The American Enterprise articles from May 1999

The American Enterprise archives from May 1999

Propaganda in America?
May 1, 1999... "Truth is something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not... something you can make up as you go along."--George Orwell, 1944 "There are no facts."--Michel Foucault, 1968 Lying is ancienter than Croesus, as old as...

Sidelights.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Kenya has an official government committee investigating the Y2K problem; its report is due in April 2000. ?? More than one company now makes fortune cookies for dogs. Fortunes include, "You can lead a master to the door, but you can't take him...

GET SMARTER ON SCHOOL REFORM.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... When the issue is education--and in politics these days, it often is--conservative pols need to come up with something more than school choice to talk about. True, choice would be a godsend in many urban areas. And it is one of the most humane...

AMERICANS WITH BAD ATTITUDES ACT.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Nicholas Panagopoulos is one more satisfied customer of the Americans with Disabilities Act--the George Bush-birthed monster that has given everyone from blind truckdrivers to deaf phone operators to disruptive high school students a license to...

THE GOOD OLD DAYS WEREN'T STAINLESS.
May 1, 1999... If you're fretting over America's relative indifference to White House scandals, and think previous generations would have been reliably outraged by today's chicanery, we suggest you consult your history. Start with Frederick Lewis Allen's...

GRAND ALLIANCE: CORRUPT UNIONS AND THE CLINTONITES.
May 1, 1999... Arthur Coia is president of the Laborers Union of North America. The union's 300,000 members do lots of unglamorous work at construction sites and other workplaces, and pay hefty union dues for the privilege. But while Coia represents...

THE VEEP IS A TRUTH-STRETCHER TOO.
May 1, 1999... From a March 17, 1999 filing by Associated Press reporter Calvin Woodward: When Vice President Al Gore opened his Iowa campaign this week, his privileged upbringing as the son of a senator was nowhere in sight. Instead, he talked about how...

JESSE JACKSON BLASTED OUT OF THE SKY.
May 1, 1999... T. J. Rodgers, the outspoken CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, has dared to say that would-be Emperor Jesse Jackson has no clothes. When Jackson announced he was bringing to Silicon Valley his crusade to force corporate America to hire more...

PROOF! MODERN ART MAKES YOU STUPID.
May 1, 1999... The next time some guy in a beret calls you a fogey for preferring classic art to avant-garde alternatives, quick: challenge him to a maze race. Frances Rauscher is a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh who has been...

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER.
May 1, 1999... Classic Version: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, laying in supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The...

CHINESE TAKE-OUT AT LOS ALAMOS.
May 1, 1999... Three years ago, on one of those beautiful spring days in D.C. that make you proud to be an American, the Clinton crew at the White House was busy with its morning exercise of counting Chinese money in the back room when some bad news hit....

STUPID INSTRUCTIONS.
May 1, 1999... * On Marks and Spencer Bread Pudding: Product will be hot after heating. * On a bar of Dial soap: Use like regular soap. * On a Japanese food processor: Not to be used for the other use. * On a bag of Fritos: You could be a winner!...

SUPERBABY.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... The brave new biological world edges closer every day. The latest twist is an ad placed in school newspapers at top universities from Stanford to Yale in which an anonymous couple are offering $50,000 for an undergrad's ova. But not just any...

WAKE-UP CALL.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... A couple issues ago we predicted that "the rights of men-who-just-love-children will be one of the next causes of America's fervid liberationists' (BIRD'S EYE, January/February 1999). Well, evidence has since accumulated that the campaign is...

WHAT $25,000 A YEAR OF TUITION BUYS.
May 1, 1999... The journal Philosophy and Literature has announced the winners of their Fourth Annual Bad Writing Contest. Though it's hard to believe that some people actually communicate this way, all entries are from real articles by real professors...

TRUE COLORS REVEALED.
May 1, 1999... A late-March story in the New York Times noted that Governor George W. Bush has been summoning experts to Texas to brief him on national issues, then made the nasty crack that "There may never have been a `serious' candidate who needed it...

EYES ON THE SKIES.(Interview)
May 1, 1999... Homer Hickam, Jr., 55, is a retired NASA engineer who worked on the U.S. space shuttle program, the Hubble Telescope, and the international space station. His memoir Rocket Boys, the true story of his rise from the West Virginia mining town of...

Indicators.
May 1, 1999... ENVIRONMENTALISTS VS. SCIENTISTS A book-length study comparing the views of environmental activists to those of scientific experts and the general public has just been published by academics Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter. Its title is...

Is Baseball Striking Out with the Public?
May 1, 1999... TWO CURMUDGEONLY LOVERS OF THE GAME THINK THERE IS MORE AILING IT THAN CAN BE CURED BY ONE HOME-RUN DERBY. Jonathan Yardley I retain a deep love for baseball, and hate to think its place in American life is fading. Yet I am convinced...

"Live" with TAE.
May 1, 1999... THE ARCHITECT OF AMERICA'S MOST STUNNING URBAN TURNAROUND IS SUDDENLY UNDER HEAVY FIRE FROM THE LIBERAL ESTABLISHMENT. HE MAY FACE THE FIRST LADY IN HIS NEXT RACE. Rudy Giuliani, Republican Mayor of New York City and almost certainly a...

"IT'S OUR TURN".
May 1, 1999... Swallowing the Lies of Bill Clinton In New Hampshire in the winter of 1992, I helped form a shivering cluster of hacks standing around Clinton spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers. The Gennifer Flowers tapes had all been transcribed and they proved to...

PATHOLOGICAL.
May 1, 1999... Bill Clinton's Tenuous Connection to the Truth "I want an America where `family values' live in our actions, not just our speeches." --Bill Clinton in his 1992 Democratic Convention acceptance address Yes, most, if not all,...

Lies IN OUR COURTROOMS.
May 1, 1999... LAWYERS PLAY TO WIN, BUT THERE ARE LINES THEY AREN'T SUPPOSED TO CROSS. An Irishman stopped before a grave in a cemetery whose tombstone declared: "Here lies a lawyer and an honest man." "An' who'd ever think," he murmured, "there'd...

MEDIA FAKES.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... WHAT'S BEHIND TODAY'S TROUBLING EPIDEMIC OF FALSIFIED JOURNALISM? BARNICLE COMPLETELY MADE UP A HEART-RENDING STORY ABOUT TWO BOYS IN A HOSPITAL'S CANCER WARD. LATE IN THE SPRING of 1998, 4,000 teenagers dressed in their most...

UNTRUTH IN ACADEME.
May 1, 1999... DAVID STOLL, an assistant professor at Middlebury College, doesn't seem like the kind of person who would be unsympathetic to Rigoberta Menchu. Menchu's autobiographical account of the civil war in Guatemala earned her adulation from the...

MISREPRESENTING THE HOLOCAUST.
May 1, 1999... IN FEBRUARY, President Clinton told the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. that "Adolf Hitler preached a perverted form of Christianity." That is patently untrue. Hitler was in fact an enemy of Christianity, and a pagan. Consider his...

THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT VIRUS.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... People think that what goes on in college English departments doesn't matter much to the rest of our country. But in fact, English departments have been a primary source of the epidemic of lying currently upon us. In the late 1960s and early...

FROM EUPHEMISM TO BLOODY LIES.
May 1, 1999... In the eighteenth-century France of painters Fragonard and Watteau, a lady told her confessor that she had "esteem" for a certain courtier. "Et combien de fois a-t-il vous estime?" ("And how many times has he `esteemed' you?"), the priest...

A LYING TONGUE LASTS ONLY A MOMENT.
May 1, 1999... Listening to President Clinton's explanation of how he didn't really lie in his grand jury testimony brought back fond memories of my grad school days. What Clinton did was take the words sex, alone, and is and proceed to "deconstruct" them....

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE STOP TEACHING TRUTH?
May 1, 1999... In the fall of 1996, I took part in a PBS program billed as a "Socratic dialogue." For an hour, I discussed moral questions with another ethics professor, a high school history teacher, and seven high school students. The program, "Ethical...

LYING'S THREAT TO THE LEFT.
May 1, 1999... For much of his career, Bob Fitch has been the prototypical man of the Left. Labor organizer, activist, Marxist intellectual, he draws from a long tradition of American radicalism that combines complex theory with an in-the-streets commitment....

Right Man for the Hour.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... THIS SUMMER MARKS THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF GERALD FORD'S RISE TO THE PRESIDENCY FOLLOWING RICHARD NIXON'S RESIGNATION. HE WAS THE... On August 9, 1974, Gerald Rudolph Ford of Grand Rapids, Michigan, became President of the United States...

GENTLE IN MANNER, STRONG IN DEED.
May 1, 1999... The President of the United States is America's moral, not just political, leader. Presidents must do right to achieve good. Gerald Ford knew that, and decency was his core. I can think of no one who a quarter-century ago could have done a...

NORMALCY COMES TO BEDLAM.
May 1, 1999... The first thing I noticed about the Ford takeover of the White House was the pipes. Jerry Ford was a pipe smoker. So, Washington being Washington--and people being sheep--as soon as he assumed the presidency one noticed an increasing...

"I NEVER ENCOUNTERED A HIDDEN AGENDA".
May 1, 1999... After the so-called smoking-gun tape was released on August 5, Vice President Gerald Ford, at a Cabinet meeting the next day, took the unprecedented step of dissociating from President Nixon. He would no longer defend the President's position...

THE "ANTI-CLINTON".(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... As President Clinton gave his testimony in the Lewinsky scandal, I was thinking about Gerald Ford. Like Bill Clinton, he is a graduate of Yale Law School, but the similarity ends there. Ford came to mind because I had heard him speak twice...

A DISSENTING VIEW.
May 1, 1999... To conservatives, as a rule, Presidents look better in retrospect. Another way to put this is that every President tends to make his predecessors look better than they did while they held office. Many conservatives now revere Harry Truman, of...

GOOD INSTINCT.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Presidents in our country lead by consent and persuasion, rooted in trust, not by command. Fortunately, President Ford brought with him some extraordinarily valuable attributes: an instinctive honesty, straightforwardness, and openness. His...

DANGERS VETOED.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... For 29 months, Gerald Ford successfully led our country, beset by a weakened economy, through its most serious constitutional crisis. Political turmoil at home and the oil crisis engendered in the Middle East had the nation reeling. Labor costs...

OF ETHICS AND FLINCHING.
May 1, 1999... I served in the House under Gerald Ford for almost ten years, and when he was chosen as Vice President there was nothing I wanted to add or subtract from his public or private character to fit the country's need. From Gerald Ford you always got...

President Ford speaks with The American Enterprise.
May 1, 1999... We recently dispatched Ben Stein, former Nixon speechwriter, lawyer, and current host of "Win Ben Stein's Money" on Comedy Central, to interview Gerald Ford at his home in Palm Springs, California. TAE: As a young congressman elected in...

BANNED BY THE FREE THINKERS.
May 1, 1999... Last year, the publishing house I head released a new book entitled Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism by E Carolyn Graglia. In the process we discovered what can happen to the truth when liberal dogma is at stake. Two small...

REFUSING TO LET FACTS GET IN THE WAY OF A GOOD STORY.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... I am an academic economist who decided to undertake large statistical studies of the effects that gun availability has on crime and death rates. To my surprise, I found that making it easier for everyday citizens to own guns actually reduced...

TAX TORTURE.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... TARKIO, MISSOURI--It's tax time again. One of the real disadvantages of being a self-employed farmer is income tax. Not because you pay more income taxes than other people do--because you don't--but because of the time, record-keeping, and...

BURGER QUEEN.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... ITHACA, NEW YORK--When I announced the change of my major from biology with pre-med aspirations to English, my advisor simply raised an eyebrow and asked if I planned to work at McDonald's for the rest of my life. "Actually," I quipped, "I've...

Keep Uncle Sam Out of the Stock Market.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... In his State of the Union address, President Clinton proposed investing some $700 billion of the Social Security Trust Fund in the stock market. Give him credit for admitting that the current program generates a rate of return on your...

The Case for a Tax Cut NOW (AND TAX REFORM NOT LONG AFTER).
May 1, 1999... U.S. leaders are relying too heavily on an expansive monetary policy to sustain our growing economy. Fiscal policies, meanwhile, are quite tight. While that has helped produce a budget surplus by squeezing lots of dollars out of taxpayers, it...

Free Market Opportunity on Savings Accounts.
May 1, 1999... A midst the appalling laundry list of new giveaways President Clinton proposed in his recent State of the Union address was one idea--allowing families to open Universal Savings Accounts (USAs) and make tax-deductible contributions in...

The Ford Impeachment.
May 1, 1999... On April 15, 1970, House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford coined a lasting truism when he told his colleagues and a packed press gallery that "an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers [it] to be at a...

Mixed Messages for Generation Y.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... What was it like at the movies these past few months? A blast if you were a 14-year-old boy. Not since the early 1980s--the last time teen flicks ruled Hollywood's roost--has there been such a crop of high school comedies and hormone-driven...

All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery.(Review)
May 1, 1999... All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery By Henry Mayer St. Martin's Press, 707 pages, $32.50 No one attacked the black slavery of the South with greater vehemence than a group of young, radical abolitionists who...

Eat the Rich.(Review)
May 1, 1999... Eat the Rich By P. J. O'Rourke Atlantic Monthly Press, 246 Pages, $24 Since 1776, when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, countless volumes have been written by people who call themselves economists, but in those 200-plus years,...

Elegy For Iris.(Review)
May 1, 1999... Elegy For Iris By John Bayley St. Martin's Press, 294 pages, $22.95 The late Iris Murdoch's dementia was one of those diabolical cosmic jokes, on the order of Milton's going blind or Beethoven's growing deaf. You wonder why it couldn't...

Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine.(Review)
May 1, 1999... Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine By Clay S. Conrad Cato Institute/Carolina Academic Press, 335 pages, $22.50 In a criminal trial, may the jury consider whether it is fair that the particular defendant be punished? Or are...

Dear America.(Brief Article)(Obituary)
May 1, 1999... Dear America By Karl Hess, 1975 Karl Hess's life was a quintessential modern American journey. He was reared mostly by his mother in Washington, D.C., in the 1930s. She had left his father because of his relentless tomcatting. Family...

Mistreating Treaties.(Review)
May 1, 1999... Jeremy Rabkin, The New Sovereignty, AEI Press, 1150 17th Street N. W., Washington, D.C. 20036. From the start, the U.S. government has been suspicious of international covenants. In the Federalist, John Jay argued that treaties would be...

The FCC: Enemy of the Future.(Review)
May 1, 1999... Thomas W. Hazlett, "Assigning Property Rights to Radio Spectrum Users: Why Did FCC License Auctions Take 67 Years?" in The Journal of Law and Economics (October 1998), University of Chicago Press, 7720 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, Illinois...

How Unions Keep Workers Unemployed.(Review)
May 1, 1999... Edward Bierhanzl and James Gwartney, "Regulations, Unions, and Labor Markets," in Regulation (Summer 1998), Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue N. W., Washington, D.C. 20001. America continues to lead the world in job creation, while...

Kill the Death Tax.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Dan Miller, The Economics of the Estate Tax, Joint Economic Committee, G-01 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510. Most taxes drag on our economy, and especially onerous is the estate tax, imposed by the federal government...

Make War Against Sex Predators.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Matthew Daniels and Dan Englund, Statutory Rape: When Adults Prey Sexually upon Children. Massachusetts Family Institute, 381 Elliott Street, Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts 02464. Find a household with a teenage single mother and an...

School Choice Helps Public Schools.(Review)
May 1, 1999... Nina Shokraii Rees, "Public School Benefits of Private School Vouchers," in Policy Review (January/February 1999), Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Avenue N.E., Washington, D. C. 20002. Recent research has demonstrated that voucher...

Flood Insurance Washout.(Brief Article)
May 1, 1999... Higher Ground: A Report on Voluntary Property Buyouts in the Nation's Flood-plains. National Wildlife Federation, 8925 Leesburg Pike, Vienna, Virginia 22184. Whenever there's a major flood, the federal government usually spends billions of...

A Faster Road to Mars.(Review)
May 1, 1999... John Tierney, "Martian Chronicle," in Reason (February 1999), 3415 South Sepulveda Boulevard #400, Los Angeles, California 90034. A long-term goal of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is a manned expedition to Mars,...

Will Japan Recover?(Review)
May 1, 1999... Peter Hartcher, "Can Japan Come Back?" in The National Interest (Winter 1998-99), 1112 16th Street N. W. #540, Washington, D. C. 20036. World War II Japan about $140 billion in today's dollars. The collapse of the Japanese "bubble economy"...

Opinion Pulse.(Polling Data)(Statistical Data Included)
May 1, 1999... LIARS Elected officials don't fare well in terms of their honesty and ethical standards. Similar proportions in 1943 and in 1997 agreed that it's almost impossible for people in politics to remain honest. Starting, it appears, with...

the Mail.
May 1, 1999... TAE thoroughly disappoints me. All your articles conform to conservative dogma and lack independent thinking. I believe your magazine would benefit from self-criticism and introspection. I most certainly am not a liberal, but it's clear TAE's...