunals" order, the most wonderful--for pure dishonesty--is the indignation expressed over the directive's alleged denigration of regular Pentagon legal work. What the president has proposed "bear[s] scant…
IT IS NOW a virtually unquestioned assumption of American elite conversation that the law enforcement measures George W. Bush has adopted in the aftermath of September 11 make him, as the New York Times matter-of-factly reports, "only the latest of many presidents to restrict civil liberties in…
THE EDITORIAL in our magazine's current issue suggests that Mazen Al-Najjar, an illegal alien living in Tampa, Florida, is a "free man" pending judicial appeal of his petition for political asylum--notwithstanding a Department of Justice determination that Al-Najjar has held leadership positions in…
NINE MONTHS HAVE NOW GONE BY, and we, like most Americans, find much to praise in the conduct of George W. Bush's presidency--especially his recent assumption of wartime leadership. But we are a bit concerned by one aspect of the administration's performance these past couple of weeks: In the…
FIRST SEX: Late yesterday afternoon, George Gedda of the Associated Press filed an interesting wire about the anthrax risk currently confronting employees at the State Department's headquarters building in Washington. On Monday, department spokesman Richard Boucher had announced that, save for two…
WHAT IS ANTHRAX? Bacillus anthracis is a rod-shaped bacterium that typically appears--when outside a living host--in a dormant state, protected by a hard-shelled spore. Provided it is lodged in rich soil subject to dramatic changes in climate, the organism can and does persist in this form for many…
AT A WHITE HOUSE NEWS CONFERENCE yesterday afternoon, homeland security czar Tom Ridge announced that "the residents of Washington, D.C., and all Americans, can be confident that their government is taking every step possible to ensure that our mail systems are safe and that they are secure." About…
BY THE SECOND WEEK OF AUGUST, instructors at the Pan Am Flying Academy in Eagan, Minnesota, had become so suspicious about the behavior of a new, foreign student that they were moved to contact the FBI's field office in Minneapolis. One Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan extraction in…
IF YOU’VE HEARD IT ONCE, you’ve heard it a thousand times already—from the same people who always tell us obvious things a thousand times when once would do: In response to a mass murder of our fellow citizens carried out by foreign hands, Americans must be careful not to alter the fundamental…
SAMI AL-ARIAN, THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA PROFESSOR featured in the editorial I wrote for this week's print edition of The Weekly Standard, now appears to be in some difficulty with his employers. Last Wednesday, during an on-air interview with Fox News Channel controversialist Bill O'Reilly,…
EVEN AS THE SKY was falling Tuesday morning, September 11, visitors to the Nation magazine’s website could find a freshly posted essay by Edward Said on the intellectual’s role in the modern world. A true intellectual, Said declared, now makes it his mission to publicize those injustices that are…
WE WILL ADJUDICATE who’s at fault in a moment. We will begin, instead, simply by noting that today, nearly eight months after Inauguration Day, it remains unclear whether the "Bush administration" actually warrants that designation. The president’s Social Security Administration has no…
IN AN AFFAIR OF STATE, his 1999 analysis of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Bill Clinton’s resulting impeachment, Richard A. Posner, a judge on the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, set out to prove that, almost without exception, the leading characters in that drama were "fools, knaves,…
LAST OCTOBER IN ST. LOUIS, during the closing minutes of their third and final televised debate, Al Gore and George W. Bush had a little exchange on the proper role of affirmative action in federal decision-making. A woman in the audience asked Governor Bush what his intentions were with respect to…
FROM RECENT SCHOLARSHIP has emerged a remarkably complete picture of modern American legal politics at the moment of creation. We now know that in the 1980s, occupying the farthest-right outposts of human imagination, was a barbarian tribe of conservative "Republicans" led by a mythic figure called…
TWO WEEKS AGO, following a long round of high-profile diplomacy, the Bush administration finally achieved what it thought an acceptable entente with the People’s Republic of China regarding the disposition of our downed EP-3 surveillance plane. The entire embarrassing incident thus safely consigned…
LAST WEEK THE SUPREME COURT assumed its usual stance astride the statute books, took a mighty swing—and shanked a particular federal law so far into the trees that it will likely never be found again. At least, not the way that law was originally written. As you’ve no doubt heard, the Court ruled…
EVERY STUDENT OF AMERICAN POLITICS is familiar with the life-cycle biology of "borking," that process by which nominees for high national office are nowadays targeted for career-destroying character assassination. First there comes the insect's egg: a cartoon account, hatched by some ideological…
Before the next series of important decisions about China tumble onto Mr. Bush's desk, he and his aides should settle on a long-term strategy that protects American interests while encouraging China to play a constructive role as it assumes its natural place as a great power. Mr. Bush outlined a…
Before the next series of important decisions about China tumble onto Mr. Bush's desk, he and his aides should settle on a long-term strategy that protects American interests while encouraging China to play a constructive role as it assumes its natural place as a great power. Mr. Bush outlined a…
Three years ago this month, America's political, foreign policy, and business establishment was rolling its eyes in anticipation of yet another ritualized congressional debate over renewal of China's most-favored-nation trade status. Once again in that debate, small-minded, irresponsible types were…
THIS WEEK AND NEXT, the U.S. Senate will consider amendments to a piece of omnibus campaign finance reform legislation -- and then approve or reject the result by a majority vote. Nothing like this has happened for years. One or another iteration of the bill in question has haunted each of the past…
On March 1, a panel of the federal government's leading number crunchers decided that it might not be such a good idea, after all, for the Census Bureau to adjust last year's nationwide tally according to the "sampling" methods of modern statistical science. It might make the enumeration's…
For a handful of remaining stalwarts, the pardons are nothing. Next year, if security cameras capture Bill Clinton robbing a bank with a sawed-off shotgun, James Carville will no doubt go on Hardball, just as he did earlier this month, and call him "the best president we've ever had." Joe Lockhart…
Nobody in the White House or Justice Department appears to have known who Tom Bhakta was. Not really. They didn't know where he lived, so the address boxes on all the relevant forms were left blank. They didn't even know how to spell his name; it came out "Bhatka" on both the president's executive…
Nobody in the White House or Justice Department appears to have known who Tom Bhakta was. Not really. They didn't know where he lived, so the address boxes on all the relevant forms were left blank. They didn't even know how to spell his name; it came out "Bhatka" on both the president's executive…
Bill Clinton has left office essentially unchanged: now, as always, a man convinced that no criticism of him can ever have justice, no fact that wounds his pride can ever be true -- and convinced, as well, that any who see things differently are dishonorable. This is a personality disorder, one…
We have no trouble conceding that Al Gore's was an especially generous and gracious speech last Wednesday, in which the vice president conceded that he'd lost this year's election. All indications are, however, that Gore's supporters still cannot bring themselves to concede that George W. Bush…
By a process intellectual historians will one day scratch their heads bloody over, articulate Americans -- a good many of them, anyway -- seem lately to have rejected the very possibility of honest argument about issues of great public moment. In the pages of our finest newspapers, for example,…
"Well, we just have to win, then." -- Bill Clinton, concluding that candor about Monica Lewinsky might destroy his presidency. "I'm not like George Bush. If he wins or loses, life goes on. I'll do anything to win." -- Al Gore, explaining this year's campaign.
The presidential election of 2000 is the impeachment drama of 1998-99 all over again. And Al Gore is Bill Clinton. Only Gore's behavior is worse -- worse because Clinton's misdeeds were of a gravity about which people might at least plausibly disagree. What Gore has done is directly challenge…
About a week ago, I spent a few days struggling with the suspicion that I was spiritually polluted. It was something David Brooks wrote that got me started.
Sellout
Dear loyal reader, I hesitate to tell you this. But I have lately detected in myself stirrings of the personal growth variety. And they have caused me to doubt certain ideas I have promoted in this magazine for years -- like that policies of enforced race and gender equity are foolish.
Fedwa Malti-Douglas holds an endowed professorship at Indiana University, where she practices feminist criticism in the departments of gender studies and comparative literature. Judging from the big-name blurbs on the jacket of her latest book, she is a well-known and admired figure in American…
At the end of last week, by general consensus here in the capital, the presidential campaign turned "negative" -- and it was George W. Bush who did the deed. The awkward way Bush crossed this line and the reaction to his move are eloquent testimony to a central weakness of current American…
Nearly the whole of his life has been a lie, but on the first night of last week's Democratic convention, Bill Clinton nevertheless bestirred himself and spoke the truth. He identified more directly and completely than anyone else possibly could the central point of reference in the coming…
In the fall of 1998, Senator Joseph Lieberman became that rarest thing in the Democratic party: a belated but loud and therefore noteworthy critic of Bill Clinton's entanglement with Monica Lewinsky. Obviously, then, by adding Lieberman to his ticket last week, Gore was attempting "separation" from…
For our taste, there was rather too much up-with-people gush at last week's Republican National Convention -- and too much pop-culture flash, and too much manipulative hypersentimentality. There were persons with disabilities. There was a Miss America. There was a professional wrestler. There was…
HERE'S HOW NEWS is often put together. Reporters hear things from people. Some of these people, in return for their disclosures, demand and receive a measure of anonymity -- so in the reporter's finished story, their identities are disguised. Not entirely disguised. Newspapers generally demand a…
Remember the magnum opus that Bill Clinton was going to pen about race relations, the greatest domestic policy question of them all? Even though it isn't really part of the president's "day job," a White House spokesman recently explained, the book nevertheless remains every bit as super important…
At some point in this year's presidential campaign, American voters may well be invited to consider a curious, four-minute snippet of videotape, narrated in Chinese and recorded April 29, 1996, in Los Angeles's Hacienda Heights. It opens with a high school marching band straight out of The Music…
It wasn't supposed to be this way. This was to have been the year when our political controversies over U.S. engagement with China were finally put to sleep. So, at least, was the hopeful orthodoxy in American business and diplomatic circles. As recently as a few weeks ago.
Where race is concerned -- today as yesterday the most profound but botched up and phonied over issue in our national politics -- the Republicans are bad enough. In private life, black and white Americans smile uneasily at one another across a wide divide of consciousness. In public life, the…
There are times when things are good and "societies rest and the human race seems to take breath," Tocqueville wrote. In such times, as in the American 1830s he was describing, a nation's civic affairs appear "firmly settled on certain fundamentals" and its people lose interest in the risk or…
A Vast Conspiracy, The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President, by Jeffrey Toobin, Random House, 422 pp., $ 25.95
Earlier this year, James Milgram of Stanford University got curious about something called the Connected Mathematics Project (CMP), an intermediate-school math curriculum lately developed at Michigan State. So he carefully analyzed CMP's sequence of 24 student booklets. And in one of the…
Once upon a time, not so long ago, Communist regimes dotted the globe and Americans knew what we thought of them. We disliked them. Because we saw ourselves as the heart and mind and muscle of liberty, we felt obliged, as a matter of principle, to resist the advance of these dictatorships -- and to…
No one any longer contends, as Kate Michelman of NARAL did when initially confronted on the subject in the fall of 1995, that "there is no such thing as a partial birth" -- in other words, that the hideous abortion procedure in question is an outright hoax perpetrated by the pro-life movement. At…
In May 1986, state senator Jack Lindsay engineered an unnoticed amendment to a South Carolina budget bill. The amendment made legal the distribution of "property" but not "money" to anyone playing a commercially operated game of skill. By the time Lindsay died in January 1991 -- while a focus of…
What must have been the largest fleet of Lear jets ever assembled began touching down at Shanghai's brand-new international airport on Monday, September 27. It was like a Renaissance Weekend for the U.S. corporate power elite. Henry Kissinger was there, of course. So were Carla Hills and Mickey…
America is an enormous country speckled with all manner of random foolishness. It is also a nation of laws, earnestly accumulated and amended since before the Revolution. And sometimes it is both things at once, spawning an entire sub-genre of newspaper humor devoted to "weird state statutes."…
Richard A. Posner, chief judge of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, is that rarest thing in government employ, as in life generally. He is a real writer: vivid, witty, conscious of language's weave and rhythm. He also knows quite a lot. Both his official opinions and his voluminous…
In 1995, the Ohio legislature enacted its Pilot Project Scholarship Program for disadvantaged elementary school students in Cleveland. Under PPSP, low-income families became eligible for state grants covering up to 90 percent of tuition costs at any Cleveland private school or nearby suburban…
On August 14, the Iowa state GOP's presidential straw poll produced the obvious winner. In George W. Bush, Republicans have the two-term governor of an electorally significant state, a man with a famous name, a formidable organization, considerable charm, and a putative platform broadly congenial…
A couple of weeks ago, Tim Russert of NBC's Meet the Press read his audience choice bits of U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright's latest and perhaps final decision in the Paula Jones litigation. Bill Clinton, Wright had written on July 29, has "violated this Court's discovery orders by giving…
The federal treasury (barring a recession) will run an astonishing $ 3 trillion cumulative surplus over the next ten years. The prospect of so much ready money has brought Washington's legislative and policy engines, largely cold and silent since the end of 1995, roaring back to life.
Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments Act prohibited gender discrimination in school programs receiving federal financial assistance. But on the question whether its requirements applied to school-sponsored sports, which then as now generally received only indirect federal aid, the new law and…
Thirty-three million human beings across the globe already show the symptoms of AIDS or are infected with the HIV virus. Two thirds of them live in sub-Saharan Africa -- more than 25 times the number of cases accounted for by Canada, Mexico, and the United States combined. In Africa the infection…
There is a scattering of what used to be called hard news in Bob Woodward's latest hot Washington book, Shadow, though it is not clear whether anybody -- even the author -- much notices or cares. For example: Confusion has always surrounded the meaning of President Clinton's violent rage on…
What a piece of shameless zealotry this whole campaign finance "reform" business has become. The movement's favored piece of national legislation at the moment, the Shays-Meehan bill in the House of Representatives, is an almost unbelievable atrocity against the Constitution. It would, among other…
For years, Lanny Davis wagged his friendly tail from the petshop window of local politics in suburban Washington and dreamed of life downtown, where the lucky dogs do their business not on last week's Potomac Value-Shopper -- but right there, live, on CNN. But no one would buy him. Then, one day,…
One often learns the most when politicians are forced to speak from least immediate knowledge about a subject with greatest long-term implications. The release last Tuesday of Rep. Christopher Cox's House select committee report on recent Chinese military espionage against the United States is a…
"La inclusion es el simbolo de nuestra fuerza," says Republican National Committee co-chairman Patricia S. Harrison. "Inclusion" -- decoded from the original Spinnish -- is the hallmark buzzword of a GOP eager to evade its share of responsibility for the fact that American law continues to stink…
With the Stuart Restoration of 1660, the tide of English politics turned sharply against the Puritans, and it became illegal for any man who refused Holy Communion in the Church of England to hold public office. What, then, was a dissenting politician to do? To a good many of the most influential…
Just past sundown on April 12, Chuck Bartels of the Associated Press had some news he thought might be of interest to the most famous woman in Cabot, Arkansas. So he rang Paula Jones's doorbell -- it plays the spooky five-note theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind -- and informed her that…
On February 11, 1994, during a zoo-like Washington press conference organized by some of the president's least cautious ideological opponents, a woefully inarticulate woman named Paula Jones suggested that Bill Clinton had once done something horrible to her at a "Quality Management Conference" in…
Acon-game conspiracy stalks the land, using a fantasy of instant riches to bilk financially vulnerable Americans out of their hard-earned nest eggs. Fortunately, however, a bipartisan group of the nation's elected officials is on full alert. In the Senate, Republican Susan Collins of Maine has held…
This is the dramatic and disturbing story of one woman's struggle to defend herself against the untrammeled power of the American criminal justice system and its leering media accomplices. It is a "fascinating human story of love, betrayal, and obsession." It is, in fact, a revelation. For…
This week, the American people, acting through their senators in Washington, will formally choose to retain Bill Clinton as president for the remainder of his elected term. What this decision might imply for our nation's culture and politics is no doubt an almost endless question. The White House…
CERTAIN THINGS WE CAN NOW FORECAST with as much certainty as politics ever allows. The president will be acquitted and will continue in office. For reasons this magazine has exhaustively detailed -- all of which arguments, as the lawyers say, are incorporated here by reference -- Clinton's…
While much of America is sleepily rubbing its belly and burping with satisfaction, may we take just a moment to point out that the state of the Union is actually quite bad?
This week advocates for the Clinton White House will speak from the Senate rostrum. At first blush, they will seem -- to any serious student of the Lewinsky scandal -- to be making an implicit, highly unflattering judgment about the intelligence of the 100 senators. If extensive legal documents…
Last week as the Senate took up the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton, and as Republicans argued with Democrats and the talking heads talked away, the dominating spirit in Washington was that of a man whose name was never mentioned: Ross Perot. Twice rejected at the ballot box, he has…
United States senators -- following the lead of the 101st senator, the New York Times editorial page -- are scrambling to fashion a "deal" for the "censure" of William Jefferson Clinton. The deal is proposed in the gravest possible tone of voice. Its advocates claim to be acting only with the…
The modern American political party is a frequently disappointing beast. And the Republican party, sure enough, has all too often in recent years disappointed us with graceless or timid leadership. This magazine has never hesitated to point out these GOP weaknesses. They still exist, and we do not…
In marathon sessions all day Tuesday and Wednesday morning of last week, the House Judiciary Committee allowed the White House to summon 14 uninterrupted expert witnesses in a final defense of the president. Few of these witnesses said anything even remotely notable.
At a December 1 House Judiciary Committee hearing on the consequences of dishonest legal testimony, Judge Leon Higginbotham Jr., appearing for the committee's Democrats, suggested that a "per se perjury" trigger for presidential impeachment would be preposterously extreme. What if President Clinton…
When you are on the "winning" side of some soon to be resolved issue, you are naturally disinclined to invite detailed argument about the merits of your position. Congressional Democrats believe they have this Clinton-Lewinsky matter locked down tight. So last Monday, at the House Constitution…
American political parties hardly ever concede what's "bad" in a given campaign result. The dark cloud is always a meteorological anomaly; what really matters is the silver lining. Sometimes -- rarely -- this is actually true. It is partly true where official Republican explanations for the 1998…
On two recent Mondays, October 19 and 26, U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright began to make public the documentary record of Jones v. Clinton, the epic litigation her court has supervised for more than four years. Further such releases are promised. What Judge Wright has unsealed so far --…
During his January 17 deposition in the Paula Jones civil suit, President Clinton was asked this rather simple question: "At any time, were you and Monica Lewinsky alone together in the Oval Office?" Clinton answered, "I don't recall," and then launched a longish speculation about how it was…
He has known this day would eventually come. He has not cared. At last, it has come, and he still does not care. He will stay clawed to his White House desk until his fingers are bloody stumps -- and until the nation's expectations for its leader are similarly reduced and wounded. He would sooner…
Officially, at least, the White House line remains that President Clinton's August 17 mea-sorta-culpa speech achieved a thorough-going catharsis on the Monica Lewinsky matter -- both for him personally and for all America. He has been "quite heartened by the reaction," Clinton surreally suggested…
The leering jokes of late-night comics. The armchair analyses of prime-time experts and pseudo-experts. The headlines and polls and spin and back-room calculation of everyday politics. Suddenly now, all this round-the-clock Lewinsky chatter seems so far short of the mark as to be beyond endurance.…
The full-figured lady has sung -- and retired to her mother's Watergate apartment -- but Washington's epic opera of presidential pathology is not quite over yet. The title character must now belt out his showstopper aria, which calls for him at last to tell the truth about his own behavior. It will…
It turns out, just as we always suspected, that Bill Clinton really is human, after all. He has appeared vaguely inhuman, of course, to friend and foe alike, through much of his career. For his dazzled admirers, he has been a comic-book hero made real, a public figure of para-normal steel and…
It turns out, just as we always suspected, that Bill Clinton really is human, after all. He has appeared vaguely inhuman, of course, to friend and foe alike, through much of his career. For his dazzled admirers, he has been a comic-book hero made real, a public figure of para-normal steel and…
Had Barbara Battalino not accepted responsibility for her crime, the Clinton Justice Department would surely have brought her to trial and pressed to have her convicted, then incarcerated for at least 10 months, as federal sentencing guidelines demand. But Battalino spared the government the…
Last Wednesday morning there appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times a paid advertisement from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The federation wanted Times readers to understand the 105th Congress's various legislative sins against "family planning." The federation also wanted…
July 4, after nine days of self-congratulation in China, Bill Clinton returned to the United States, where for six months he has declined to respond -- in public or under oath -- to swirling evidence that he has committed felony crimes while president. He immediately addressed the nation by radio.…
STEVEN BRILL IS A STICKLER FOR ETIQUETTE, and he doesn't mind telling you so. Here's a story he told last week on Meet the Press. On June 11, he gave the Office of Independent Counsel a heads-up about "Pressgate," Brill's novella-length article identifying Kenneth Starr as the source of illegal…
There is a widespread popular bias against the use of anonymous sources in print and TV news. "If there's nothing evil or false about it," the thinking goes, "why must they whisper it in the dark?" And, predictably enough, a certain number of journalists are eager to win applause by pandering to…
What if, just for the sake of argument, nothing more can ever be established from the Monica Lewinsky investigation than that she and the president engaged in, say, a sex act -- and that both of them later, under oath in a civil proceeding, denied having had a sexual relationship? The answer to…
Monday through Thursday of last week marked what must be the most cynical four-day period in the history of the American presidency.
Two weeks ago, chief judge Norma Holloway Johnson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia released a large collection of documents -- and her final ruling -- concerning the Clinton administration's refusal to allow testimony by Secret Service officials before Kenneth Starr's…
It is worth recalling, at this troubled point in our political history, why we have a president in the first place. There are many reasons; ours is a sophisticated constitutional design. But the simplest reason is among the most important: The president exists to be respected.
White House ideologist Sidney Blumenthal flew up to Cambridge, Mass., two Thursdays ago to give a speech at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. We are living in history, he reminded his audience. We are witnessing the epic struggle of Bill and Hillary Clinton to fashion something called…
Last week, President Clinton was presented a choice whether to authorize federal spending on distribution of injection equipment to heroin and cocaine addicts. He chose correctly. He did not know he was choosing correctly. He made his choice for the wrong reasons. The manner in which he made his…
Washington's resistance to the poisons of Clintonism has dramatically deteriorated since the Paula Jones lawsuit was dismissed by Judge Susan Webber Wright on April 1.
On Friday, March 20, 1998, Bill Clinton's public and private attorneys made a novel claim in a Washington, D.C., federal courtroom. They claimed that nothing less than the United States Constitution gives the president authority to have sex with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office and to receive…
On Friday, March 13, Paula Jones's attorneys filed several hundred pages of sworn testimony and corroborating evidence with Judge Susan Webber Wright's U. S. District Court in Arkansas. There's a lot to be learned from these documents. First of all, there's the fact of Bill Clinton's animal grip on…
To appreciate just how much dirt is being flung at independent counsel Kenneth Starr by the White House and its spin-agents, you must first learn a few things about cars and trucks.
DICK MORRIS CAME TO LUNCH the other day. In the course of explaining why the president's Monica Lewinsky caper is merely a sideshow, he ventured that a "silent plurality" of Americans objects more to having the story forced on its attention than it does to the underlying behavior. But don't a lot…
An independent prosecutor had been appointed to investigate a scandal engulfing the White House. But instead of doing that, this prosecutor was " deliberately going into extraneous issues," the president complained in a private memo to his chief of staff. "He cannot be allowed to get away with…
THE WASHINGTON OPINIONOCRACY has developed pretty good antennae about the sincerity of Lewinsky-related public statements by various presidential henchmen. Clinton attorney David Kendall and his allies are now loudly bemoaning news leaks by Kenneth Starr's team of prosecutors. The complaint is…
There are many witnesses to the trail of Hurricane Monica. There are blameless ones like Bill Clinton's valets and stewards and Secret Service agents. There are not-so-blameless ones like his political handlers and sundry enablers. And all of them have lawyers. Most of the lawyers have been…
We now know three things for sure that we did not know two weeks ago when the president of the United States categorically denied both a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky and an attempt to dissuade her from contradicting him.
She appears, in happier times, to have called him "Schmucko," with a vulgar sort of familiar affection. Later on, after things got complicated between them, she renamed him "the Creep." And in those surreptitiously tape-recorded conversations with her confidante, Linda Tripp, Monica Lewinsky also…
Every day brings a fresh bad report from Asia. That region's go-go mid- 1990s, fueled by giant Western investment and loans, have run aground. It turns out that great chunks of the money were converted to local business deals driven not by market imperatives but by controlling elites operating in…
American debate about abortion remains unhealthy. Abortion's place in political advertising is a case in point.
As the era of Clintonized expectations crawls into its sixth year, huge numbers of Americans have long since forgotten to be upset that their elected government conducts itself like a used-car dealership. So bored is the mass opinionocracy with the Clinton administration's compulsive…
Stephen E. Ambrose
Section 607 of the U.S. criminal code makes it a felony to "solicit or receive any contribution" for purposes of a federal election campaign "in any room or building occupied in the discharge of official duties." This provision applies to any "officer or employee of the United States or any…
One morning this past April, Terri Lynn Revere parked in the sun outside Landry's Cafe Bridge City, Louisiana, where she proceeded to play video poker virtually non-stop for more than four hours. When Revere pulled herself away around 2:30 p.m., the boy she was baby-sitting, two-year-old Jared…
Surprise. The Supreme Court will not hear Piscataway v. Taxman. The court will not review how the Piscataway, New Jersey, board of education achieved "diversity" in its high school -- by retaining the only black teacher in the business department and laying off an equally qualified white teacher.…
Remember back when Republican presidents were trying to pack the federal courts with right-wing judges? These judges were going to fashion an America, as Sen. Edward Kennedy memorably put it, in which "women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,…
Ann Devroy, White House correspondent of the Washington Post, fought a heroic battle with cancer for more than a year. She beat it back and returned to the paper this June. Then she suffered a recurrence. On October 23 she died. To all who knew her, which means most of political Washington, the…
In a just-mailed fund-raising letter on behalf of the Republican National Committee, Steve Forbes concludes with characteristic enthusiasm that " History is on our side!" Whose side? The side of wholesale, root-and- branch tax reform, not just "a minor tax cut or a few new loopholes." A brand- new…
We take you first to Texas. On September 26, President Clinton visited Houston for another in an endless series of DNC fundraisers. While he was there, he did a little drop-by at San Jacinto College. His subject was affirmative action. The president heaped praise on outgoing Houston mayor Bob…
This Wednesday, Attorney General Janet Reno will testify at an oversight hearing of the House Judiciary Committee. The hearing will center on her management of the Justice Department inquiry into 1996 campaign fund-raising. Committee chairman Henry Hyde's Republican majority will want to know why…
We have been waiting more than a year, since the enactment of welfare reform in August 1996, to congratulate the Republican Congress on a meaningful and clear-cut political victory. Those congratulations are now in order. The three-day Senate Finance Committee hearings on the Internal Revenue…
Everything you know about the current politics of campaign-finance reform is wrong. Minority leader Tom Daschle has insisted, and the newspapers have reported, over and over again, that the Senate's entire 45-member Democratic caucus enthusiastically endorses the McCain-Feingold "Bipartisan…
Vice president Gore wants you to know that the executive branch he represents is the finest, best intentioned, most effective in history. Gore is a proud man. But he is a thoughtful man, too, a teller of unpleasant truths. So he must remind us, as he did at a special "summit" meeting in Washington…
Al Gore is easy to dislike. There are his idiosyncratic policy fevers, like global warming, which give off the distinct vibration of a man naive beneath his years. There is Gore's career-long habit of super-partisan rhetorical crudity -- which goes little noticed, so complete is his disguise as a…
Two weeks ago, Americans were briefly alerted to a history of state-coerced sterilization in modern Sweden. A series of articles in Dagens Nyheter, the leading Stockholm daily, had recently detailed the program under which nearly 60,000 "socially inferior" and "subnormal" Swedish women were…
You can't sit down here in the convention center ballroom without first picking up the cardboard placard on your chair, either a "Speaker Newt!" in blue, or an "I >SO> Newt" in red. Each of 1,300-odd delegates to the 1997 " Midwest Republican Leadership Conference" has been given a "Newt's Friend"…
In Boston they love their losers. If you lose selfishly -- but do it with a certain blase style -- they love you all the more. And if you claim virtue while you're at it . . . well, then you're William Weld, bucking for Beantown sainthood.
President Clinton has lately been busy, busy, busy bringing us all together for a national conversation on race. And he keeps piling up the words -- so that the rest of us might climb his transcripts to a heaven of inter-ethnic healing. Deep inside this Tower of Bubba, of course, the president's…
The gods of the Republican House of Representatives are angry, and the trembling mortals are attempting through ritual to win back heaven's favor. There has been a human sacrifice. The virgin on the altar, Bill Paxon of New York, went under the blade with a smile, as ceremony requires. "You have…
Late last month, following House passage of the central and most contentious element in Washington's pending budget deal, Newt Gingrich was euphoric. He'd been having a rough time of it, given all those persistent stories about bitter discontent among backbench Republicans. Now, with progress…
A five-justice majority of the Supreme Court, in a pair of physician- assisted-suicide cases decided June 26, has declined to proclaim a generalized "right to die" in the Constitution. And the other four justices have joined them in a unanimous vote to uphold broad prohibitions against assisted…
At the 1995 National Junior College Athletic Association track-and-field championships in Odessa, Texas, James Beckford pulled off the third longest triple jump in history. He missed a 10year-old world record by two inches. Beckford's team, Blinn College, went on to demolish its competition and…
Bill Clinton is quite plainly going claustrophobic inside the dollhouse presidency he has constructed. As "time runs out of my hourglass," he says with characteristic smarm, "I get more impatient to do everything I think I have to do to prepare this country for a new century." So five years into…
The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote next week on the extension of China's most-favored-nation trading status. How it will turn out is anyone's guess; the House Republican leadership is split on the question, so its nose-counting whip system isn't operating. That in itself is a…
Most smokers take their first, experimental puff before they reach adulthood -- as children. Children enjoy cartoons. The spokesbeast for the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco company's flagship brand, Camel, is a cartoon camel named Joe. He appears on billboards and in newspapers and magazines where…
Leroy Hendricks is now 62 years old. Sitting in his car one day when he was 20, in 1955, he exposed himself to two small girls. In 1957, he was convicted for playing strip poker with a 14-year-old girl. In 1960, Hendricks was sentenced to a three-year prison term for molesting two boys, ages 7 and…
In strictly legislative terms, it looks as if the congressional effort to abolish the unconscionable practice of partial-birth abortion has fallen short. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed such a ban on March 20. The Senate approved a nearly identical bill on May 20. The two…
On April 29, the federal government told employers "they may not discriminate against qualified workers with mental illness, may not ask job applicants if they have a history of mental illness, and must take reasonable steps to accommodate employees with psychiatric or emotional problems." That's…
In the United States, "there is hardly any talk of the beauty of virtue," Tocqueville noted. "American moralists do not pretend that one must sacrifice himself for his fellows because it is a fine thing to do so." They are " forever forming" associations "of a thousand different types" all by…
This was supposed to be a banner year for America's China boosters. The plan was for the Clinton administration to hammer out an agreement for China's accession to the World Trade Organization, maybe in time for a Rose Garden ceremony with President Jiang Zemin this fall. That deal would confer on…
The number-two job at the Department of Justice, which holds the title of deputy attorney general, is vacant. The number-three job, associate attorney general, is vacant. The solicitor general's office, which represents the United States before the Supreme Court, is being run by former White House…
At an airport ceremony marking his arrival in Beijing last week, Vice President Gore made portentous use of an ancient T'ang Dynasty poem called " On Stork Tower." Bilateral relations between our "two great nations and civilizations," the vice president said, are "filled with many rivers, some…
The Fourth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections was held the last week of January in Washington. An annual event, it is the probably the world's most important scientific meeting of AIDS specialists. At one of this year's sessions, Dr. Steffanie Strathdee, a Canadian…
Two weeks ago, a man named Ron Fitzsimmons, the executive director of a major trade association for abortion clinics, briefly fessed up about partial- birth abortion. For almost two years, he and other pro-choice activists had insisted that the grisly procedure was extremely rare. It was, they…
During his first term in office, Bill Clinton raised an astonishing amount of campaign cash -- nearly $ 40 million -- with a program of Map Room coffees and Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers for major Democratic donors. Perhaps it bothers you that the president routinely and systematically used the…
Early last week, independent counsel Kenneth Starr announced that, come August 1, he would no longer be able to represent the United States of America in the Whitewater matter and associated investigations. He insisted his decision did not signal what such decisions usually signal: that the lawyer…
Once a year, and for only as long as the dutiful questioning of the press corps requires, the Clinton administration is nominally tough on Communist China. The State Department's annual "country reports" on international human- rights practices fall due. These reports follow a standard analytical…
One night in 1980, I went to see Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining. I liked it: the creepy music, and that classic scene where the Jack Nicholson character, deranged by writer's block, busts through a bathroom door to attack his wife with an axe. "Heeeere's Johnny!" he bellowed. Great fun.
We should begin with a brief recapitulation of the California Civil Rights Initiative story. CCRI is an amendment to the California constitution, with language lifted almost verbatim from the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, that would ban the use of racial and gender preferences in statefunded…
How to approach the prospect of a second Clinton administration? On the occasion of Richard Nixon's inauguration in January 1969, the cartoonist Herblock, a Nixon-phobe of rare distinction, gave the new president a famously magnanimous graphical pat on the fanny. For years he had drawn an indelible…
Does the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantee a right to doctor-prescribed poison for mentally competent, terminally ill patients who want a speedier death? Last year, the nation's two largest federal circuit courts of appeals, the Second and the Ninth, answered yes and invalidated…
Tell us quick, President Clinton's defenders demand. Before you begin screaming about the "Asian money" fund-raising scandal dogging the Democratic party and its White House, tell us "what it all means." What sinister conspiracy is involved? What precisely was the quid pro quo? And unless you can…
It's sort of like "the California goldfields in 1849," reports the trade publication Restaurant Business: China has 1.2 billion hungry people, but only one fast-food joint for every 5 million of them. Better get a move on, the magazine advises; "the time to break into China is now." PepsiCo made…
There are obvious dark ironies. Bill Clinton took office in 1993 vowing to deal more firmly with "the butchers of Beijing" than had his Republican predecessor. He hasn't. In 1994, the president began an awkward reversal on the issue, abandoning the human rights conditions he had initially attached…
In December 1995, over the knee-jerk objections of many Republicans -- " exit strategy," sitting ducks, body bags" -- President Clinton began deploying nearly 20,000 American ground troops to Bosnia. If he hadn't, a fragile cease-fire would have broken, ethnic carnage in Bosnia would have resumed,…
It has come to this: A respected federal official, Bill Bradley, publishes an op-ed about campaign finance in the New York Times arguing for a constitutional amendment that would restrict the political speech of his congressional colleagues, their would-be successors, and American voters as a…
E. J. Dionne's Election Day Washington Post column was positively Whitmanesque, an evocation of the envelope-stuffing communitarian politics of his Massachusetts childhood. Casting an American ballot is inherently good, he reminded me. Dionne even takes his kids to the polls with him, the better to…
The election results can be described and explained. Their practical effect can be logically predicted. But beyond that, it's difficult to make much of what happened last week. All year long, the two parties struggled mightily for control of the best-polling buzzwords. Somehow, along the way, no…
The Republican presidential campaign has stripped its poorly tooled sprockets in the effort to illuminate Bob Dole's advantages over Bill Clinton as a guide and steward for the next four years of American public life. It remains possible, nevertheless, through the smoke generated by the GOP's…
It's been a rough couple of months for supporters of Proposition 209, the " California Civil Rights Initiative" that would ban the use of ethnic and gender preferences in state employment, contracting, and public education. Though CCRI maintains its steady 15-point public-approval margin in the…
Heads up. The sky is falling. Barring the possibility of some freak event or act of unprecedented self-destruction by Bill Clinton, this year's presidential campaign is over. On November 5, American voters will almost certainly return a Democratic administration to the White House. In fact, there's…
Democrats insist, Republicans privately acknowledge, and the newspapers generally agree that the GOP's 104th Congress ends in disappointment. But none of them can convincingly explain precisely how or why.
The key word is "consistent." Bob Dole is consistent. His campaign consistently misuses -- or just plain throws away -- its best weapons against President Clinton.
Americans worry endlessly and admirably over the quality of our virtue as a people. We do it more and more these days, groping to account for the latest statistical or anecdotal indicator of decline. Here we seem too coarse with one another. There we seem too easy on ourselves as individuals. And…
One day in June, over a slice of strawberry cheesecake and a cup of decaf mocha cappuccino, Dr. John Hagelin told the Knight-Ridder news service that it "would be nice" if he could put every American in a deep trance. Literally. Hagelin, a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, is the Natural Law…
Had there never been so much as a hint of sordid sex-play involving President Clinton's now-departed chief strategist, Dick Morris would still be the biggest news from the Chicago Democratic convention. And the story would still be a scandal.
On the final evening of the Republican national convention in San Diego, just before that business about someone accepting the party's nomination for the presidency of the United States, four distinguished senators shed their suit jackets to harmonize an a cappella barbershop version of "Elvira" in…
Here's a simple fact you'd never know from the media coverage of the abortion controversy inside the Republican party last week: A large majority of Republicans who voted this year chose a candidate named Dole who has never parted meaningful substantive company with the pro-life movement on the…
Modern liberalism's central pretension -- its insistence that the federal government must guarantee national solutions to our most glaring domestic problems -- is dead. The centerpiece of the American welfare system is to be abolished by Bill Clinton's signature on Republican legislation. "I never…
A specter haunts Republicans as they finish preparations for Bob Dole's forthcoming presidential nominating ceremony in San Diego. And they freely admit it. "Every meeting on planning this convention," a senior Dole aide tells the New York Times, "begins with what went wrong in 1992."
These are heady days for the self-appointed disciplinarians of American politics. There's so much for them to do, many Republican and Democratic fannies to spank. Festering national problems demand commonsense, compromise solutions, you see. But our party politicians never come when they are called…
These are heady days for the self-appointed disciplinarians of American politics. There's so much for them to do, many Republican and Democratic fannies to spank. Festering national problems demand commonsense, compromise solutions, you see. But our party politicians never come when they are called…
A fund-raising appeal for the Republican National Committee's coffers has recently arrived in GOP mailboxes across the state of California. The pitch letter is printed on "Bob Dole" stationery. The hook, in classic direct-mail marketing fashion, is an "official 1996 Republican Party Campaign Issues…
A fund-raising appeal for the Republican National Committee's coffers has recently arrived in GOP mailboxes across the state of California. The pitch letter is printed on "Bob Dole" stationery. The hook, in classic direct-mail marketing fashion, is an "official 1996 Republican Party Campaign Issues…
In the six days from June 6 to June 11, Bob Dole engineered not one but two astonishing developments in internal Republican abortion politics. On the seventh day he rested, sitting square in the middle of the resulting rubble. It is not clear how he will get back up.
In the six days from June 6 to June 11, Bob Dole engineered not one but two astonishing developments in internal Republican abortion politics. On the seventh day he rested, sitting square in the middle of the resulting rubble. It is not clear how he will get back up.
When Bill and Hillary Clinton turn themselves loose in the supermarket of ambition, others are meant to pay the bills. The couple began preparing their daughter, Chelsea, for her share of this debt when she was six, according to Mrs. Clinton's jaw-dropping "we're hoping that we have another child"…
When Bill and Hillary Clinton turn themselves loose in the supermarket of ambition, others are meant to pay the bills. The couple began preparing their daughter, Chelsea, for her share of this debt when she was six, according to Mrs. Clinton's jaw-dropping "we're hoping that we have another child"…
It hasd an unusual and impressive astringent quality Bob Dole's big announcement last week.
If Bob Dole does the right thing, sometime in the next few weeks your morning newspaper will report the death of a major "bipartisan" proposal to reform campaign financing -- a proposal killed off by the threat of a Republican filibuster in the United States Senate. The story will also point out…
Bill Clinton is mostly talk. He enjoys daily political combat and negotiates its demands with rare talent. But he has never been much for actual, week-in, week-out government. Over any given administrative term in his long career, the Clinton record is thickly stained with the evidence both of his…
TIn a 1993 interview in Cincinnati Medicine, Dr. Martin Haskell described how he had developed a partial-birth abortion procedure -- and used it more than 700 times. Because of the "toughness and development of the fetal tissues," he explained, late-pregnancy abortions were difficult to complete…
On August 18, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled that a U. S. District Court had inadequately considered the Eighth Amendment claims of one Josephine Brown. Brown is a transsexual prison inmate who argued that Colorado's refusal to provide her with estrogen and other medical…
Behold the unharnessed desire that is H. Ross Perot: "Get me the fucking list!" he shrieked at longtime sidekick Tom Luce during a television shoot four years ago, as the poor man fumbled for some now-forgotten piece of paper. "Don't you understand? When I say I want something, I want it!" All of…
Affirmative action bleeds anew. And this latest wound might eventually prove fatal. Ruling March 18 in the case of Hopwood v. Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has now sharply limited the circumstances under which a state-sponsored institution of higher education may give…
Until recently, the American "death with dignity" movement celebrated the Netherlands as a model for the humane treatment of the terminally ill and other such unfortunates. Holland is the only nation on earth that offcially condones euthanasia. It does not punish doctors who accede to the "well-…
Recent partisan politics is a mess of apparently contradictory evidence about American ideological appetites. The 1992 Democratic presidential campaign serves up nouvelle liberalism-less fat, light sauces, and lots of fresh ingredients in unusual, artistic combination. Voters swallow it but can't…
Political ideas have consequences. But political consequences don't always have ideas. Not very big ones, at least. Sometimes in politics things just happen, almost at random, products of unconnected choice and chance that only remotely involve The Issues. This naturally unsettles the serious…
The United States has a fantastically complicated system of immigration law. It provides for more new residents each year than occur in all the rest of the world's nations combined. America also has sizable illegal immigration, which creates serious practical problems for those few states in which…
Not long ago, health-care reform was almost fatally wounded by association with one of the greatest domestic-policy bellyflops in American political history: the Clinton "Health Security Act" of 1994.
Barnstorming high above Congress in the limitless political sky of his State of the Union, his white scarf trailing in the warm wind of recent poll results, the president makes an unassisted plane-to-plane transfer. His rickety "big government" turbo-prop spins out of sight. And suddenly a…
All told, legal gambling in the United States generates roughly $ 40 billion in annual net revenues, from maybe $ 500 billion worth of wagers. It is now the nation's fastest growing "entertainment." American casino attendance almost tripled between 1990 and 1994, to 125 million. And so, no…
It was nice while it lasted. The GOP owned sole bragging rights to credi bility on the balanced budget. It was a hugely popular goal and issue. It was a n apt shorthand slogan for limited-government conservatism. Then, too (don't tell anyone), it was a convient roof under which to shelter and…
It would be impossible to exaggerate how badly Republican budget-balance rs feel they've been vio lated by the White House these past several months. Ev en by Washington standards, administration budget tactics have been astonishing ly crude and deceitful. So you can sympathize with the…
Critics of an ideological, partisan American politics especially those who would alter that politics by adding a third major party to the mix -- generally complain as much about the tone of public discourse as about its substance. Washington has become a mean, soul-destroying place, they say. So…
There is much good-government mourning over the Senate retirements that will end some of Washington's most famously nonideological Republican and Democratic careers next year. They were angels, these Mark Hatfields and Sam Nunns, always rescuing the infant compromise from a legislative building…
President Clinton has decided to deploy U.S. troops in Bosnia. By doing so, he tests Republicans on a yea-or-nay question concerning America's continued engagement with the rest of the world. At this point, all too many of them are flunking that test.
You're feeling sorry for the Republican congressional leadership, aren't you? Last week they rushed their beautiful football -- the first legitimate budget-balancing plan in living memory -- headlong into a few presidential vetoes. And it looks to you like they got knocked on their cans. The…
You're feeling sorry for the Republican congressional leadership, aren't you? Last week they rushed their beautiful football -- the first legitimate budget-balancing plan in living memory -- headlong into a few presidential vetoes. And it looks to you like they got knocked on their cans. The…
Last week, Congress and the White House joined forces in the drug war. New guidelines from the U.S. Sentencing Commission would have equalized the treatment of crack and powder cocaine where federal sentences for drug trafficking are concerned -- by sharply reducing crack sentences, in effect.…
On a beautiful fall afternoon in Washington last Iweek, camera angles framing the Capitol dome, a bipartisan group of senators and House members gathered with "citizen activists" to decry the "swamp of corrupt campaign money" now engulfing Congress and destroying democracy. The solution? An…
All good men despise him, but the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, peerless master of demagoguery's magic arts, has already defeated them. And they do not know it. A week ago Sunda ABC's Sam Donaldson asked the cleric about President Clinton's reluctance to endorse the Nation of Islam-sponsored…
He got away with it. O. J. is free to drink his celebratory champagne, despite the mountain of circumstantial evidence that, one night in June 1994, he did corner and knife to death his ex-wife and a young man who chanced upon the scene.
Back in August, you will recall, Ross Perot, ostentatiously concerned to make the two-party system work, issued another peep from his magic flute and summoned a zombie-like procession of leading American political figures to prostrate themselves before a poorly attended meeting of his ragtag…
If you believe, as we do, that affrmative action is inconsistent with common fairness, and has become irrelevant to the problems of race it was created to address, then perhaps you are disheartened these days. Just a few short months ago there existed a very real prospect of significant reform. But…
On February 19, 1993, in Chillicothe, Ohio, President Clinton made a statement on abortion. Leading American politicians, pro-choice or pro- life, rarely edge so close to the heart of the matter.
What explains conservative doubts about the political success of their own limited government principles, as we near the end of the first year of the first Republican, and most conservative, Congress in more than 40 years? We refer here not to House Majority Leader Dick Armey, whose forecast of…