National Review articles from August 2001

National Review archives from August 2001

Letters to the Editor.
August 6, 2001... The Marriage Amendment In the July 23 issue, the Editors ("In Need of Amendment") and Robert P. George ("The 28th Amendment") argue for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Conservatives ought to think harder before...

For the Record.(poll by the Washington Post shows a 58% approval rating for President George W. Bush)(this and other items are discussed)(Brief Article)
August 6, 2001... --In Washington Post poll, President Bush wins 58 percent approval rating. . . . Bush eulogizes John Cardinal O'Connor at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City: "The world will remember the gallant defender of children and their...

The Week.(some Democrats are questioning the shrinking of the federal budget surplus, and the funding of Medicare)(this and other topics are discussed)
August 6, 2001... --Ann Coulter, a contributor to National Review Online, had a sharp point: We won't know for sure that Gary Condit is guilty until Alan Dershowitz defends him. --Estimates of the federal budget surplus over the next decade are shrinking,...

Public Policy: Cell Division.(stem cell research: public and political opinion)(Brief Article)
August 6, 2001... President bush opposes federal funding for research on stem cells taken from human embryos because the research would destroy the embryos. He is under intense pressure to reverse his position. The media are almost as gung-ho for this cause as...

China: A Dangerous Decision.(2008 Olympics in China, compared with the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany)(Brief Article)
August 6, 2001... The awarding of the Olympic Games to Beijing is no light thing. People could die from it-or be tortured or banished to a dungeon or camp. Although it is is difficult to say with certainty how an event seven years from now will affect the...

Scandal: Son of Clinton.(the questionable behavior of Congressman Gary Condit)(Brief Article)
August 6, 2001... Reasonable people can certainly suspect Rep. Gary Condit of doing away with his lover Chandra Levy. Every passing day makes it more likely that she came to harm; Condit had a possible motive-the fear of exposure-while both his conduct of his...

Notes & Asides.
August 6, 2001... --Dear Bill: The longstanding mystery of how to parse He is risen has been resolved. The problem has been that it is Greek to you (and me), in which language an aorist tense can communicate a "completed past event that is not to be repeated."...

Bush by the (Poll) Numbers: How does he stand, and what's he doing?(President Bush's approval ratings are around 50%, although he is expected to get a boost from the tax rebate checks, an idea that was not his)
August 6, 2001... It's an article of faith inside the White House these days that George W. Bush will receive a big boost in political capital in the next few weeks, when millions of tax rebate checks begin arriving in mailboxes across the country. "When people...

Regrets Only . . . or, Why Bush should turn down the NAACP-flat.(suggestion that President George W. Bush should refuse to speak at NAACP meetings)
August 6, 2001... In his address to the recent meeting of the NAACP, Julian Bond crowed that the group was the "biggest, baddest civil-rights organization in the country." President Bush's natural assumption has been that repairing the breach between himself and...

Luck Be the Ladies?: The frat prez goes after the dames.(a "Winning Women" initiative by the Republican Party)
August 6, 2001... When members of the Republican National Committee meet in Boston later this month, they will be briefed on how to woo women voters. The presentation will include a startling electoral map of last November's results, showing that if only men had...

Immigrants for President: Why the foreign-born should be allowed to compete for the big job.
August 6, 2001... When President Bush spoke at Ellis Island on July 10, his speech was full of patriotic boilerplate: "America at its best is a welcoming society." It was a ho-hum address that just about any president might have given. Praising America's...

Liars for the Cause: When scholars ditch the truth.(Joseph J. Ellis)
August 6, 2001... Joseph J. Ellis may never have been in combat in Vietnam, but he is certainly getting shelled now. In June, the Boston Globe revealed that Ellis, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is also a...

A Spanish Disquisition: How one European nation can distinguish itself.(Spain and free trade)(Brief Article)
August 6, 2001... The subjective Geiger counter registers a lessening of anti-American sentiment, if only by comparison with France and Germany and the green wastes of Scandinavia. Thanks in part to the conservative government of President Jose Maria Aznar,...

Ugh, Wilderness!: The horror of 'ANWR,' the American elite's favorite hellhole.
August 6, 2001... Deadhorse, Alaska As I stand here looking at what must be the largest selection of porn magazines above the Arctic Circle (and an impressive display by any standards), I can't help thinking of a line from the 1973 film classic Papillon:...

Deterrence, but Updated: Where missile defense comes in-crucially.
August 6, 2001... The U.S. nuclear deterrent worked for 40 years against the Soviets, so why won't it work now against lesser powers, armed with drastically fewer nuclear weapons than Moscow? Once the cruder, practical arguments against a U.S. missile defense...

The Curse of Euro-Nationalism: Why the U.S. should beware the EU.(Industry Overview)
August 6, 2001... Istanbul The ancient city of Constantinople, whose mosques and minarets look down on the Bosporus that divides Asia from Europe and links the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, might seem an odd place from which to contemplate the new...

Witness and Friend: Remembering Whittaker Chambers on the centennial of his birth.(July 9, 2001 speech by William F. Buckley, Jr., presidential ceremony)(Transcript)
August 6, 2001... Editor's Note: The White House convened a full house (140 guests) at the Executive Office Building on July 9, to recall Whittaker Chambers. Chambers's son was present and brought in to display the Medal of Freedom awarded posthumously to...

The Long View.(Gary Condit)(Humor)(Brief Article)
August 6, 2001... From the Congressional Mailbag Dear Congressman Condit: Can I call you Gary? I'd like to. And I insist that you call me Barbara. You know, so many times, a person just wants to tell his story. A person in trouble or in pain just...

Profiles in Solipsism.(Review)
August 6, 2001... Washington, by Meg Greenfield (Public Affairs, 272 pp., $26) The Columnist, by Jeffrey Frank (Simon & Schuster, 240 pp., $22) Washington, d.c., may not be a bookish city, but it has inspired an unusual number of books. This literary...

The Other Washington.(Review)
August 6, 2001... Mark GaUvreau Judge Every few years, a politician or journalist publishes a novel or memoir that is declared to be a penetrating work about "the real Washington." This "real Washington" usually consists of capital-city cliches: power,...

A Tale of Two Fishes.(Review)
August 6, 2001... How Milton Works, by Stanley Fish (Harvard, 616 pp., $35) Trumpeted by its publisher as the author's "magnum opus" and "the definitive statement on Milton for our time," How Milton Works raises both very high and very low expectations....

JP2 Off-Center.(the design of the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C.)
August 6, 2001... I recently spent a few hours at the new Pope John Paul II Cultural Center, located near Catholic University and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. At the center's opening in March, President Bush declared that it...

Gwen & Eddie's Last Hurrah.(Review)
August 6, 2001... One reason European films can be more artistic than Hollywood ones is that the filmmakers are not indentured to the studio. There are no directives from the front office to clean up your act or change your ending. Two of the films discussed...

Judgment Days.(personal account: serving on a grand jury in New York City)(Brief Article)
August 6, 2001... America is a land of amateur lawyers, entertained by sensational investigations, from O.J. to JonBenet, and by televised legal mummers, from Judge Judy to Greta Van Susteren. But of all the jurisdictions in the United States, the County of New...

On the Right - Mortimer Adler Is Dead.(Brief Article)(Column)
August 6, 2001... NEW YORK, JUNE 29 Mortimer adler left school at 15 to work as a secretary to the editor of the New York Sun. Two years later he read Plato, and resolved to become a philosopher. That kind of thing doesn't happen very often; on the...

On the Right - The Ayatollah Comes.(Brief Article)(Column)
August 6, 2001... To New Jersey NEW YORK, JULY 10 Get a load of this! An epic struggle looming on the uses and abuses of political rhetoric; major contenders: Bret D. Schundler ("think of Schindler's List, then just change Shi to Shu," he says affably...

On the Right - On the Road to Mandalay.(Chinese human rights abuses and the 2008 Olympics)(Brief Article)(Column)
August 6, 2001... NEW YORK, JULY 13 From this quarter there was no call made on the Bush administration to heave into the Olympic Games question, seeking to obstruct the selection of Peking for the 2008 site. The problem for the United States was now as the...

Misanthrope's Corner.(Congressman Gary A. Condit)(Brief Article)
August 6, 2001... I've been sitting here trying to calculate how many times I've seen Gary Condit run down the Capitol's back stairs. I tried multiplying the number of days since the story broke by three (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News), and then multiplying by three...

For the Record.(Brief Article)
August 20, 2001... --As Treasury begins mailing $38 billion in rebates to 90 million taxpayers, President Bush comments: "I said the federal government was overcharging [Americans], and on your behalf I demanded a refund. Congress worked with me in a bipartisan...

The Week.
August 20, 2001... --Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has named his child Aidan Caohman Vieques Kennedy (note the second-to-the-last name). That's not the strangest Kennedy-family moniker, however. We understand-seriously now-that Teddy's dog is named Splash. --The...

Politics: Values Lite.(Brief Article)
August 20, 2001... The presidential election of 2000 was a stark demonstration of neoconservative author Ben Wattenberg's proposition that "values matter most." Among whites (81 percent of the electorate), regular churchgoers backed Bush and more secular voters...

Foreign Policy: Home Alone?(President Bush called isolationist)(Brief Article)
August 20, 2001... In a time of world peace and stability, it can be hard to pick holes in a president's conduct of foreign policy, but George W. Bush's critics have found a bad rap to hang on him: He is an isolationist. Senate majority leader Tom Daschle...

Culture Watch: Immaterial Girl.(Madonna, entertainer)(Brief Article)
August 20, 2001... Madonna, at age 42 older, but no wiser, embarked on her first tour in eight years. Tickets in Philadelphia and New York went for hundreds of dollars a pop, and that part of the world that pays attention to such things gaped at the spectacle....

Notes and Asides.(Letter to the Editor)
August 20, 2001... --Dear Mr. Buckley: You are right that "begging the question" (Notes & Asides, June 11) involves a failure to answer it, but the full meaning is more specific. A begged question remains unanswered because in some fashion the answer is assumed...

George Bush's House Training - The president is learning to work with his party in Congress.
August 20, 2001... 'I would say Johnny is improving," says one senior Republican aide on Capitol Hill, a bit hopefully. "He's learning to work better with others." "Johnny," in this case, is the president of the United States, and in the view of some...

Once More, with Feeling - Back to the drawing board on taxes.(Bush economy)
August 20, 2001... An ominous phrase made its debut on July 25: "the Bush economy." Asked to assess the administration so far, Senate majority leader Tom Daschle replied, "I would say that the most troubling aspect of the Bush presidency is the Bush economy. The...

The Vex of Mex - Why Bush's amnesty proposal will backfire.(proposal to grant amnesty)(to undocumented aliens)(from Mexico)
August 20, 2001... President Bush's proposal to grant an amnesty to illegal Mexican immigrants-that is to say, Mexican president Vicente Fox's proposal that Bush should grant such an amnesty-is, to date, almost the only policy embraced by the Bush administration...

Silence of the Frankenfoodies - They care about turnips, not people.
August 20, 2001... 'This warfare against nature must end once and for all," Michael Fox declared at a rally. "We are very clever little simians, aren't we? Manipulating the bases of life and thinking we're little gods." Fox-not the actor, but the senior scholar...

Cash Bar - How trial lawyers bankroll the Democratic party.
August 20, 2001... The Democratic party has come full circle on tobacco. In 1988, Al Gore boasted that he had "raised tobacco": "I've hoed it. I've dug in it. I've chopped it, I've shredded it, spiked it" and so on. Then he waged a ferocious anti-tobacco...

Welcome to 'Tort Hell' - West Virginia, that is. A 'doctors crisis'.(doctor shortage in state caused by legal atmosphere)
August 20, 2001... The state of West Virginia, no stranger to problems, has a severe one on its hands now: a "doctors crisis." That's what many are calling it, and with good reason. West Virginia is losing doctors every day; communities are going without care; no...

The Road to Reform - How the trial lawyers can be fought.(tort system reform)
August 20, 2001... Imagine yourself the CEO of a major corporation approached by your chief marketer with plans for next year's sales campaign. "Let's save lots of money by putting fewer features on next year's widgets," he says. "Then let's ask our customers to...

The Numinous Negro - His importance in our lives; why he is fading.
August 20, 2001... Earlier this year, Al Sharpton led an abortive putsch against Jesse Jackson, though its significance was greater than he, or Jackson, suspected, for it involved someone more important than either man. Both Sharpton and Jackson know this person...

D.C. Blue-Very Blue - The force that Marion Barry built (or wrecked).
August 20, 2001... Jaywalking may be a petty crime, but on the night of March 30, 1967, it had disastrous consequences. At the corner of 13th and U Streets, in the Upper Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C., a young black man tried to cross against the light....

Weed Whackers - The anti-marijuana forces, and why they're wrong.
August 20, 2001... Rarely do trial balloons burst so quickly. During the recent British campaign, Tory shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe had no sooner proposed tougher penalties for marijuana possession than a third of her fellow Tory shadow-cabinet ministers...

The Long View.(humorous list of drugs to be approved)(Humor)(Brief Article)
August 20, 2001... The following drugs are awaiting FDA approval. Researchers are invited to submit all relevant clinical data. shaymitol(tm). Symptoms: multiple, including an inability to refuse an invitation to appear on television; a willingness to live in...

Entitlement Publishing.(Review)
August 20, 2001... The Wind Done Gone, by Alice Randall (Houghton Mifflin, 210 pp., $22) 'No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures," said Dr. Johnson, right as always. As proof of his point, I offer in evidence Gone with the Wind. Never has a middlebrow...

The First'Black Conservative'?(Review)
August 20, 2001... Rac[e]ing to the Right, by George S. Schuyler (Tennessee, 224 pp., $27.50) It is hard to think of anyone who is, or has been, a black conservative, in the full sense of the word "conservative." Most of those who are called black...

Abandoned Ship.(Review)
August 20, 2001... In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors, by Doug Stanton (Holt, 333 pp., $25) John Erskine's famous essay, "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent," was first articulated as his 1913...

Sickness and Health.(Review)
August 20, 2001... Saving Milly: Love, Politics, and Parkinson's Disease, by Morton Kondracke (Public Affairs, 320 pp., $25) Morton Kondracke is a veteran journalist and syndicated columnist, a television "talking head" best known as the eminently reasonable...

Dylan and Tradition.
August 20, 2001... To greybeards nostalgic for their granola days, Bob Dylan's 60th birthday was a poignant reminder of how long in the tooth they're getting. To less nostalgic souls, the sight of another 1960s icon confronting age is a welcome rebuke to the...

Apes & Scrapes.(Review)
August 20, 2001... This summer's movies are even more disheartening than the usual dog-day fare. They are less concerned with human beings than with robots, dinosaurs, cats and dogs, and monkeys. Perhaps this is why so many reviewers have gone ape over Ghost...

Books Shelf.(Review)(Brief Article)
August 20, 2001... It was inevitable that the popular success of the "greatest generation" books about World War II would prompt a renewed interest in that war's antecedent. One of our best (and most readable) military historians, John S. D. Eisenhower, has just...

On the Right - W.'s Strange Flirtation.(Brief Article)
August 20, 2001... NEW YORK, JULY 17 It is, alas, hard to measure the collapse of the Bush administration in the matter of education. The bill that is making its way through Congress has good points in it, even as it can be said, with Christian resolution,...

On the Right - Way to Go, Kay.(Brief Article)(Obituary)
August 20, 2001... NEW YORK, JULY 20 The death of Katharine Graham has got more attention than the death of anyone else in recent memory. This is so because she became a mythogenic figure in her profession: a woman; a victim of a deranged husband; unworldly...

On the Right - Countdown Time for Bush.(Brief Article)
August 20, 2001... NEW YORK, JULY 27 Yesterday an old and revered friend in casual conversation over the telephone said that President Bush will soon be ruling on the matter of embryonic-stem-cell research. "Of course, I'm for it, and you're against it." His...

Misanthrope's Corner.(Brief Article)
August 20, 2001... Global warming, anyone? Anyone? Just as I thought, so let's get to Condit-Levy. This is the first time in the ten years I have been lurking back here that I have written on the same subject twice in a row, but there are reasons for my...