National Review articles from June 2001

National Review archives from June 2001

For the Record.(President Bush showing a better-than-expected approval rating)(this and other items are discussed)(Brief Article)
June 11, 2001... President Bush's approval rating at 59 percent, in Fox News survey. . . . In Harris poll, 51 percent rate Bush performance better than expected. . . . Sen. Joe Biden (D., Del.) on Bush, in National Journal: "One of his obvious strengths goes...

The Week.(U.S. politics)
June 11, 2001... --Well, at least maybe we can get rid of the dairy compact now. --Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont is not a moderate. He is a liberal. When he was a House Republican, he voted against Ronald Reagan more often than with him. His record as a...

Public Policy: Energy in the Executive.(Brief Article)
June 11, 2001... Would that every nation were blessed with such an "energy crisis." Yes, California has a serious problem that, given a combination of circumstances, could also affect other parts of the country. But consider the big picture. Electricity rates...

Washington: Borking Olson.(Theodore Olson's appointment to Solicitor General)(Brief Article)(Column)
June 11, 2001... In the Year of Monica, one of the liberals' refrains was that it was "time to move on." Oddly, even though their side prevailed in the impeachment contest, it is they who have not moved on. They are still trying to hunt down members of the vast...

Italy: Avanti, Silvio.(Silvio Berlusconi election in Italy ushers in a conservative government)(Brief Article)
June 11, 2001... The victory of Silvio Berlusconi in the Italian elections brings to office a conservative government in one of the leading European countries. This is exceptional in itself. Berlusconi's House of Liberty coalition has a majority large enough to...

Notes and Asides.(Letter to the Editor)
June 11, 2001... --Dear Mr. Buckley: I would appreciate it if you would clarify the idiom "begging the question." I believe it is currently misunderstood and misused in place of more common expressions like "calls for the question" or "raises the...

A Man, a Plan-a Waste of Time: The problem with Bush's "comprehensive national energy strategy".
June 11, 2001... It's regrettable that conservatives are rallying around the new Bush energy plan, because this whole debate is nine parts political theater to one part policy-and even that "one part" of policy is pregnant with economic and rhetorical...

Markets vs.'Crises': How energy problems get solved-or worsened.(the US seems on the verge of another energy crisis)
June 11, 2001... 'Happy families are all alike," wrote Tolstoy at the beginning of Anna Karenina. "Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The same could be said for markets. Every working market is happy in that it functions smoothly, efficiently, and...

Guzzling, Gorgeous & Grand: SUVs and those who love them.(sport utility vehicle drivers meeting the disapproval of other drivers)
June 11, 2001... Readers of Dickens may occasionally imagine what it might have been like to peer from the guillotine and see Madame Defarge knitting her Book of Sin. One would expect a look of terrifying certitude and ferocity, and while having one's head...

California, Here He Comes?: The president and that troublesome state.(President Bush making plans to win in California, in 2004)
June 11, 2001... 'I really believe that the week before the election, we were within five points in California," says Gerald Parsky, a little wistfully, as he describes George W. Bush's presidential campaign in the nation's largest state. Parsky, an investment...

The Olson Project: Democrats against a Bush nominee.(Theodore Olsen, Democrats' plans to undermine President Bush's political appointments)
June 11, 2001... On May 17, in a small Senate hearing room jammed with journalists, it was payback time. Theodore Olson is eminently qualified to be solicitor general, and everyone in the room knew it. Unfortunately, the Democrats in the room also knew he had...

Of Judges and Senators: How to think about judicial nominees.(Brief Article)
June 11, 2001... It is a fact of American political life, predictable as the tides, that a party's view of the proper division of power among the branches of government depends on which branches it controls. During the New Deal, conservatives worried about the...

The Ultimate Penalty . . . and a just one: The basics of capital punishment.(Brief Article)
June 11, 2001... The case of Timothy McVeigh reminds us that the endless dispute about the death penalty is mainly religious in origin, even if many of the arguments employed are secular. The religious belief is that only God can legitimately end a human life;...

Who Cares About Cuba?: Ninety miles away, far from our minds.
June 11, 2001... It is a bald question, and one that pops up from time to time: Why are Americans so indifferent to the plight of Cubans? Why do Americans, particularly our elites, scorn the exile community in Florida? Why do our elites continually excuse, or...

Goodbye, Mr. Olin: When conservative funds dry up.(philanthropic funds)(Statistical Data Included)
June 11, 2001... Nobody likes to think too much about the death of an aging parent. Yet it's something most people must confront at some awful moment in their lives. Today, conservatives find themselves in this painful predicament as they watch the John M. Olin...

Toujours l'antiamericanisme: The religion of the French elite.
June 11, 2001... The election of George W. Bush as president has released emotional spasms through Europe. With the exception of Spain and Austria, and now Italy, every European country is in the hands of socialists, champagne socialists to be sure, but all...

Situation Normal: A word, a concept, and the trouble they cause.(shifting demographics and normalcy)(Statistical Data Included)
June 11, 2001... The latest batch of data released from the 2000 census describes America's household arrangements. There are a tad more than 105 million households in the U.S., of which 72 million are families ("two or more people related by birth, marriage,...

The Long View.(hypocrisy of liberal elite in entertainment industry)(Brief Article)
June 11, 2001... A memo from a SoCal big to his personal assistant Janice: Could you please take care of the following items before I get back from Aspen? Thanks! TO DO 1. Send in check for the "Sierra Club Salutes Governor Gray Davis" fundraiser...

Dante Refreshed.(Review)
June 11, 2001... The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri, translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (Doubleday, 614 pp., $35) When two lesser angels fail to recognize Milton's Satan, he replies scornfully, "Not to know me argues yourselves unknown."...

Mixology.(Review)
June 11, 2001... The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again, by Michael Barone (Regnery, 338 pp., $27.95) Just a hundred years ago, at the height of the last great wave of immigration, Irish, Italians, and Jews were each regarded as a race...

Ideas Without Consequences.(Review)
June 11, 2001... Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America, by Angela D. Dillard (New York University, 245 pp., $26.95) Angela Dillard, a young black political historian of leftist views, has written a well-intentioned book...

Rodney Rules.(Review)
June 11, 2001... In early May, Avery Fisher Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic, played host to another American cultural institution: Rodney Dangerfield. Said Rodney, midway through his act, as he sized up his surroundings, "I can take a classy place like...

Nic & J-Lo.(Review)
June 11, 2001... The Australian director Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was clearly a misnomer. The work's reduction to the taste of the MTV generation was plainly Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. About his Moulin Rouge, the buzz from...

Internal Emigres.(efforts of New Yorkers to find peace and quiet)(Brief Article)
June 11, 2001... The two big Caterpillar bulldozers were lifting up the skin of the street on the west side of Union Square and digging out its bones and arteries. The gestures they made, as one machine hoisted a piece of infrastructural detritus and passed it...

On the Right - Goldwater & the Press.(Brief Article)(Column)(Review)
June 11, 2001... NEW YORK, MAY 11 Most journeymen I know who are in the business, myself included, wince at comprehensive references to "the press." This is so in part because editors and reporters and columnists and researchers have their own opinions...

On the Right - The Legal Jam.(Brief Article)(Column)
June 11, 2001... NEW YORK, MAY 15 It is a big confusing sprawl of a system, but there are those who love it, and it takes lifelong love for our system, after weighing the Supreme Court's decision. The anomalies knock you down, but there is still light... ..

On the Right - The Crooner, R.I.P.(singer Perry Como)(Brief Article)(Column)(Obituary)
June 11, 2001... NEW YORK, MAY 18 Perry Como died in his sleep, and one comments, How else? He was if not the founder of the casual mode, its preeminent prince, and his reputation was made mostly by that attitude towards music. He treated it, evidently (I...

Misanthrope's Corner.(misrepresentation of Marquis de Sade as hero in movie "Quills")(Brief Article)(Column)
June 11, 2001... The movie Quills has come and gone, but this sympathetic portrait of the Marquis de Sade will turn up on TV in a year or so. It will be "edited for content," of course, but cutting the worst of the sex and violence will not diminish its...

The Week.(News Briefs)
June 25, 2001... --If John McCain does go the third-party route, the name of Teddy Roosevelt's vehicle, Bull Moose, is available. Or he could choose a new second word. --The tax cut Congress has passed is disappointing in several respects. It phases in...

After Jeffords.(Brief Article)
June 25, 2001... What should Republicans do now that James Jeffords has left the GOP and given the Democrats control of the Senate? The usual suspects have the same helpful advice as ever: move left. President Bush alienated Jeffords by governing from the...

McCain's Confusions.(Brief Article)
June 25, 2001... During the primaries last year, John McCain presented himself as a pro- life, tax-cutting Reagan conservative. True, he departed from Republican orthodoxy in supporting campaign-finance regulation; and the tax cut he offered was more modest...

Betting on Blair.(Brief Article)
June 25, 2001... Ladbrokes, the grand British bookie, took the unprecedented step of paying out winnings before a race was even over. The race in question was the British general election, in which a landslide for Tony Blair's "New Labour" government was so...

A Day in the Life . . .(Brief Article)
June 25, 2001... We shall never have satisfactory explanations for the Bill Clinton phenomenon. No amount of disgrace prevents him from continuing to play to the gallery. For their part, people seem to have a morbid fascination with anyone who can do things...

Notes & Asides.(Letter to the Editor)
June 25, 2001... --Dear Mr. Buckley: Regarding the appropriateness of your use of "uxorious" in describing Mrs. Clinton's docility, the Oxford English Dictionary offers "maritorious," and defines it as "fond of one's husband." The usage example...

For the Record.(News Briefs)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2001... Party-switching Sen. Jim Jeffords, in Newsweek: "I don't blame the president as much as I do the Senate leadership." . . . Republican Senate leader Trent Lott says there is "something liberating about being in the minority" because Republicans...

The Meaning of Switcher Jim: Sense and nonsense in the Jeffords fallout.
June 25, 2001... It's the South Carolina primary and the John Ashcroft nomination rolled into one-with a dash of arsenic thrown in. It's an occasion for all the independent minds-namely, the media, Democrats, and GOP moderates-to make every argument possible...

Bad Lands: Why do the Dakotas vote for Dems?
June 25, 2001... 'It's hard to explain, and I don't think there's an easy answer," says Rep. John Thune, Republican from South Dakota. It's late on a recent Friday afternoon, and Thune is discussing his state's politics as he begins the long drive from Rapid...

November 2002: The shape of the Senate.
June 25, 2001... Anyone concerned that Hill Republicans aren't taking the 2002 elections seriously enough can stop worrying: A 23-page strategy memo-from Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign-on how Democrats get out the vote has become mandatory reading among GOP...

Lactose Tolerant: How Jeffords keeps getting milk.(Senator James M. Jeffords leaving the Republican Party, a theory linking the decision to the Vermont milk industry)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2001... There have been many explanations for the defection of Sen. James Jeffords from the GOP: He is a man of principle. He is a lefty. He cares about education. He is just a weasel. But as the debates raged, an odd consensus emerged on one point:...

The Guns of Vieques: A very silly, but very trendy, cause.(protests against Naval training on Vieques Island)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2001... Mr. Fumento, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., is completing a book on advances in biotechnology. You could think of other reasons for putting Al Sharpton in prison-but he was put there on May 23 for illegal...

Thanks for the Memories: Rote is right.(National Spelling Bee is won by a home-schooled student)
June 25, 2001... In what has now become a hardy perennial of U.S. minor-news reporting, the $10,000 grand prize at this year's National Spelling Bee was won yet again by a homeschooled competitor, 13-year-old Sean Conley from Shakopee, Minn. Young Sean tells us...

De-Demonizing Rum: What's wrong with 'underage' drinking?(legal drinking age in Texas)
June 25, 2001... It was a day of shame for the Bushes, an incident made all the more embarrassing by the family's previous well-publicized difficulties with alcohol. I refer, of course, to the regrettable 1997 decision by then- governor George W. Bush to...

Trent Lott, Minority Leader: Where did he go wrong? And how can he go right again?
June 25, 2001... The Democrats were stonewalling. It was the evening of May 16, and Senate majority leader Trent Lott was trying to reach an agreement with them on the president's education bill. The bill had started out center-left and moved leftward, but the...

National Greatness Lite: The substance, such as it is, of McCainery.(formulating policy positions for a John McCain movement)
June 25, 2001... To get ahead, John McCain needs a movement and a program. At present, he has neither. He has, instead, a resume and a coterie. And the coterie is doing its best to transform the resume into a program (and itself into a mass movement). In the...

Dirty Wars: The campaign against Reagan's (and W.'s) men.(controversial nominations by President Bush)
June 25, 2001... The Cold War in Central America will soon be refought in Congress, thanks to President Bush's selection of a slew of Reaganites for key foreign-policy positions. The refighting is already on, actually; certainly the Left, broadly defined, has...

Roots-Deep Ones - The perils of looking into American prehistory.(Cactus Hill excavation in Virginia reveals evidence of early European settlement of the New World)
June 25, 2001... One of the secrets of archaeology is that many truly great finds aren't made by archaeologists. It was a farmer, Harold Conover, who stumbled on a clue in the late 1980s that led to a magnificent site in Virginia called Cactus Hill. Conover and...

The Long View.(the White House, Congress, and political parties)(humor)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2001... [BEGIN TELEPHONE TRANSCRIPT] RECORDED VOICE: Hello and welcome to the White House Customer Service line for moderate Republican senators. If you have a touch-tone telephone, please press one. If you do not have a touch-tone telephone,...

World Class.(Review)
June 25, 2001... Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century, by Henry Kissinger (Simon & Schuster, 318 pp., $30) Why is it that, even though Henry Kissinger has beyond any doubt become the most honored elder in the world of...

Retroactivist.(Review)
June 25, 2001... The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State, by Michael B. Katz (Metropolitan, 469 pp., $35) In this age of multiculturalism, identity politics, the Third Way, and postmodernism, it's easy to forget what liberalism meant...

Forgotten War.(Review)
June 25, 2001... Fields of Light: A Son Remembers His Heroic Father, by Joseph Hurka (Pushcart Press, 220 pp., $24.50) Throughout the Cold War, there was resistance in Soviet-occupied Europe to the imposition of Communism. Sometimes this involved...

Let 'em Eat Cake.(Review)
June 25, 2001... As Good As I Could Be: A Memoir of Raising Wonderful Children in Difficult Times, by Susan Cheever (Simon & Schuster, 192 pp., $23) Having thrown out all the old rules about raising children, today's parents must "make it up as they go...

Too Many Zeros.(Review)
June 25, 2001... How much history can $135,000,000 buy you? Quite a bit, as the three- hour movie Pearl Harbor rousingly demonstrates. It can buy you enough digitally and otherwise created special effects to make the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor nearly as...

Book Shelf.(Review)
June 25, 2001... 'If everything else in our language should perish, [the King James Version of the Bible] would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power." In these famous words, Thomas Babington Macaulay was speaking for the consensus of...

On the Right - The Latest Profile In Courage.(former President Gerald Ford receives Profiles in Courage award)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2001... NEW YORK, MAY 22 The event at the Kennedy Library in Cambridge was pretty heady historical stuff. There at the Windsor Castle of Camelot were the two most illustrious survivors, brother Edward Kennedy and daughter Caroline Kennedy. And...

On the Right - Jeffords the Humble Patriot.(Brief Article)
June 25, 2001... NEW YORK, MAY 25 You need only know Jim Jeffords to trust his motives, I've heard it said (three times) in 24 hours. This gives a little advantage to those who don't know Jim Jeffords, because some of us do not trust his motives. If he is...

On the Right - Squeeze Play.(relations between Washington and Moscow)(Brief Article)
June 25, 2001... NEW YORK, MAY 29 The mating dance between Washington and Moscow almost takes us back to the Cold War years-which continue to be informative. In 1972, there was the ABM Treaty, which is being hallowed as the Constitutional Convention of...

Misanthrope's Corner.(Brief Article)
June 25, 2001... Now that The Wind Done Gone has been cleared for publication by the court of appeals, I present my own version, Gone with the Hurricane Activity. Scarlett O'Hara was not a physically ideal human being, but men seldom perceived it when...