Lee Bockhorn is a writer and editor who was a staff member at The Weekly Standard, where he contributed extensively over a decade on topics including conservative politics, public policy, and defense issues. He wrote and edited pieces covering Republican Party strategy, school choice, missile defense, and broader cultural commentary for the magazine.
The state of the "Republican brand" has become a ubiquitous discussion topic among Washington wonks, journalists, and politicians over the past year. Last May, then-congressman Tom Davis of Virginia sent a memo to his House GOP colleagues arguing that "the Republican brand is in the trash can.…
SO, HERE WE ARE. After the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas striking down that state's anti-sodomy law, the question has been, Is gay marriage next? Barring some unforeseen event, the supreme court of Massachusetts will declare homosexual marriage legal this week. The nation's legal…
NOW THAT THE WAR in Iraq is over (the first part, anyway), Americans are trying to repair relations with our erstwhile European allies. While some of my Weekly Standard colleagues are doing the really tough work--attending lavish, well-lubricated conferences on Italy's Lake Como to discuss…
NOW THAT MATTERS IN POSTWAR IRAQ have, to put it mildly, become challenging, antiwar liberals are exhibiting a new spring in their step, and a revivified eagerness to heap scorn on the Bush administration. One of the most bizarre examples of this appears in the June 9 issue of the New Yorker, in a…
FOR SOME YEARS NOW, Time magazine has been the most liberal of America's three major newsweeklies. Still, I never thought I'd see the day when Time's editors would opt to transform their publication into a bulletin board for Democratic-wonk strategy. But that seems to have happened this week, as…
LAST WEEK, Democratic party consultant Jenny Backus told the New York Times that Democratic congressmen and presidential candidates "don't need to do any criticism of the Bush administration right now" because the "generals are doing that job for us." Of all the retired rent-a-generals currently…
ONCE IN A BLUE MOON, I read something in the New York Times that actually brings a smile to my face. Take this story from last Saturday's edition, which chronicled the split on college campuses between students and professors over the war in Iraq. It sounds almost too good to be true: Leftist…
WHEN THE WAR IN IRAQ began nearly two weeks ago, I should have, ideally, begun boning up on my Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, so as to have something meaningful to say about the conflict. Instead, I found myself sitting in a hotel room in Rome at the beginning of a long-planned and rather ill-timed…
WE ARE NOW just weeks away from going to war to disarm and depose Saddam Hussein's regime, and beginning the difficult but necessary task of bringing the fresh breezes of self-government into the authoritarian hothouses of the Arab world. The arguments of the antiwar protestors--to the extent they…
THE COLUMBIA IS LOST, but what remains are all the things that make us human: our grief, our sympathy for the families of the astronauts and the larger family of NASA--and our darker impulses as well. It never takes long for shallow souls to use such an event to promote their own agendas. Already…
THIS THURSDAY, January 16, is the deadline for the Bush administration to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the University of Michigan race-preference cases currently before the Supreme Court. The media and Beltway conservatives have speculated a great deal recently about what position (if any)…
IT'S A NEW YEAR, which means it's time for all of us to make our usual bold New Year's resolutions--and promptly break them.
WE TEND TO ASSUME that science involves demystification: Rainbows are not a sign of God's covenant with man, science tells us, but simply sunlight refracted through the prism of water vapor; thunderbolts are not products of the wrath of Zeus, but of electrical charges in the atmosphere--you get the…
SINCE TAKING OVER Congress in 1995, the Republican party has proven itself mostly inept at using the power of the federal purse to pursue conservative goals. But the Solomon Amendment, the 1996 brainchild of former New York GOP congressman Gerald Solomon, is now proving to be a notable exception.…
Tim Russert: Now, you said in The New York Times last week, "Jeb Bush is gone." You want to take those words back?
AMONG MY twenty-something peers at The Weekly Standard, I'm thought to be a bit of a premature old fogy. Perhaps it's my stuffed-shirt sartorial choices, my TV preferences (Turner Classic Movies over the WB), or my taste in music (Duke Ellington over Eminem). What can I say? I'm a cranky old man…
IF YOU WANT to get an idea of what kind of emotionally draining season it's been for the St. Louis Cardinals, you need look no further than last week as they prepared to play the Arizona Diamondbacks in Game 2 of the National League Division Series. In Phoenix to watch the team play was Flynn Kile,…
IN MARCH, I wrote a piece touting Michael Walzer's provocative essay, "Can There Be a Decent Left?" which appeared in the Spring issue of Dissent magazine. Walzer critiqued the most egregious responses of his fellow lefties to September 11, declaring that the left had "lost its bearings" and needed…
SOMETIMES, we pick the worst weeks to take our vacations here at The Weekly Standard. August is usually a slow month for politics, but last week presented, a target-rich environment for conservative journalists: There was Al Gore's op-ed screed in the New York Times, the leak of the Defense Policy…
Astaire and Rogers by Edward Gallafent Columbia University Press, 256 pp., $24.95 THE PLACE of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as the American dance couple, perhaps even the American romantic couple, seems secure. The very phrase "Fred and Ginger" still evokes a sense of elegance, glamour, and…
THE NEWS HEADLINES have been awfully depressing lately: stock market doldrums, terrorism fears, priest-sex scandals, child kidnappings, massive wildfires, and on and on. In times like these, many of us turn to sports for a temporary respite. For instance, take 1998, when, amidst the sleaze of Anno…
WHO, I FOUND MYSELF WONDERING the other afternoon in the checkout line at Borders, ever actually pays money for one of those bookmarks full of coo-inducing saucer-eyed kittens or saccharine poetry? Someone must, but for my part I'm rarely tempted. In my experience, fancy store-bought bookmarks…
LAST SUNDAY, the New York Times Magazine published a remarkably chilling essay entitled "Family Planning." Penned by an anonymous father--let's call him Mr. X--it described his family's efforts to convince his pregnant 15-year-old daughter, against her own better instincts, to have an abortion.
SUNDAY NIGHT, I needed a diversion to keep me awake until 2:30 a.m. so I could watch the U.S. soccer team open up a serious can of whup-ass on Mexico. So, I watched one of Clint Eastwood's classic Dirty Harry movies--1973's "Magnum Force"--on Ted Turner's "Superstation" TBS. I noticed two things…
IF, LIKE ME, you're a voracious reader--someone who maintains a steady diet of not only novels and biographies and important new works on current affairs, but also good journalism--then you're probably familiar with a particular kind of despair: knowing that you don't have enough hours in the day…
SINCE HIS APPEARANCE at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner, everyone inside the Beltway has been in a tizzy over Ozzy Osbourne. But today, I'd like to change the subject from Ozzy to Ossie. Ossie Davis, that is.
A COMMON journalistic trope in recent years held that Bill Clinton was fortunate in his enemies: Whatever his personal or political faults--and they were many and grave--they were always redeemed, or at least diminished in scope, by the tactical bungling and sheer ickiness of people like Tom DeLay,…
What's So Great About America by Dinesh D'Souza Regnery, 218 pp., $27.95 IT BECOMES NECESSARY, from time to time, to defend America not just against physical attack but also against its intellectual enemies, foreign and domestic--and few are better qualified to provide such a defense than Dinesh…
NEWSFLASH: When it comes to knowledge of their nation's history, American students are as dumb as rocks. The most recent confirmation of this perennial truth came last Thursday, when the Department of Education released the latest results from the U.S. History portion of the National Assessment of…
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES reported Wednesday that the California state assembly is moving swiftly to ban ethnic mascots (specifically, Indian mascots) at all California public schools. I took special interest because the accompanying graphic featured the insignia of my own alma mater, Arcadia High…
EVERYONE HAS AN OPINION about which event truly heralds the arrival of spring--baseball's opening day, the cherry trees blossoming in Washington, Easter Sunday. But for me, and doubtless for golf nuts across the land, it isn't really spring until the Masters golf tournament arrives in mid-April,…
IN A CLASSIC episode of the "Twilight Zone," a woman driving cross-country by herself keeps encountering a sinister-looking hitchhiker. No matter how fast she drives, no matter how many extra hours she travels at night, somehow, the hitchhiker manages to catch up with her--he reappears again and…
SPECULATION about Condoleezza Rice as a possible vice presidential choice for the GOP ticket in 2004 has reached the proverbial tipping point. Everyone's talking about it, from Eleanor Clift on the left, to the good folks at National Review Online on the right, to Andrew Sullivan on the . . . well,…
THESE ARE TOUGH TIMES for the American left. As my friend Stanley Kurtz of the Hudson Institute recently noted in a terrific piece for National Review Online, leftist intellectuals have become increasingly paranoid, and liberal politicians have resorted to foolish and desperate criticism of the…
FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, anticipation has been building over "9/11," the documentary film of the World Trade Center disaster scheduled to air this Sunday on CBS at 9 P.M. (Eastern). The movie is the work of Jules and Gideon Naudet, two young French filmmakers who happened to be making a documentary about…
BY NOW, you're surely aware of the controversy that erupted at UC Berkeley last week over the school's student-taught courses on "Male Sexuality" and "Female Sexuality," sponsored by (of course) the Women's Studies department. Last semester's "Male Sexuality" course featured an orgy; a party game…
LAST AUGUST, after a few days of white-knuckle bidding on eBay, I became the proud owner of a 1950s vibraphone. That's the instrument the old jazz master Lionel Hampton plays; it's similar to a xylophone, but its metal keys give it a much more sustained and mellow sound than the xylophone's wood.…
DIVORCE IS in the news again--and not just because of Michael Jordan's marital woes. In the past two weeks, both USA Today and the Washington Post have run fawning profiles of E. Mavis Hetherington, one of the nation's leading divorce researchers. Hetherington, an emeritus professor of psychology…
IT SEEMS that conservative provocateur David Horowitz, ever willing to pee in the punch bowl of American academia, has done it again. Horowitz--who, among other things, heads up the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture--had pollster Frank Luntz survey Ivy League humanities…
IF THE CREATORS of college football's Bowl Championship Series weren't already reeling from all the criticism they've gotten since Nebraska backed into tonight's national championship game in the Rose Bowl against Miami, they should be now. The Oregon Ducks finished the season ranked number two in…
ANYONE WHO HASN'T been hiding in a cave with Osama since September is probably suffering from a surfeit of "How the World Has Changed" journalism. Much of it has been pabulum, but I confess that I find one genre fascinating: the articles about how everyday Americans are coping with calamity through…
EVEN AS AMERICA enjoys its newfound sense of political and cultural unity, the battles over issues of race and culture roil on, though perhaps in more muted tones. One example is the recent dust-up in California over changes to the University of California system's admissions procedures. Actually,…
FOR THE FIRST WEEK or so after September 11, the American media's coverage of the story was uniformly superb. It was, of course, inevitable that certain portions of the media would return to their usual obtuse navel-gazing. But the speed with which it happened is something to behold. The latest…
ONE OF THE MORE SURPRISING casualties of the post-September 11 political landscape in America is the intractable opposition to missile defense. Before the terrorist attacks, the prospects for moving forward on missile defense looked bleak. Democrats on the Senate Armed Services committee, led by…
IS THERE ANY DISASTER SO AWFUL, so overwhelming, that it cannot be transformed into just another landmark moment in the heroic personal odyssey of William Jefferson Clinton? Given the man's behavior since Sept. 11, the answer appears to be a big fat no. He's covering his ass, feeling our pain,…
THE RECENT DRAMA surrounding FBI agent Robert Hanssen comes at a time when we are reminded of another famous American spy case. April 1 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Whittaker Chambers, one of the true heroes of the 20th century's long twilight struggle against tyranny -- and…
WHEN A STATE COURT overturned Florida's eight-month-old school-choice program earlier this month, both sides reacted with emotion. It was "probably the worst day of our lives," said Tracy Richardson, mother of one of the 53 children who had received state "opportunity scholarships" to attend…
Civil War historian Bruce Catton once said, "Whatever we are looking for, we come to Washington in millions to stand in silence and try to find it." When I moved to Washington last June, I'm not sure I was looking for anything specific. I'd just spent my undergraduate years trying to ignore dorm…
RACIAL BEAN COUNTERS, always seeking grist for their ever grinding mills, have found their most spurious cause yet -- the lack of "diversity" on network TV shows. The NAACP led the way, with Kweisi Mfume calling last month for boycotts and even legal action against the networks. Now Hispanics,…
America has become schizophrenic about manners. By the millions we flock to scatological comedies, from the toilet-mouthed South Park to the masturbatory American Pie. And at the same time polls reveal that a huge majority believe American manners and morals have undergone a precipitous and…