The American Enterprise articles from September 2003

The American Enterprise archives from September 2003

Men--it's in their nature. (Bird's Eye).(Editorial)
September 1, 2003... This past spring, my son spent a month in Israel with his senior class. Only one activity disappointed him. While camping in the Negev Desert, special counselors from a progressive-socialist kibbutz paid a visit and led the students through a...

Sidelights.
September 1, 2003... Fifty percent of Americans believe Hillary Rodham Clinton's new memoir Living History should be filed in the history section of libraries and bookstores, according to CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. Twenty-two percent believe it belongs in the...

Belgium waffles. (Scan).
September 1, 2003... An old adage says that democracies do not wage war against each other. Democratic nations, nonetheless, are finding a new way to express their disdain for their allies' foreign policies: They take the heads of government to court. Since...

American iron lady. (Scan).
September 1, 2003... Phyllis Schlafly's critics have accused her of hypocrisy for celebrating traditional women's roles while pursuing an activist career. But she recently told the Washington Times that there is no contradiction. "Feminism is not about female...

Cancer scare? Don't sweat it. (Scan).
September 1, 2003... If your wife or sweetheart is more a sweat-hard, or if her underarms begin to look more like those of a gorilla than the clean-shaven armpits you remember, all is not lost: She has undoubtedly been taken in by one of the most cruel cancer myths...

Electric dreams come true. (Scan).
September 1, 2003... Toyota motors recently unveiled an unassuming mid-sized sedan. The 2004 Prius, a streamlined jellybean-like car, stacks up nicely against cars like the Ford Taurus, Honda Accord, or Chevrolet Malibu when it comes to features and amenities. From...

Just sixteen words. (Scan).
September 1, 2003... "It is 16 words, and has become an enormously overblown issue," said national security advisor Condoleeza Rice, dismissing the faulty statement about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in President Bush's last State of the Union Address....

Real sex-ed polls. (Scan).
September 1, 2003... A recent poll suggests that parents aren't as gung-ho about comprehensive sex education (as opposed to abstinence-based education) as is commonly believed. The libertine Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS),...

Nobel Peace posturing. (Scan).
September 1, 2003... In 2000, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to then-South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung. He was honored with the prize largely because of a celebrated June 2000 meeting with North Korean president Kim Jong-Il, in which the two leaders vowed that...

The left wing. (Scan).
September 1, 2003... Lawrence O'Donnell, a former aide to Senator Pat Moynihan and occasional TV pundit, was tapped by TV writer/producer Aaron Sorkin to serve as a consultant on NBC's "The West Wing." That led to O'Donnell's getting his own show this year, "Mr....

A history of French-hating. (Scan).
September 1, 2003... Mark Twain made this observation in his notebook in 1879: "The French are the connecting link between man and the monkey." A century later, some would say Twain was too generous. Jonah Goldberg, an editor at National Review, places them...

Living lies. (Scan).(Editorial)
September 1, 2003... Hillary Rodham Clinton's new book, Living History, weaves a tale that only the most gullible will be able to swallow whole. Unfortunately for Clinton, many will find little value in reading a book that so thoroughly strains credulity. The...

Washington internships. (Scan).
September 1, 2003... Are you a reliable student interested in journalism, politics, and public policy? The American Enterprise magazine is offering full- and part-time Washington internships. Positions are unpaid, but provide a chance to be part of a team...

The men of Congress. (Indicators).
September 1, 2003... For this special TAE installment on men, the INDICATORS editors decided to conduct our own survey of the men currently in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. How many of the individuals in Congress notably exhibit one or more of the...

Conspicuously un-masculine. (Indicators).
September 1, 2003... Clearly there are a large number of extraordinarily accomplished, even valiant, men in our national legislative bodies. There are also some who have achieved nothing in the way of the traditional male milestones. Fully 40 offices reported...

Military men. (Indicators).
September 1, 2003... Of the 150 men in Congress with military service to their credit, 87 are Republicans, and 63 are Democrats. We broke those down by service era and found that GOP and Democratic congressmen served at roughly similar rates in World War II...

The XX party and the XY party. (Indicators).
September 1, 2003... Women have recently piled into the Democratic Party in disproportionate numbers, while men have tended to vote for and join the Republican Party. Quite apart from this demonstrated inclination of the sexes to separate by party, our data...

What really matters: spending, not deficits. (Forward Observer).
September 1, 2003... Here's a mystery: Why don't more Americans want a tax cut? Congress did finally pass President Bush's tax-relief plan, but it was an intense struggle, and, in the end, the total reductions were cut in half. The plan offered something for...

Choosing sides. (Politico).
September 1, 2003... The Sunday morning television shows love to pronounce winners at the end of each week's news cycle. But they ignore the important question of who will win over the next ten or 20 years. Are American politics moving rightward? Or leftward? ...

Lew Hicks: he's a Navy SEAL-turned-successful-businessman who could beat just about anyone in a fight but prefers communication to combat. ("Live" with TAE).
September 1, 2003... Lew Hicks epitomizes the masculine man: He knows how to fight but uses violence only as a last resort. Since leaving the Navy SEALs seven years ago, he's built a 200-person company devoted to teaching law enforcement agencies (and a handful of...

The return of manly leaders and the Americans who love them.
September 1, 2003... Many years ago, Chris Matthews--now famous on TV--hit on an interesting formulation: He said the Democrats were the "mommy party" and the Republicans the "daddy party." That is, the Democrats were "nurturers," concerned with health policy and...

Why we need macho men.
September 1, 2003... With many Republicans excited by the possibility that former Mr. Olympia bodybuilder and current Terminator 3 star Arnold Schwarzenegger may run for governor of California, the connection between masculinity and leadership charisma needs...

Men on men: intellectual locker room talk. (The State of Modern Manhood--What Men Think).
September 1, 2003... The American Enterprise and the Internet publication FrontPage recently joined forces to conduct an on-line discussion about men today. Jamie Glazov moderated the symposium. The panelists included: * James Bowman, resident scholar at the...

The kind of men society needs--and women want. (The State of Modern Manhood--What Men Think).
September 1, 2003... The American Enterprise recently invited six spirited women to come to our offices to talk about the condition of the male species. For comparison's sake, we asked many of the same questions we posed to the male panelists in our previous...

The manliness of men.
September 1, 2003... Today the very word "manliness" seems obsolete. There are other words, such as "courage," "frankness," or "confidence," that convey the good side of manliness without naming a sex. But to use them in place of "manliness" begs the question...

The new science of sex.
September 1, 2003... Two centuries ago, protofeminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a treatise entitled "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" in which she theorized that men and women are essentially the same. The roles they play, she suggested, are merely social...

The car and the man.
September 1, 2003... The automobile--the Toyota, the Cadillac, the Buick, the Subaru, the Ford, the Jaguar, the Plymouth, the Bentley--is essentially a dream. No, it's better than that. It is a dream come true. For men. For all of his existence, from the stone...

The manliness of art.
September 1, 2003... From the modest semi-attached house where he spent his early childhood, Alexander Stoddart could get a good view of a roadside monument to Sir William Wallace--the Scottish insurgent these days better known as Braveheart, courtesy of Mel...

Me man, me hunt!
September 1, 2003... When you reach Sidney, Nebraska in the late summer, you've driven about two hours since you've seen anything green. Or any water at all. lust the brown of wheat fields during harvest, parched pasture, and a blue sky that goes on forever. ...

Boys under attack: Christina Hoff Sommers was right.
September 1, 2003... Three years ago, Christina Hoff Sommers presented a radically titled book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men. Back then, a war against boys seemed an odd charge in a society that had accepted as fact the...

Alamo battles. (Hollywood Report).
September 1, 2003... Last year, 48-year-old director Ron Howard stood next to Texas governor Rick Perry at the Governor's Mansion in Austin looking at a painting of the Battle of the Alamo. Both men were hopeful the scene would come to life on the big screen: Davy...

My man of iron. (In real life: first-person America).
September 1, 2003... KAILUA-KONA, HAWAII -- "I was wondering how my body was going to do it from the ten-mile mark of the run onward. But during the last quarter mile of the marathon the crowd was loud and supportive. I never had so many people cheer for me." So...

Unfortunate son. (Flashback).
September 1, 2003... To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero If exasperated sons of nutty mothers need a patron saint, why not call on poor reviled Robert T. Lincoln, son of Abraham and Mary? The wild Bush...

Liable to suffer. (the Malpractice Economist).(Editorial)
September 1, 2003... As a Briton, I am used to health service in crisis. Britain now spends only 6 percent of its gross domestic product on health care; America spends 13 percent. British hospital wards are forced to close regularly, doctors work such long hours...

Capturing the apocalypse.(Gulag: A History)(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Gulag: A History By Anne Applebaum Doubleday, 720 pages, $35 Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History is nothing short of a masterpiece. Relying on official archives, personal stories, accounts by inmates, and reports by those who visited or heard...

I'll take my stand ... Yankee style.(Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette)(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette By Bill Kauffman Henry Holt, 224 pages, $22 TAE associate editor Bill Kauffman writes with a certain petulance and a decided panache. There is a puckish edge to his sentences. He is a contrarian writer...

Church and state.
September 1, 2003... The Naked Public Square By Richard John Neuhaus Last fall, Ashley Woodiwiss, a political n science professor at Wheaton College cut short his "Gandhi, King, and Havel" seminar to let me ask his upper level students about their beliefs on...

Buffalo scam. (Now Playing).(Buffalo Soldiers)(Movie Review)
September 1, 2003... It would be easy to go after Buffalo Soldiers for being unpatriotic. But that would be giving the filmmakers too much credit. Skittish and unsure of itself, Buffalo Soldiers may tell the story of a drug-dealing military clerk at a poorly...

Keep Congress going. (Politics).
September 1, 2003... Lloyd Cutler, et al., Preserving Our Institutions: The First Report of the Continuity of Government Commission, June 4, 2003, the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution (continuityofgovernment.org) On September 11,...

Let the market fix medicare. (Science and Medicine).
September 1, 2003... Newt Gingrich, The Future of Human Longevity: How Markets and Innovation Can Transform Medicare, June 3, 2003, Senate Special Committee on Aging (thomas.loc.gov) In testimony before a special Senate committee on aging, AEI senior fellow...

Castro the crook. (Other Countries).
September 1, 2003... Mark Falcoff, "Castro's Gambit," in Commentary, June 2003 (commentary.org) In April 2003, Fidel Castro's Cuban regime arrested over 70 human rights activists, put them on "trial" (with no effective defense allowed), and sentenced them to...

A Mid-East solution? (Other Countries).
September 1, 2003... Martin Indyk, "A Trusteeship for Palestine," in Foreign Affairs, May/June 2003 (foreignaffairs.org) Despite a long series of promises to stop, Palestinian terrorists have continued to attack Israel in the wake of every peace agreement....

Control the funds. (Business And Economics).
September 1, 2003... Tracie Woidtke, et al., "Reining in Activist Funds," in Harvard Business Review, March 2003 (harvardbusinessonline.org) Public employee pension funds now rank as some of the nation's largest stockholders. Many of these funds, such as...

A bad solution. (Business And Economics).
September 1, 2003... Richard Epstein, "How Not to Prevent Another Enron," in Hoover Digest, Spring 2003 (hooverdigest.org) The high-profile troubles of Enron, Tyco, and MCI (Worldcom) have led many Americans to believe that corporate governance has simply gone...

A third way on drug law. (Society).
September 1, 2003... David Boyum and Mark A. R. Kleiman, "Breaking the Drug-Crime Link" in The Public Interest, Summer 2003 (thepublicinterest.com) In public policy debates, the case for drug legalization is usually pitted squarely against arguments for...

Men today. (Opinion Pulse).
September 1, 2003... The polling archive at the American Enterprise Institute contains dozens of studies on women's attitudes--their concerns, their politics, their goals--but hardly any that focus solely on men's attitudes. Both men and women see changes from the...

Guy talk. (Opinion Pulse).
September 1, 2003... Men are happy with their lives, their marriages, and their families. Job satisfaction is high, too. Sixty-six percent of men compared to 94 percent of women expect their partner to work for pay. Women say men spend, more time working for pay...

Stereotypes about guys. (Opinion Pulse).
September 1, 2003... Men are more likely than women to be fans of professional baseball, football, golf, and auto racing. Men and women generally agree on stereotypes about the sexes. Large majorities of men and women say that men like gadgets and want to control...

The mail.(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... As a former reporter and editor for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, as well as a former press relations manager for a major corporation, I applaud your July/August issue ("How the Media Press our Hot Buttons"). Over the...

Last gasp.
September 1, 2003... "Get lost! We're having girl talk." Boys, go play outside for a while--your dad's hard drive has crashed & he needs a little time to reboot. "Have I ever told you know how beautiful you are when you agree with me?" "Never mind...