National Review articles from February 2002

National Review archives from February 2002

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
February 11, 2002... --Kudos to Richard Lowry for his article on airport security ("Profiles in Cowardice," Jan. 28). My husband and I, both 67, both white, both dressed "to the nines" for first class, were recently about to board a Delta flight in Atlanta for a...

For the Record.(current events)(Brief Article)(Column)
February 11, 2002... -- President Bush in Illinois: "I've made up my mind. The tax-relief plan we passed, which you're now beginning to feel the effects of, is going to be permanent." . . . Bush, in New Orleans: "I like to remind people: Those who shut down [free]...

The Week.(Column)
February 11, 2002... -- Talk stopped. The buzz was. -- Saudi Arabia is reportedly considering asking America to quit its bases there. The strategic calculations that made the U.S.-Saudi alliance important to both sides-as a way to balance the Soviet Union...

Notes & Asides.(Brief Article)(Column)
February 11, 2002... -- Dear Mr. Buckley: In a recent column, you wrote: "The Taliban has taken unmarried women detected in pregnancy and buried them to neck level before execution." Your sentence reminded me of an unrelated problem with English. To mean...

Under Foreign Flags: The glories and agonies of colonialism.
February 11, 2002... The question of colonialism has come up again: How did it fare? What were its advantages and disadvantages? And is there a role for it in the future, or now? The European colonial empires endured half a millennium, embraced a huge variety...

The State of Welfare: An old and tricky question resurfaces.
February 11, 2002... This year, Congress must reauthorize the welfare reforms that President Clinton so reluctantly signed in 1996. Disaffected liberals are using this as an opportunity for a dramatic overhaul of that dramatic overhaul, while conservatives hope to...

I'm Okay, Your 401(k): The battle over savings and investment.
February 11, 2002... In the wake of Enron's collapse, pundits who formerly defined retirement security as a single underfunded plan (Social Security) locked into a single major asset category (U.S. Treasuries) have suddenly discovered "sound investment principles."...

Right Rumbles: Conservatism recovers its nerve.
February 11, 2002... When George W. Bush became president, he was simultaneously celebrated as the lone star of conservatism in the Western world. Almost everywhere else-notably in the four major European countries of France, Britain, Germany, and Italy-the...

Rages of the Age: On 'road rage,' 'air rage,' 'rink rage' . . .(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Whatever happened to bad temper? When I threw a tantrum as a child (which as I recall was quite often), I was thought to stand in need of some correction: and so a terrible punishment, such as not being allowed out into the garden for an...

Is There a Dr. in the House?: What's in an honorific.
February 11, 2002... What's in an honorific? Not Shakespearean, but it is our topic for today. The question came up when the New York Times ran its several articles on the Cornel West controversy at Harvard. (West, a star professor in the Afro-American Studies...

Sins of the Fathers: Pedophile priests and the challenge to the American Church.(Cover Story)
February 11, 2002... When news broke in 1992 that former Catholic priest James Porter, known for years to Church officials as a predatory child rapist, had sexually abused dozens of children during his clerical career, making his the worst clerical pedophilia case...

The Enron Trap: And how to stay out of it.
February 11, 2002... Here's a worrisome scenario for the White House as it tries to navigate its way through the Enron mess: Weeks from now, there's still no evidence that anyone in the administration did anything wrong, yet the White House finds itself in a...

Lapse of Reason: The libertarians and cloning.
February 11, 2002... In November, the libertarian magazine Reason posted on its website defenses of human cloning by 38 "leading thinkers and commentators." The occasion was noteworthy for several reasons. One is that Virginia Postrel, the former editor of the...

InDigestible: The decline of a great magazine.
February 11, 2002... There's probably no agreeing on precisely when Reader's Digest took a turn for the worse. There was the move last year to stick a celebrity photograph on the cover of every issue, rather than the picture of an ordinary American whose story of...

The Long View.(Brief Article)(Column)
February 11, 2002... Great Moments from The Arthur Andersen Story From page 78, "The 1920s: The Bull Charges" . . . don't know what the term "overvalued" means in the first place. Shares, by our meticulous analysis and investigation, are, if anything,...

Tackling Bias.
February 11, 2002... Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, by Bernard Goldberg (Regnery, 232 pp., $27.95) Award-winning CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg became an instant outcast at his network when, on February 13, 1996, he published an...

Mind Games.
February 11, 2002... Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, by Richard A. Posner (Harvard, 408 pp., $29.95) The decline of public intellectuals announced in Richard Posner's new book must have been a mighty precipitous thing. For the term "public...

Dr. D's Diagnosis.
February 11, 2002... Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, by Theodore Dalrymple (Ivan R. Dee, 256 pp., $27.50) Grim news on the social front seems to be something people everywhere just have to accept as a fact of modern life. But in...

Poster Boys.
February 11, 2002... The world loves young, dashing, talented, and handsome, so the baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky and the conductor Christian Thielemann have the world by the tail. Each is a star, with his image splashed all over the place. But each is also a worthy...

City Desk: The N.Y. Difference.(New York City, after 9/11/01)(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Sometimes New York just tires you out. Work is tiring; play is tiring; commuting is tiring, whether by subway if you live in town, or by train or car if you come in from the suburbs, or by car or bus if you have a weekend place in the country...

Books in Brief.(Brief Article)
February 11, 2002... Christianity on Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry, by Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett (Encounter, 244 pp., $15.95) When Pope John Paul II began, a few years ago, his litany of repentance for the sins of Christians...

On the Right.(terrorism; antisemitism; Enron scandal)
February 11, 2002... The Long Arm of the Single Actor NEW YORK, JANUARY 8 John burns of the New York Times cracks the story of an anonymous aide, of the plight of General Musharraf. The Pakistani leader is said to have telephoned the U.S. ambassador to...

The Misanthrope's Corner.(effects of aging)(Brief Article)(Column)
February 11, 2002... Thank you for the birthday gifts, including the four low-tech alarm clocks, one of which, as my vigilant post office noted, arrived ticking. We have given "white noise" new meaning and rewritten an old adage: "Be careful what you wish for; NR...

Letters.
February 25, 2002... --Remember when one of the popular battle cries of the '60s was, "Tell it like it is!"? We must have more of Roger Kimball ("Dr. West and Mr. Summers," Jan. 28) "telling it like it is." In his Harvard tale he constantly, unerringly, hit the...

The Week.(President Bush's State of the Union speech)(this and other events are discussed)
February 25, 2002... -- The American Bar Association has criticized the use of military tribunals to try al-Qaeda terrorists. It wants them reserved for Republican judicial nominees. -- A word, in the wake of the State of the Union address, on modern rhetoric....

STATE OF THE UNION: Command Performance.(Brief Article)
February 25, 2002... The State of the Union address was the speech of a commander in chief. The war began and ended it, and the war was the backdrop of the domestic items in the middle. When President Bush and Sen. Kennedy made their friendly little waves to each...

THE BUDGET: Leaner and Tougher.(Brief Article)
February 25, 2002... Randolph Bourne famously said that war is the health of the state. Democrats are discovering to their dismay that he did not say that war is the health of domestic spending. Mitch Daniels, President Bush's budget director, has recently reminded...

Campaign finance: Exploiting Enron.(proponents of campaign finance reform are pointing to Enron as an example of why legislation should be passed)(Brief Article)
February 25, 2002... Of all the lessons that might be drawn from the story of Enron's tangled accounts and bankruptcy, perhaps the oddest is that it is imperative to ban political ads. Yet that is the lesson that Washington is drawing. The Enron scandal is said to...

Genius at Work.(anti-Americanism of Hollywood celebrities)(Brief Article)
February 25, 2002... "When I see an American flag flying, it's a joke . . . I'd be very happy to stay [in Britain]. There's nothing in America that I would miss at all." -- director Robert Altman, in the London Times "Everyone wants to play a retard." ...

Notes & Asides.(Brief Article)(Column)(Obituary)
February 25, 2002... --Robin Wu, R.I.P. At the National Review staff Christmas party, we were surprised to see Robin Wu. Of course he had been invited, as a close former associate, but in recent years he had appeared infrequently at our Christmas affair -- he...

Rising Collapsing Saddam: A multi-part strategy for getting the job done.
February 25, 2002... When President Bush made clear that the next campaigns in the war on terror would focus on states developing weapons of mass destruction, the skeptical refrain instantly emerged: "Don't expect Iraq to be a pushover like Afghanistan." (Just a...

Enron Explained: Cutting through the hype.(Company Profile)
February 25, 2002... It's now clear that this company was never as big as it seemed. It was, to a large extent, an illusion built on hype, accounting tricks, and outright fraud. Our eyes have now been opened. Or have they? The generally accepted story of...

American Tali-lawyer: Defending John Walker Lindh.(James Brosnahan )
February 25, 2002... In the days after the parents of American Taliban John Walker Lindh hired San Francisco lawyer James Brosnahan to represent their son, several observers took pains to point out Brosnahan's history of supporting leftist causes. It was all true....

Corps-Crazy: The administration and its new, needless initiatives.
February 25, 2002... The spontaneous response of Americans to the Sept. 11 attacks should serve as a rebuke to critics who fret about an anemic civic spirit. Charities' coffers were filled, blood banks overflowed, and inventories of Old Glory were exhausted. In...

'Happy and Glorious': The Queen at her Golden Jubilee.
February 25, 2002... The custom of a monarch celebrating a period of successful rule by a jubilee goes back to Ancient Egypt. The pharaohs marked the occasion by dancing round their palace. The Queen of England will not be dancing in the streets, but she celebrates...

America's Store, R.I.P.: K-Mart goes under.
February 25, 2002... Where were you when you heard the news? The news of K-Mart's impending death? I can tell you where a lot of people were. Waiting in a check-out line at K-Mart. The big retailer has been world-famous for slow service, whether in the aisles...

America's Unspecial Relationship: A cold look at the Saudis.
February 25, 2002... Until recently, the official position of the government of Saudi Arabia was that it remained unproven whether there were any Saudi citizens involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. They meant "unproven" not in the sense that anyone really doubted that...

Ataturk II?: Pakistan's Musharraf has a chance to be a great man.
February 25, 2002... Gen. Pervez Musharraf is every inch a professional soldier. On October 12, 1999, he was army chief of staff in Pakistan and flying home from a visit to Sri Lanka. He had recently fired a senior officer for meeting the Pakistani prime minister...

Old World Charms, and Alarms: Understanding those difficult Europeans.
February 25, 2002... From sea to shining sea, the cry goes up: "Why are the Europeans so awful? Why do they nitpick at the U.S., in between intervals of being saved by America from totalitarianism? Why are they already turning sour on the war on terrorism? What's...

Spam Tastes Gross: Degradation -- and illegality -- in your in-box.
February 25, 2002... It's a disgusting topic, and one that most people would rather turn away from -- which is just how the pornographers like it, of course. They would rather we just shuddered and threw up our hands. This goes for all pornography, but I am...

The Long View.(Brief Article)
February 25, 2002... The Peterson Family Sends a Memo to: Doris Peterson Senior Vice President The Peterson Family Inc. from: Michael Peterson CFO The Peterson Family Inc. in re: Expenses Dear Doris: Pursuant to our...

Great Scots!(How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It)
February 25, 2002... How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It, by Arthur Herman (Crown, 392 pp., $25.95) 'I am a typical Irishman," George Bernard Shaw once said. "My...

Men o'War.(Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos)
February 25, 2002... Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos, by Robert D. Kaplan (Random House, 198 pp., $22.95) Since September 11, America's political and military leaders have had to make many tough moral decisions. How many Afghan civilian...

What It Takes.
February 25, 2002... When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan, by Peggy Noonan (Viking, 224 pp., $24.95) Successful presidents, as Tolstoy somehow neglected to tell us, are all alike, while each failure fails in his own way. Warren Harding, Herbert...

Morals Charge.("The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis")
February 25, 2002... The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis, by Robert P. George (ISI, 403 pp., $24.95) To think reasonably is to think morally, said Samuel Johnson, for whom it was self-evident that human life is predicated on a moral...

Islam's Wrong Turns.("What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response")
February 25, 2002... What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, by Bernard Lewis (Oxford, 192 pp., $23) When it comes to Islamic studies, Bernard Lewis is the father of us all. With brilliance, integrity, and extraordinary mastery of languages...

On the Right.(Column)
February 25, 2002... Does George Love Ted? NEW YORK, JANUARY 18 There has been great fuss in the last few days over broken hearts in Washington. To uncoil the story from tabloid compression, what we have is 1) President Bush and Senator Kennedy in joint...

Misanthrope's Corner.(ethnic relations: changing attitudes)(Brief Article)
February 25, 2002... Did I ever tell you about the time I was shocked, shocked, by unabashed bigotry? It happened when I lived in Seattle. The Arab oil embargo was on, and between that and Seattle's steep hills, I decided it was time to forego the convenience of an...