National Review articles from June 2003

National Review archives from June 2003

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
June 2, 2003... --John O'Sullivan's excellent article ("The Eternal U.N.," April 7) is nevertheless incorrect as to the ultimate fate of the U.N. It is going to die. Moribund now, its bureaucracy will only get worse. I suggest that we resign from it, and...

The Week.
June 2, 2003... -- Looting, random shooting, mayhem -- Baghdad is looking a little like pre-Giuliani New York. -- When President Bush flew onto the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare an end to the Iraq war, liberals reacted as if they had caught...

Editorial: CULTURE WATCH: Bennett and His Enemies.
June 2, 2003... The sad business of William Bennett requires discouraging commentary. There is, first, the existential point, which is that Bill Bennett is through. We speak, of course, of his public life. He is objectively discredited. He will not be...

OBITUARY: Sophie Wilkins, R.I.P.(Obituary)
June 2, 2003... I wrote in 1965 an article for Esquire magazine in which I told of a young man who had already spent more time in a death house (at Trenton, N.J.) than anyone in American penal history. Edgar Smith had caught my attention after telling a...

OBITUARY: Tony Savage, R.I.P.(Obituary)
June 2, 2003... The news came as a bolt, in mid morning. Tony Savage had been taken to the hospital the day before and there suffered a humiliating day and night of seizures and hemorrhages of different kinds and died early the next morning. His fianc?e had...

Notes & Asides.(Column)
June 2, 2003... -- Dear Mr. Buckley: Please print, for the record, the following attribution: "A Parable: The Tenth Man," appearing on National Review Online on April 27, 2001, was written by Don Dodson of Fort Worth, Texas. Sincerely, Don Dodson ...

1984 in 2003?: Fears about the Patriot Act are misguided.
June 2, 2003... Has the war on terrorism become a war on Americans' civil liberties? A coalition of left- and right-wing groups fears so, and has been working hard to restrain the law-and-order impulses of the Bush administration. It's a coalition that...

The Castro News Network: Fidel has a friend in Atlanta.
June 2, 2003... It wasn't the most sophisticated hijacking ever planned. In Havana Bay on April 2, a small group of Cubans armed with a pistol and several knives seized control of a 45-foot ferryboat and ordered the pilot to head for Florida. The Baragua...

A Blind Eye, Still Turned: Getting serious about prison rape.
June 2, 2003... Every day, a large number of men are raped in American jails and prisons. For a nation that prides itself on being a human-rights leader, the sheer number of men raped behind bars -- 240,000 a year according to the activist group Stop Prison...

Grin and Barrett: The Cisneros independent counsel is still on the case!
June 2, 2003... Remember Henry Cisneros? Of course; he was the once-rising Democratic star who became Bill Clinton's first secretary of housing and urban development. Here's a tougher one: Remember Linda Medlar? In case you've forgotten, she was Cisneros's...

Lemrick Nelson and Us: The death of the citizen; the retribalization of society.
June 2, 2003... Future social historians will no doubt puzzle over a curious contradiction in contemporary liberalism: its furious ideological rejection of the moral relevance to society of biological factors such as race and sex on one hand, and its equally...

Solzhenitsyn's World: Ours, too -- the commencement address at 25.
June 2, 2003... It was the most notorious commencement speech of the 20th century -- and probably the greatest. On June 8, 1978 -- 25 years ago -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stood up at Harvard and delivered "A World Split Apart." It featured an unsparing analysis...

Homeland Politics: From the Cold War to 9/11, conservatism had been portrayed as resting on two pillars: economic conservatism and social conservatism. Don't forget the third.
June 2, 2003... The world since 9/11 is, in many ways, reminiscent of the struggle against Communism. Once again, Americans have witnessed ideological conflict on a global scale; militant antiwar demonstrations in U.S. cities; a Democratic party divided over...

Rank Hypocrisy (Charges): The liberals' posture over Bill Bennett is absurd.
June 2, 2003... It was arguably a two-day story, or one that never should have been written in the first place: Virtue czar Bill Bennett played a lot of high-stakes slots and video poker in Las Vegas and Atlantic City over the last ten years. The authors of...

Please, Release Me! The recent disclosure of the McCarthy transcripts is a window into a misunderstood world.
June 2, 2003... On May 5, Senators Susan Collins, Maine Republican, and Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat, stood together in Sen. Joseph McCarthy's old hearing room to announce the release of previously closed transcripts of executive-session hearings conducted by...

The Long View.
June 2, 2003... When democracy comes to the Axis of Evil: 30-second spot title: "Turning Back the Clock" PRODUCER: Carville, Soon Kee & Associates fade-in: Grainy black-and-white footage of Chongjin, North Korea. voice-over: (concerned,...

Fit for Export?("The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad")(Book Review)
June 2, 2003... The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, by Fareed Zakaria (Norton, 256 pp., $24.95) Mae West is said to have remarked that too much of a good thing can be wonderful. Fareed Zakaria, in this brilliant if imperfect new...

Founding Father.("The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism")(Book Review)
June 2, 2003... The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism, by David Klinghoffer (Doubleday, 304 pp., $26) Some 30 years ago I struggled through a Yale religious-studies course called "The Bible as Literature." Despite energetic leadership...

Triumph of an Ideology.("Diversity: The Invention of a Concept")(Book Review)
June 2, 2003... Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, by Peter Wood (Encounter, 360 pp., $24.95) In January, President Bush announced his administration's position on the University of Michigan's Supreme Court cases on affirmative action. Educational...

Picking On the Big Kid.("The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice")(Book Review)
June 2, 2003... The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, by Philip Jenkins (Oxford, 288 pp., $26) The biggest and richest kid on the block is a whiner if he complains that he is being mocked. Conventional playground wisdom extended to the...

Paying the Nazi Debt.("Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II")(Book Review)
June 2, 2003... Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II, by Stuart E. Eizenstat (PublicAffairs, 400 pp., $27.50) What's wrong with Germany? Berlin's opposition to the Bush administration's Iraq policy had...

Bronx Bazaar.
June 2, 2003... Hunt's Point is a 110-acre wholesale produce market in the southeast Bronx. Half the produce that New Yorkers eat is brought into Hunt's Point, where it is then resold in an orgy of capitalism. Hunt's Point is the stock exchange for fruits and...

On the Right.
June 2, 2003... Castro Kills Stone NEW YORK, APRIL 22 Let us pause in order to suppress any smile over the three Cuban hijackers executed by Castro, but go on to smile broadly over the terrible consequences of all of this for Oliver Stone. Here...

What's Right.
June 2, 2003... Giving 'Em Hell memo to: Any Democrat Who Will Listen from: The Ghost of Harry S. Truman re: Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? I don't know why the hell I keep sending these memos -- none of you fellows (and women! I didn't...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
June 16, 2003... --Your half-baked editorial defense of Sen. Santorum ("Sex and the Senator," May 19) fosters disrespect for law in general. There are two purposes to the criminal code: to decrease undesirable behavior through fear of punishment and to serve as...

The Week.
June 16, 2003... -- Smith College -- the historic women's institution -- has amended its student constitution to exclude the pronouns "she" and "her." Why? As a news story explained, "a growing number of students identify themselves as transgender, and say they...

Editorial: TAXES: A Victory.
June 16, 2003... Congress has just enacted the most pro-growth tax cut since 1981. The 1986 tax reform reduced tax rates but also included tax increases on capital. The 1997 tax cut focused narrowly on capital gains. The 2001 tax cut reduced tax rates, but did...

Editorial: CULTURE WATCH: Scoundrel Times.
June 16, 2003... Scandals continue to rock the New York Times in the wake of the Jayson Blair affair -- some of them Blair aftershocks, some brand new. The Times's anxious efforts to check other stories produced a correction to an atmospheric account, by...

Notes & Asides,.
June 16, 2003... -- Dear Mr. Buckley: You were wrong to say (April 21) that you were wrong and your correspondent was right in claiming "averral" doesn't exist just because it is not in some dictionaries. It is in the OED, marked, as you so often are by...

So Much Process, So Little Peace: Lessons for the opponents of terrorists.
June 16, 2003... Since 9/11, the West has waged a robust war on terrorism. One failed state that sheltered international terrorists, Afghanistan, was invaded and is currently being pacified. One rogue state that assisted terrorism (most notoriously by...

Hide and Seek . . . and Seek: Where'd those weapons of mass destruction get to?
June 16, 2003... In a perverse game of international Where's Waldo, American inspectors have fanned out across Iraq searching for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). With the exception of two trailers, the search has yet to yield a smoking gun. And, even though...

Arrest This: Against Belgium's self-righteous, illegitimate, kangaroo courts.
June 16, 2003... Once the war against Saddam Hussein reached a successful conclusion, the war against that war entered a new phase. Activists, asserting that the United States committed "war crimes" in Iraq, are even now in the process of initiating criminal...

Rich Man, Poor Man: How to think about income inequality. (Hint: It's not as bad as you may think).
June 16, 2003... As the 2004 campaign begins in earnest, it appears the Democrats' preferred strategy will be to tie a weak economy to President Bush's economic policies. But what will they talk about if the economy gets strong? Several pieces in the New York...

How Firm a Foundation - Hank the Deuce, 'Ping' Ferry, and what to learn from them.
June 16, 2003... It's not always true that the good that men do lives after them: Many of the great fortunes of modern capitalism have been turned to the service of anti-market forces. Their great foundations, born of good intention and high purpose, have...

St. Mugg at 100: A Godly man in a Godless age.
June 16, 2003... Malcolm Muggeridge was the modern equivalent of an Old Testament prophet. Using the English language with extraordinary skill and power, he sought to persuade men and women to turn their backs on the world of materialism, with its cults of...

Getting to the bottom of this 'neo' nonsense: Before you talk about conservatives, know what you're doing.
June 16, 2003... Have neoconservatives hijacked the Bush administration's foreign policy? That's the charge of opponents of the Iraq war on both the left and the right. Eric Alterman thinks that an "easily manipulated" president has been the neocons' victim....

Presidential Pants on Fire?: They say that Bush is 'lying.' They're wrong.
June 16, 2003... There's an idea gaining momentum among Democrats and pundits on the left: George W. Bush is a bigger liar than Bill Clinton ever was. Writers like Paul Krugman of the New York Times, E. J. Dionne and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, and...

A Conservative View of the Court: Getting beyond 'activism' and 'restraint'.
June 16, 2003... Not so long ago, liberals could be counted on to agitate for a "living Constitution," and conservatives for "strict construction." But those fronts have been crumbling. In the fights over President Bush's judicial nominees, Democrats are now...

The Long View.
June 16, 2003... The (Jayson) Blair Pitch Project: Coming to theaters near you! "All the News" Young hotshot reporter JayCee Flair wakes up one morning to find himself on the front page of the New York Dispatch, the most highly regarded and influential...

The Rake's Progress.("Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris -- The Rake Who Wrote the Constitution")(Book Review)
June 16, 2003... Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris -- The Rake Who Wrote the Constitution, by Richard Brookhiser (Free Press, 251 pp., $26) The first question this excellent book provokes is: What has taken so long? Why has a readable life of...

Blinded by Science.("Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human")(Book Review)
June 16, 2003... Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, by Matt Ridley (HarperCollins, 336 pp., $25.95) This is a very strange book, and I am not quite sure what the author is attempting to achieve. At the very least it appears that...

Our Captain, Kirk.(Russell Kirk)
June 16, 2003... Looking back on past triumphs is a good thing, especially during times of uncertainty and jolting change. At a time of recession, terrorism, and the fearful realities of war, glancing back a half-century seems to take one back to a time that...

Books in Brief.(Book Review)
June 16, 2003... amanda bright@home, by Danielle Crittenden (Warner, 368 pp., $23.95) In this charming novel, Danielle Crittenden gives us a year in the life of Amanda Bright: mother of two, wife of Bob Clarke, and resident of Washington, D.C. Amanda is a...

Give 'Em Szell.(conductor George Szell)
June 16, 2003... George Szell, the Hungarian-Jewish conductor, led the Cleveland Orchestra from 1946 until his death in 1970. It was a tenure of exactitude and illumination. Over the years, Szell made many commercial recordings -- but these could make little...

On the Right.
June 16, 2003... Problems in Common NEW YORK, MAY 9 The French have other distractions than the U.S. victory in Iraq. They will have to weigh in on the U.S. proposal to reorder the economic scene in Iraq to conform in some way with post-Saddam...

What's Right.
June 16, 2003... Capers, Tapers, &c. 'W ell, I'm just a simple country lawyer . . ." For Americans above a certain age, that one phrase can conjure up a season of political memories. Thirty years ago this summer, Sen. Sam Ervin took the gavel of a...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
June 30, 2003... --Re Eli Lehrer's "A Blind Eye, Still Turned," June 2: Prison rape is a confounding issue when viewed from the micro-managing standpoint of the current U.S. Congress, which is ever ready to pour more liberal ideology and taxpayer money into...

The Week.(observations on current events)
June 30, 2003... --The editorial material below was checked by Dorothy McCartney, John Virtes, Julie Crane, Sarah Maserati, Emmy Chang, Duncan Currie, and Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky. The stylistic guidelines were set by Fowler and by the King James Bible Committee....

Editorial: IRAQ'S WEAPONS: Missing Logic.(weapons of mass destruction yet to be found)(Editorial)
June 30, 2003... The most vociferous critics of the president appear to be in the grip of a fairly obvious logical fallacy: Since we have not yet found weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq they must not have existed and the administration is guilty of...

Editorial: THE MEDIA: No Raines, No Thunder.(resignation of Howell Raines, New York Times editor)(Editorial)
June 30, 2003... Five weeks after the Jayson Blair scandal broke, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, executive and managing editors of the New York Times, resigned. In Trollope's novels the voice of authority that lays down the law for Victorian England is called...

Notes & Asides.(Australia's gun policy; grammar errors)
June 30, 2003... -- Dear Mr. Buckley: I never thought I'd catch you in a grammatical error, but you made one (or at least agreed with one) in your reply to Mr. Horst Brakel a few months ago. Mr. Brakel disagreed with a correspondent who claimed that "if I...

Saddam and the Terrorists: A marriage (now ended).
June 30, 2003... From 1993 to 1998, the Clinton administration politicized intelligence on global terrorism and the rising power of al-Qaeda to such an extent that serious opportunities to dismantle Osama bin Laden's enterprise, and even capture him, were...

Their Brothers' Keepers: The conservative shade of human-rights activists.(religious conservatives most likely to promote human rights)
June 30, 2003... In early May, the Institute on Religion and Democracy sent a letter to President Bush, prompted by South Korean president Roh Moo Hyun's visit to Washington. The letter -- spearheaded by Christian conservatives -- issued a plea in behalf of...

We're Number Twenty?!: The odd, anti-American scorekeeping of the Center for Global Development.
June 30, 2003... The Center for Global Development (CGD), a left-leaning global-poverty think tank, recently announced that the United States ranks 20th out of 21 countries when it comes to helping poorer nations -- just barely ahead of last-place Japan....

The Nuclear Jitters: Fear not research, and a wise deterrence.(need for research on low-yield nuclear weapons)
June 30, 2003... Life has been hard of late for the handful of journalists, academics, and pundits who have made a profession of being distraught over U.S. nuclear weapons and policies. Credible polls show that a majority of the public appreciates the value of...

Throw the Bums Out: But do so with compassion -- Coolidge-style compassion.(dealing with homelessness in San Francisco, California)
June 30, 2003... On a recent business trip to San Francisco I decided to take a look at the new Asian Art Museum, which is in the old municipal library building, on one side of the downtown Civic Center Plaza. The museum is very impressive; but in making my way...

Take Your Medicine!: If the GOP neglects health care, it is in deep trouble - period.(Republican Party lacks health policy)
June 30, 2003... Republican politicians and conservative activists seem positively giddy about the political prospects for 2004. With the president enjoying strong public support for his foreign policy and signing a third growth-oriented tax cut in as many...

The Suffocation of Innovation: When the Left fights progress, fight back.(prescription drug coverage and new drugs)
June 30, 2003... A few years ago, I took part in a congressional hearing on prescription-drug coverage for seniors. During the hearing, Robert Reischauer -- the former director of the Congressional Budget Office and now a budget expert at the Urban Institute --...

The Right Prescription: A drug benefit that makes sense.
June 30, 2003... In early June, Senate Finance Committee leaders reached a surprise bipartisan agreement on a Medicare prescription-drug benefit bill, paving the way for passage after years of deadlock. The House is expected to follow, dramatically increasing...

The Genie of Choice: Has it been let loose in Britain? Britain?(National Health Service in Great Britain)
June 30, 2003... Four months ago, the British health secretary, Alan Milburn, made the most revolutionary announcement since the introduction of the state- run, state-funded National Health Service in 1948. He revealed that he was planning to introduce a...

Our Anti-Model to the North: Whatever you do: don't do like Canada.(socialized health care)
June 30, 2003... Twelve years ago, Canadians were scandalized to learn that a Toronto hospital was using its CT scanner to do brain examinations on dogs for $300 (Cdn.) a pop. Meanwhile, patients were waiting up to three months to get checked out. When did...

Sandra's Day: Why the Rehnquist Court has been the O'Connor Court, and how to replace her (should it come to that).(William Rehnquist; Sandra Day O'Connor; Supreme Court)
June 30, 2003... Conservatives have never much cared for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. They viewed her nomination to the Supreme Court as the result of Ronald Reagan's ill-advised, because gratuitous, 1980 campaign pledge to appoint the first female justice....

The New Fellow-Traveling: In the present crisis, a sickening familiarity.(increased number of Islamist extremists)
June 30, 2003... Islamist fellow-traveling today has a different focus from the Soviet fellow-traveling that preceded it, but the cast of mind is the same. The common premise that Western society is responsible for the world's ills generates in certain...

Water Fights: Believe it or not, the fluoridation war still rages -- with a twist you may like.(efforts to have cities no longer fluoridate water)
June 30, 2003... For eons now, liberals have teased conservatives about one thing (well, many things, but I'm thinking of one in particular): the fluoridation of water. "Oh, you work at National Review? What do you do, write editorials denouncing the...

The Long View.(humor about famous people from history)
June 30, 2003... Great Moments in Autobiography From page 267 of Present at the Creation: My Life and Times with Thomas Jefferson, in and around the Whyte House, Virginia, and Congreff, by Mrs. Thomas Jefferson (Putnam, 1809): "Sit down a moment, I...

Everybody Must Get Stoned?('Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use')(Book Review)
June 30, 2003... Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, by Jacob Sullum (J. P. Tarcher, 352 pp., $25.95) Jacob Sullum is a brave man. In his first book, the entertaining and provocative For Your Own Good, he attacked the excesses of anti-smoking activism and...

El Sid, Vicious.('The Clinton Wars')(Book Review)
June 30, 2003... The Clinton Wars, by Sidney Blumenthal (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 822 pp., $30) No one really expected Sidney Blumenthal's memoir to be a complete account of the Clinton scandals. There are other places for that. A reader can consult the...

Lost in the Male.('The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism')(Book Review)
June 30, 2003... The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, by J. Michael Bailey (Joseph Henry, 256 pp., $24.95) Sexual eccentricity raises difficult philosophical issues for conservatives. On the one hand, we have a core...

Shelf Life: Laughter and Remembering.('The Morality of Laughter,' 'Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life' and other books)(Book Review)(Brief Article)
June 30, 2003... 'Laughter," wrote poet Galway Kinnell, "is our stuttering / in a language we can't speak yet." And he was on to something: Laughter is the advent of a language of transcendence, a language in which human beings reject the limits placed on them...

Rumors Greatly Exaggerated.(popularity of classical music)
June 30, 2003... Franz Joseph Haydn (1732- 1809) was one of the fortunate masters who lived long enough to be universally appreciated by the audiences of his day. Yet in 1805, while he was living comfortably in Vienna, a rumor spread throughout Europe that...

City Desk: After the Fall.
June 30, 2003... In the last week of May there were two falls in my neighborhood, within four blocks and four days of each other. A 32-year-old woman fell out of a fourth-floor window, and a 29-year-old woman was hit on the head by a stool that fell out of a...

On the Right.(what Christian evangelists are teaching people about Islam; Hillary Clinton's book; Iraq's weapons of mass destruction)
June 30, 2003... Onward, Christian Missionaries NEW YORK, MAY 27 The program initiated by sundry evangelical Christian ministers to accost Islam by teaching the tenets of the Christian faith to those who seek to bring that faith to Muslims is very...

What's Right.(company names)
June 30, 2003... What's in a (Company) Name A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a man whose grandfather had owned a company called (let me scramble the name slightly to protect privacy) "American Plier and Wrench." The company made (again...