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.
AND IN other baseball news . . .
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
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
THIS YEAR it's really, really bad--so bad that I'm going to admit it publicly and ask our readers for help.
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…
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?
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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.
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