National Review articles from July 2003

National Review archives from July 2003

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
July 14, 2003... --Neal B. Freeman's "How Firm a Foundation" (June 16), tying Wilbur H. "Ping" Ferry to the radicalization of the Ford Foundation, is misleading at best. In fact, it was the famed educator Robert M. Hutchins who was most responsible for steering...

The Week.
July 14, 2003... -- How important was the University of Michigan/affirmative-action case at the Supreme Court? Let the headlines from one edition of the Detroit News-published a few days before the Court issued its decision-tell the story: "Racial equality at...

RACIAL PREFERENCES: Travesty.
July 14, 2003... The legislators of 1868 were masters of brevity. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees "equal protection of the laws" to "all persons." It turns out that what that amendment really means is that state governments may...

IRAN: Come the Revolution.
July 14, 2003... In a development that is potentially as far-reaching as the Iraq war, Iran has been rocked by anti-government demonstrations. Started by students, but taken up now by large segments of the population, the outbreaks have spread beyond Tehran to...

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: Deceptions about Deception.
July 14, 2003... Has anyone ever attempted to rewrite history so quickly? Before history itself had even been written? With shooting still going on in Iraq, the "Bush lied" forces-those, mostly on the left, who claim the administration deceived the country into...

Notes & Asides.
July 14, 2003... -- Dear Mr. Buckley: I was disappointed in your column "No Gay Things Allowed?" (May 5), wherein you conclude that "It would be nice if Texas simply repealed the [sodomy] law . . ." As you noted in another context many years ago: Not...

Spending with the Best of 'Em: The current president is no tightwad- unfortunately.
July 14, 2003... In the 2000 Republican primary, Steve Forbes told voters that they should reject George W. Bush because he was too liberal. He backed up his claims with statistics showing that government spending in Texas had increased by 36 percent while Bush...

Cain Is Able: Meet the black conservative who has joined the Georgia Senate race.
July 14, 2003... A candidate recently kicked off his very first race for public office- and within days, conservatives were buzzing about his potential as a vice-presidential nominee. Novice candidates don't typically generate such ambitious speculation, but...

Restless in Havana: A rough year for Fidel Castro. A rougher one, of course, for his prisoners.
July 14, 2003... A quick review of what you already know: Castro seized power in 1959; the U.S. tried-disastrously-to do him in; Castro consolidated his rule; he is now in the 45th year of one of the cruelest tyrannies on earth. In 1991, the Soviet Union...

Thievery, Treachery, Treason . . .: The struggle post-Taliban and what the U.S. should do.
July 14, 2003... The new Afghan government of Hamid Karzai is in deep trouble. The power of its domestic foes is growing daily. Inside the government, the minister of defense, Mohammed Fahim, is leading an unlikely Red-Green coalition of former Communists and...

Babylon Comes to Sparta: Have our service academies gotten too modern?
July 14, 2003... Earlier this year, the history faculty on a Maryland campus met to hear a young colleague discuss a paper he was writing. The author hoped to receive feedback and eventually publish his work in a scholarly journal. His topic was the invasion of...

Hearing America Singing . . .: . . . and watching it eating, and . . .
July 14, 2003... Hollywood A friend of mine filmed a television pilot last year. A "pilot" is a trial episode of a proposed series. What you do, essentially, is spend anywhere from $750,000 to $2 million on 22 minutes of film, hopeful that one of the big...

Party Hearty: The Demorats are acting, gloriously, like themselves.
July 14, 2003... As they head into the 2004 elections, the Democrats are in a position similar to that of the Republicans in 1964. They're the out party, facing a popular incumbent who is doing a lot of things they can't stand. Many liberals appear to be...

All Smoke, No Fire: The administration's critics are wrong about Halliburton and Iraq.
July 14, 2003... On March 24, Halliburton, the giant energy-services company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, announced that a subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, had signed a contract with the Army Corps of Engineers to put out oil fires in Iraq, as...

It Takes a (Well-Planned) Village: In praise of the New Urbanism.
July 14, 2003... Nate Bowman first broke ground on Vermillion, his 350-acre North Carolina village, over four years ago, and since then only one of its four neighborhoods has been built. Even at this stage, though, he's got a lot to brag about. Rather than the...

The Long View.
July 14, 2003... Memorandum to: B. Streisand, E. Alterman, and the rest of the programming team from: A. Gore re: The first 30 days of LeftNet, the Liberal Television Network In the first place, let's all give ourselves a hand for 30 really...

The Dancing Mind.('Emerson')(Book Review)
July 14, 2003... Emerson, by Lawrence Buell (Harvard, 416 pp., $29.95) Lawrence Buell began this book when he was 26, he tells us, and now we have it when he is 64. He has had plenty of time to master the enormous quantity of Emerson's production-the...

False Dawn.('Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002')(Book Review)
July 14, 2003... Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002, by Charles Enderlin (Other Press, 308 pp., $28) The liberation of Iraq has promoted the Israeli-Palestinian dispute to the status of next item of business in...

Against the Gene Genies.('Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age')(Book Review)
July 14, 2003... Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, by Bill McKibben (Times, 288 pp., $25) Woody Allen once said: "Today we are at a crossroads. One road leads to hopelessness and despair; the other, to total extinction. Let us pray we choose...

Supreme Command.('Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations')(Book Review)
July 14, 2003... Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations, by Peter D. Feaver (Harvard, 381 pp., $49.95) During the 1990s, a number of events suggested that all was not well with civil-military relations in America. The media played...

Guns & Other Freedoms.('The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You've Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong')(Book Review)(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... Each of us has a favorite part of the Bill of Rights; for me-as for many others-it's the First Amendment. But a good rule of thumb is to consider that particular freedom most important which, at a particular time, is most under attack. And...

ON the Right.(release of Palestinian freedom fighters; marijuana laws; interrogation of judicial-nominee William Pryor)
July 14, 2003... String Them Up NEW YORK, JUNE 6 Ahmed jubarah said that he did not consider himself a murderer, he was simply a man who wanted peace and freedom. That's all. He traveled extensively in his young life, including, at age 20, a voyage to...

What's Right.(same-sex marriages legal in Canada)
July 14, 2003... The North Goes South Here's what didn't happen when the Canadian government announced that it would comply with the orders of a high (but not supreme) court and write gay marriage into the law of the land. There were no protests from the...

The Week.
July 28, 2003... -- And we've always been told that the Kennedy women are different. -- Howard Dean already had won the hearts of many Democrats, but now he has won their money as well. He led the pack in the second-quarter fundraising race, with $7...

Editorial: POLITICS: Left Turn.
July 28, 2003... The news this summer has been rather bleak for conservatives. The Supreme Court first decided to write "diversity" into the Constitution. A few days later, it issued a ruling on sodomy laws that called into question its willingness to tolerate...

Editorial: IRAQ: Postwar Is Hell.
July 28, 2003... Some soldiers are killed in pitched battles, some are murdered in public by brazen assassins. As combat deaths in Iraq have edged over 30 since April, it has become clear that the war did not end there when Saddam Hussein's statue fell. ...

Notes & Asides.
July 28, 2003... -- Dear Mr. Buckley: As one who thoroughly agrees with you that J. S. Bach is the best, I sheepishly confess that when possible amidst Saturday chores, I tune in the local "oldies" radio station. A true Boomer, I was born but five years before...

Affirmative Action Forever?: The elites have now enshrined race preferences; but will the public sit still?
July 28, 2003... If any single person is responsible for the Supreme Court's decision to entrench "diversity" in American life and law, it is President George W. Bush. For several years it had been clear that, despite consistent public hostility to racial...

'Diversity' . . . D'oh!: Some tactical stumbles on the way to the Michigan debacle.
July 28, 2003... The Supreme Court delivered a huge blow to equal opportunity on June 23, but the two cases involving "diversity" at the University of Michigan may have been lost well before then. That's because the Center for Individual Rights, the Washington,...

From Bad to Worse: Affirmative action and prescription drugs, and what they have to do with each other.
July 28, 2003... In the last week of June, conservatism suffered two of its worst defeats in a generation -- the Supreme Court's endorsement of state-sponsored racial preferences and congressional passage of a huge new prescription-drug entitlement. Worse yet,...

HateBush.org: The rise of a website, a political action committee . . . a movement?
July 28, 2003... As the 2000 presidential campaign began, a young computer programmer from Massachusetts named Zack Exley enjoyed 15 minutes of fame when he created a website called GWBush.com. The site, which Exley billed as a "parody," featured a doctored...

Yes, Silvio!: Berlusconi ruffles feathers -- the right ones.
July 28, 2003... In the infinitely gray landscape of Europe, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's prime minister, is a blob of color and energy. Why, he speaks his mind as though he thought himself Donald Rumsfeld. Therefore one funny thing after another happens to him....

Coming out ahead: Why Gay Marriage is on the way.
July 28, 2003... For social conservatives, it seems that the battle over gay rights is nearing an end before it has even fairly begun. It is true that a small majority of the American public continues to believe, as the poll question puts it, that "sexual...

Stand and Fight: Don't take gay marriage lying down.
July 28, 2003... It's time for conservatives to take their cue from the New Jersey Nets, or maybe from those hard-luck kids, the Boston Red Sox. Only a few weeks ago, the victors in Lawrence v. Texas -- the Supreme Court case that struck down a Texas law...

The Daunting Aftermath: L. Paul Bremer & Co. have a different kind of war on their hands.
July 28, 2003... Just how much trouble are we and our erstwhile British allies in now that the aftermath of the Iraq war has taken on such a dour coloration? The answer rather depends on what one means by "trouble," and on what one means by "we." As to the...

The Two Europes: How Jacques Chirac got that way -- and why others (blessedly) are different.
July 28, 2003... The question was European farm policy, the setting a European Union summit. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, was lamenting the hollowness of the EU's professed commitment to free trade. How, Blair wondered, could the EU justify its...

The Long View.
July 28, 2003... Saddam Hussein: The Audio Outtakes consultant's voice: "Okay, sir, we're ready to go here in the booth. Do you need some water or something before we start?" Saddam Hussein: "No, no. I am ready." Consultant's voice:...

The Civilizing God.("For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch- Hunts, and the End of Slavery")(Book Review)
July 28, 2003... For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch- Hunts, and the End of Slavery, by Rodney Stark (Princeton, 496 pp., $35) Would the peoples of the Arab world be better off with a Bible in their hands or a Koran? In...

Censors Everywhere.("The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn")(Book Review)
July 28, 2003... The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, by Diane Ravitch (Knopf, 255 pp., $24) It was one of the most delicious moments in the recent history of academic idiocy when, in 1982, the principal of the Mark Twain...

One Man's Zeta Jones.("Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics")(Book Review)
July 28, 2003... Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, by John Derbyshire (Joseph Henry, 304 pp., $27.95) This is a striking and brilliant book, in many ways the most ambitious science-for-the-public attempt I...

Shelf Life: Question Authority.(Book Review)
July 28, 2003... Three years ago, Encounter Books set out on a crucial mission: Publisher Peter Collier wanted to "enlarge the space for ideas in our culture" by publishing serious conservative nonfiction. And Encounter has more than fulfilled its early promise...

Music: Backhaus for Your House.
July 28, 2003... Daniel Barenboim just completed a cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas at Carnegie Hall. That is, he played all 32 sonatas, over eight recitals. In so doing, he became only the fourth pianist to perform this cycle in that historic hall. The first...

City Desk: All the World's a . . .
July 28, 2003... (A small theater on W. 42nd Street, in NEW YORK CITY. Time: early evening, early summer, early 21st century. The theaters of Broadway, given over to spectacle-hungry suburbanites and gay aficionados of musicals, are several blocks, and quantum...

On the Right.
July 28, 2003... What's Up in the Spy World? NEW YORK, JUNE 20 The Big Bad Russians have pulled a fast one which bears pondering. The victim is one Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, by U.S. lights a hero, by Russian lights a traitor. We learn that in November...

What's Right.
July 28, 2003... Our Town In his one-man play Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray explains why he, an old-stock Bostonian, chose to settle in New York City: "I always wanted to live on an island off the coast of America." That's a funny way to describe...