National Review articles from December 2002

National Review archives from December 2002

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
December 9, 2002... I have my own contribution to Jay Nordlinger's delightful linguistic observations ("'Gutter' Politics," Nov. 11). I think back on my days of sipping Darjeeling tea on the verandah of the Gall Face hotel in Colombo, Ceylon, a half-century...

The Week.(notable events and figures in politics)
December 9, 2002... -- How many times during the midterm campaign did Democrats say that a vote for Republicans was a vote to abolish Social Security, ban abortion, gut environmental laws, and put right-wing extremists on the bench? The people voted. Let the fun...

AT WAR: Mark Your Calendar.
December 9, 2002... It's been just a few short days, and Iraq has already violated Security Council resolution 1441 -- twice. It violated the resolution in the very letter that purported to accept it. The resolution required Iraq to comply "fully"; Iraq responded...

THE DEMOCRATS: A Turn for the Worse.
December 9, 2002... Democrats spent the first weeks after the election telling themselves pleasing stories about why they got an unexpected drubbing. It was because they hadn't been themselves. If Democrats had only opposed war in Iraq and come out for the...

Notes & Asides.
December 9, 2002... -- Dear Bill: Wasn't the election wonderful? I confess I was a little surprised, didn't think we'd do quite that well. In the Deeper Meanings department, I sense that a lot of people are finally realizing that Democrats are simply...

A Risk and an Opportunity: What to do about Medicare.
December 9, 2002... A cat who sits on a hot stove, Mark Twain observed, will never again sit on any stove -- cold or hot. As the new Republican majority in Congress promises to avoid the mistakes of 1995 and 1996, it's hard not to wonder: Are these scalded cats...

Think IRAs: One solution to three problems.(Social Security reform)
December 9, 2002... How well did Republicans do in the 2002 elections? So well that the best spin the Democrats have been able to put on the results is that Republicans will now have to shoulder all the burden of governing. Presumably this burden would have been...

Junior Gets Frisky: The ambition of young Harold Ford.
December 9, 2002... A conservative might be tempted to say that Democratic representative Harold Ford Jr. is growing in office. In 1999, Ford, then 29 years old, scored a perfect 100 in the annual index of congressional liberalism compiled by Americans for...

The Bush INS: Time for accountability.
December 9, 2002... 'I knew a lot of folks who are naturalized citizens and immigrants," James Ziglar lamely responded when asked at a House hearing last March what specialized experience qualified him to serve as commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization...

Man Bites Dog: The Axis of Evil takes on canines.
December 9, 2002... If a race of super-intelligent dogs were to land their spaceships on Earth, we would not have a hard time convincing them to join the U.S. in the "War on Terror." They wouldn't even need to see that infamous al-Qaeda tape of the dog being...

Whose Majority?: A Democratic thesis and (a dollop of) wishful thinking.("The Emerging Democratic Majority")(Book Review)
December 9, 2002... It seems a little unfair to comment on a book entitled The Emerging Democratic Majority a few months after its publication and a few weeks after an election in which the Republicans increased their majority in the House and secured a majority...

Conquest's Conquest: A man and his admirers.(author Robert Conquest)
December 9, 2002... We're in something of a Robert Conquest moment -- but then, we've always been in such a moment, at least since 1968, when Conquest published his book on Stalin's rule, The Great Terror. That was the book that shut them up. Well, many of them,...

The Long View.(parodies of political diaries)
December 9, 2002... The Campaign Diaries Very Special Mopping Up(tm) Edition From the diary of Terry McAuliffe: . . . which, in some ways, is actually a "win" for us, in the sense that by winning, the Republicans have, in a sense, "lost" by "gaining...

Voices of the One God.("The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are")(Book Review)
December 9, 2002... The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are, by Norman Podhoretz (Free Press, 390 pp., $30) 'Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanu-el." The time is the late 8th century b.c., and the speaker is...

Welcoming the Enemy.("Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores")(Book Review)
December 9, 2002... Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores, by Michelle Malkin (Regnery, 332 pp., $27.95) Even more than other areas of the law, immigration policy tends to be made by anecdote....

Oslo and Other Illusions.("The High Cost of Peace: How Washington's Middle East Policy Left America Vulnerable to Terrorism")(Book Review)
December 9, 2002... The High Cost of Peace: How Washington's Middle East Policy Left America Vulnerable to Terrorism, by Yossef Bodansky (Prima, 652 pp., $27.95) On a fine September day in 1993, the so-called Oslo peace process reached its zenith in a signing...

Books in Brief.("Ghost Image")(Book Review)(Brief Article)
December 9, 2002... Ghost Image, by Joshua Gilder (Simon & Schuster, 368 pp., $23) Reagan speechwriter Joshua Gilder has donned a new hat, that of novelist. In this, his first effort, Gilder tells the dark and suspenseful story of a plastic surgeon, Jackson...

The Eternal Round.
December 9, 2002... Somerset Maugham said that if you sat in the Cafe de la Paix in Paris long enough, everyone would pass by. The force of his observation depends on grasping the full meaning of passing by. Everyone will appear, and, just as suddenly, disappear....

On the Right.(Column)
December 9, 2002... Burying Wellstone NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 1 There was even speculation about how Paul Wellstone would have reacted to his own memorial service. The first hour was reverential, but the world knows what then happened, namely a frenetic...

What's Right.(entertainment industry and War on Terror)(Column)
December 9, 2002... Oil Smear A year ago, Hollywood was volunteering to join the war on terror. Last week, some of its leading luminaries defected to the other side. A group of influential people from the entertainment world, including Laurie David, the...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
December 23, 2002... --Jonah Goldberg's jingoistic piece, "Bomb Canada" (Nov. 25), reminds me of Pierre Trudeau's remark that living as a neighbor of the U.S. is like going to bed with a 1,000-pound gorilla. Mr. Goldberg's best hope is that Attorney General...

The Week.
December 23, 2002... -- Saddam Hussein has been a very naughty boy and may need a spanking. If so, Hans Blix has the right man for the job: Jack McGeorge of Woodbridge, Va., U.N. weapons inspector and co-founder of a group called Black Rose -- dedicated to S&M....

AT WAR: Against Farce.
December 23, 2002... The December 8 deadline for Iraq to reveal its atomic-, biological-, and chemical-weapons programs comes after we go to press, but before most readers will get this issue. Think of it as the bank of the Rubicon. The U.N. monitors have...

AT WAR II: A New Day.
December 23, 2002... Who is the enemy in the Terror War? Al-Qaeda, obviously, and the Taliban (R.I.P.). Iraq and Iran are charter members of the Axis of Evil. Other radical Arab regimes are either sitting tight or (in the case of Yemen) on their best behavior. ...

POLITICS: Frustrated and Dizzy.(presence of conservative media bia)
December 23, 2002... 'The media is kind of weird these days," said Al Gore. Let us interpret that for you: There are some conservative voices getting through, and that's not at all what Gore and other liberal Democrats are used to. From birth, they expected a...

Notes and Asides.(usage of who and whom)(Column)
December 23, 2002... -- Dear Mr. Buckley: Anent the objective form of the personal pronoun (Sept. 16), the who/whom distinction is not only traditional but still useful, especially in initial position as an indicator of which way the rest of the sentence will run....

Unions, Busted: But there is much more 'busting' to do.
December 23, 2002... The tart and tony Prime Rib steakhouse in downtown Washington has long been a favorite of officials of the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers. In fact, Jake West, the former president of the...

The Air War at Home: An environmental policy that everyone should love.
December 23, 2002... In the last week of November, the Bush administration handed down a new regulation that will simultaneously reduce air pollution and increase energy conservation, all without costing either taxpayers or consumers a dime. Is everybody happy? Not...

As Miss World Turns: Swimsuits, ball gowns, and riots.
December 23, 2002... The Miss World competition is much closer to a fashion show than to a strip show. Contrary to the morbid fantasies of the sterner feminists, men do not much enjoy watching pretty girls prance up and down in bathing suits as a preliminary to...

God's Commie: The ongoing achievement of Alexander Yakovlev.
December 23, 2002... This summer they were carrying out restoration work in the basement of the Russian Supreme Court in Moscow, and discovered down there a number of skeletons from Stalin's day. In a courthouse. Imagine it. These were men and women on whom the...

White's Not Right: How Democrats use Rush Limbaugh.
December 23, 2002... Let us take as a starting-off point two seemingly contradictory things. First, Tom Daschle is not a particularly stupid man. Second, his comments on November 20, about Rush Limbaugh, sounded as if he were reading them from notes written in...

Chick-Tac-Toe: A prized fight in Las Vegas.
December 23, 2002... Most people go to Las Vegas for the gambling. Dazzled by neon, crazed by greed and Wayne Newton, they challenge the odds, trying to outwit the trickster goddess, Lady Luck herself. But I was there for a different, wilier adversary. I was in...

Bad Lands, Bad Votes: Putting Tim Johnson over the top, by any means necessary.
December 23, 2002... On Election Day, Noma Sazama knew something unusual was going on the moment she arrived at her polling place, the St. Thomas Parish Hall in Mission, South Dakota. Sazama, a member of the local election board, noticed several strangers in the...

How They Did It: An 'evil one' confesses, and boasts.(Ramzi Muhammad Abdullah bin al-Shibh)
December 23, 2002... Sitting on the floor of his Karachi apartment, Ramzi bin al-Shibh laid out in stunning detail the anatomy of the 9/11 attacks. As one of the masterminds of September 11, he had a lot to share. Talking this June with a reporter from al-Jazeera...

Out of Lebanon: The fate of Christians, the fate of a country.
December 23, 2002... The old man standing outside Brooklyn's Maronite cathedral after Sunday liturgy is just back from a visit to his native Lebanon. His face is grim, his tone close to desolate. "It's over for the Christians there," he says. "There is no future....

The Long View.(satirical poem about House of Saud)(Poem)
December 23, 2002... From the House of Saud to You Greetings, Friends! Some of you may think it's odd To get a Christmas Poem from the House of Saud. But we're for real -- don't be cynical! Don't be (oh, let's say it!) so rabbinical! Christmas is a...

Living Intelligence.("Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse")(Book Review)
December 23, 2002... Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse, by Roger Kimball (Ivan R. Dee, 384 pp., $28.95) I was not far into this book when I experienced a totally unexpected emotion. From Roger Kimball, the managing...

True and False Faces.("The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror")(Book Review)
December 23, 2002... The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror, by Stephen Schwartz (Doubleday, 288 pp., $25) More than a year after the tragic events of 9/11, the debate about the causes of Islamic terrorism continues unabated. On one...

Defending the West.("The West and The Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat")(Book Review)
December 23, 2002... The West and The Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, by Roger Scruton (ISI, 200 pp., $19.95) Will the nation-state, one of the premier achievements of modern Western civilization, survive? This is the question Roger Scruton poses...

Keepers Without Peace.("Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s: Causes, Solutions, and U.S. Interests")(Book Review)
December 23, 2002... Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s: Causes, Solutions, and U.S. Interests, by Frederick H. Fleitz Jr. (Praeger, 248 pp., $39.95) With his good intentions and his blue helmet, the U.N. peacekeeper was an icon of post-World War II...

Charisma and Other Facts.
December 23, 2002... The young Russian violinist Maxim Vengerov is undertaking an unusual concert tour. When he shows up, he brings only his violin. There's no piano, no accompanist. Vengerov does have a stool and a microphone. He likes to banter with his audience...

On the Right.(political analysis from conservative perspective)(Column)
December 23, 2002... Afloat in Paradoxes NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 19 Two days at sea, with only CNN and the ship's company to keep us abreast of the news. But the company is lively, and paradoxes are always with us. On Monday two airline events were...

What's Right.(Arab-Americans and Islamic fundamentalism)
December 23, 2002... Deadly Dangerous "At some times I feel like a member of the Jewish community in Germany in the latter stages of the Weimar Republic." -- Ibrahim Hooper, Council on American-Islamic Relations, quoted in the Washington Post, November 30,...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
December 31, 2002... --In Michael Potemra's review of Norman Podhoretz's new book ("Voices of the One God," Dec. 9), we learn that Mr. Podhoretz claims that Isaiah was not predicting the coming of Jesus. But see Luke 4:17-21: "And there was delivered unto him...

The Week.(current events, commentary)(Column)
December 31, 2002... -- A headline coming soon: "sen. lott opposes national missile defense -- fears its effect on blacks and other Minorities." -- Our recent cover story charging that South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson's 524-vote victory over Republican challenger...

Politics: Vacant Lott.(Trent Lott)
December 31, 2002... Sen. Thurmond turned 100 on December 5, when Sen. Lott said, "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we [Mississippians] voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these...

Notes & Asides.(current events, letters and commentary)(Letter to the Editor)(Column)
December 31, 2002... --Dear Mr. Buckley: Mom's the word. Apparently it has been determined that henceforth the word mom shall be used in all instances to denote the female parent instead of the previously used word that rhymes with "other." It is not clear...

Dixie Blues: Making sense of Lott -- and the South.(Trent Lott)
December 31, 2002... Trent Lott is toast, whether he stays on the plate or not. What does his immolation say about history, and memory? The Lott episode highlighted two periods in American history -- the civil rights movement and, behind it, the Civil War. (The...

Drug Bust: Killing the golden goose.(pharmaceutical price controls)(Industry Overview)
December 31, 2002... In an unprecedented series of 60-second radio spots in Michigan last fall, the head of Pfizer's Ann Arbor research labs told listeners about the wonders and woes of pharmaceutical research. David Canter's scientists had objected to being cast...

It's Not Islam: Muslims can be free and democratic.(Column)
December 31, 2002... A world wracked by acts of terror. Embattled civic forces victimized by violent political gangs. Endless wars resulting in the deaths of millions. Megalomaniacal leaders who seek to expand power through invasion and subversion. Militarized...

Isle of War: England's social collapse.(violent crime wave)
December 31, 2002... For many years, Britons consoled themselves for their loss of global influence with the reflection that at least they lived in a civilized and relatively crime-free country, unlike the all-conquering Americans, whose savagery and violence was...

Christmas Bombing: The annual assault on religious freedom.(religion and state)
December 31, 2002... It used to be that the most dependably dreadful holiday traditions were relatively benign, like the Return of the Undead Fruitcake, passed around uneaten from generation to generation, or the Andy Williams Christmas Special, that especially...

Off the Rez: It's time to close the Indian reservations.
December 31, 2002... 'If you want to start a business on the reservation, here's what you have to do," says Mark St. Pierre, executive director of the Pine Ridge Chamber of Commerce, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. "First you have to go to the...

Religion of Peace?: Islam, without the comforting cliches.
December 31, 2002... Western societies -- when faced with immigrants who adhere to traditional faiths and customs, and who maintain a suspicion-laden distance between themselves and the surrounding civil order -- tend to respond with overtures of friendship. The...

A Christmas Carol.(family singing)(Humor)(Column)
December 31, 2002... A Heath family Christmas-carol program always seems like a good idea . . . None of the Heath children was born on Sunday, but many of them almost were, which may account for the fact that, although bright and bonny and good and gay they...

The Long View.(politicians - humor)(Column)
December 31, 2002... The Candidates' Diaries Special "Back to the Future" Edition(tm) From Strom Thurmond's Diary, September 3, 1948: . . . just some kind of wonderful, wonderful dancers, which I and my people have no problem with. No problem at all....

The Quality of Mercy.(Book Review)
December 31, 2002... Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, by Matthew Scully (St. Martin's, 464 pp., $27.95) It makes a difference that the author is a Christian and a political conservative, and he intends that the...

Judging the Court.(Book Review)
December 31, 2002... First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life, by Kenneth W. Starr (Warner, 320 pp., $26.95) To most Americans, Kenneth Starr is known largely as a Javert-type figure who, as independent counsel, hounded Bill Clinton for the...

A Treasury for Today's Kids.(Book Review)
December 31, 2002... The National Review Treasury of Classic Children's Literature, selected by William F. Buckley Jr. (National Review, 528 pp., $29.95) The first thing I ever read to my oldest child, now a spirited boy of five, was an article in Commentary...

Christmas Stocking.(Book Review)
December 31, 2002... Man struggles with his sense of God, and also with his responsibility to order our common life as best he can. One of the most profound intellects to address both of these aspects of the human condition, and especially their intersection, was...

City Desk: A City Christmas.(Column)
December 31, 2002... What is the city of Christmas in the English-speaking world? Probably still 19th-century London, thanks to Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol, but surely New York is in the running. Three New Yorkers -- Washington Irving, Clement Moore, and...

On the Right.(Column)
December 31, 2002... Harvard at Bay NEW YORK, DECEMBER 3 The back and forth at Harvard is much-noticed news almost everywhere. In Israel, to be sure, as also in the Arab press. But also in Great Britain and France, where anti-Semitism is a way of life,...

What's Right.(Column)
December 31, 2002... Tear Down This Wall President bush has got himself some new economists -- and within a very few weeks, his next State of the Union address will unveil a new economic policy. It's widely expected that this new policy will emphasize new...