National Review articles from March 2003

National Review archives from March 2003

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
March 10, 2003... --Re Jay Nordlinger's "Hootie vs. Hootie" (Jan. 27): I would dearly love to see a wealthy conservative man with a little time and huge you- know-whats make a point of joining the National Organization for Women. He must be prepared for...

The Week.(duct tape, civil defense, anti-Americanism, other current issues)
March 10, 2003... -- Just wait until the Left gets wind of Vice President Cheney's secret investments in duct tape. -- The only use we can think of for this tape is to slap over the mouths of the people who want us to buy it. We are in a war. It likely will...

At War: Action This Day (Cont.).(Iraq fails to comply with United Nations demands for disarmament)
March 10, 2003... Last fall, after confronting the United Nations with its own dereliction of duty in compelling Iraq to disarm, the United States chose to give the U.N., as well as Iraq, a last chance. Iraq would have one more chance to be stubborn, and the...

THE VATICAN: When There Is No Peace.
March 10, 2003... Writing in First Things, George Weigel has remarked that "the just war tradition, as a historically informed method of rigorous moral reasoning, is far more alive in our service academies than in our divinity schools and faculties of theology;...

Notes & Asides.(political humor)
March 10, 2003... -- Dear Mr. Buckley: I am concerned about the subliminal campaign waged by left-leaning authorities to move us into a mindset that resonates with their cause. Three such phenomena come to mind: 1) On highways: When a road narrows, the...

Getting It Wrong: Conservatives, NATO, and the Iraq crisis.
March 10, 2003... Every day furnishes another news report to confirm that a massive realignment of the West is under way. Just the latest -- itself likely to be superseded by the time you read this paragraph -- is that France's President Chirac rebuked the new...

Remember Suez: Nasser and the Canal; Saddam and today.(Gamal Abdul Nasser)
March 10, 2003... In the approach to the liberation of Iraq, a peace party is gathering in one country after another, with demonstrations taking place in some 600 cities across the world. Under cover of well-meant pacifism lie political ignorance and moral...

Hispanic Like Me?: Racial games, racial tags -- the way the Left plays.(identity politics)
March 10, 2003... 'It's not good enough to simply say that because of someone's genetics or surname that they should be considered Hispanic." So came the official pronouncement from Angelo Falcon, representing a group of Hispanic leaders opposed to the...

Contra Estrada: Things I saw at the filibuster.(filibuster against appeals-court nomination of Miguel Estrada)
March 10, 2003... When Democratic senators began their filibuster of the appeals-court nomination of Miguel Estrada, there was a lot going on that you didn't see on C-SPAN. Take this scene: At one point early in the battle, Estrada himself was in the...

Originalist Sin: Conservatives, the Constitution, and affirmative action.
March 10, 2003... Robert Bork has called it "the 'heart's desire' school of constitutional jurisprudence." The key tenet of that school, according to Bork, is, "If you want something passionately enough, it is guaranteed by the Constitution." Conservatives are...

'Governor Tax': This is not your grandfather's Taft.(Bob Taft, governor of Ohio)
March 10, 2003... When President Bush announced his latest tax-cut proposal on January 7, the Republican Governors Association issued a strong statement of support the very same day. Colorado governor Bill Owens, the RGA chairman, called Bush's initiative "a...

Ministers of War: The amazing chaplaincy of the U.S. military.
March 10, 2003... The shooting had long since stopped by the time Richard Kent arrived for his tour of peacekeeping duty in Bosnia. But what the American soldier saw in an abandoned warehouse in a village called Kravica still haunts his dreams. Eight years...

Meet the Diaz-Balarts: A couple of Castro's 'nephews' -- in Congress.(Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart)
March 10, 2003... They're called the "Cuban Kennedys," and the appellation is inevitable. The family is big, influential, and sort of glamorous. They were political leaders first in Cuba and then in Miami. The sons, in fact, are princes of Miami, although no...

Blue Is True: What the color of environmentalism should be.
March 10, 2003... If you care about the environment, your symbolic color should be not green but blue. First of all, over two-thirds of the planet's surface is blue, and represents a major environmental challenge: Even with all that water, over a billion people...

The Long View.(satire on lawsuit between Satan and Jacques Chirac)
March 10, 2003... COURT-ORDERED MEDIATION IN THE MATTER: Satan (Plaintiff) vs. Jacques Chirac (Defendant) for Breach of Contract (Verbal) Transcript April 14, 2007 present: M. Chirac and his counsel, Mr. Johnnie Cochran;...

How the Right Was Won.(Getting It Right)(Book Review)
March 10, 2003... Getting It Right, by William F. Buckley Jr. (Regnery, 311 pp., $24.95) William F. Buckley Jr. is a controversialist with the soul of a peacemaker. In reading his last five novels -- The Redhunter, Spytime, Elvis in the Morning, Nuremberg:...

Tight Little Island.(This Is Cuba: An Outlaw Culture Survives)(Book Review)
March 10, 2003... This Is Cuba: An Outlaw Culture Survives, by Ben Corbett (Westview, 304 pp., $26) The debate over Cuban policy in the United States has lately undergone some strange mutations. Many conservatives and libertarians -- as well as Republican...

Do They Make the Man?(Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear)(Book Review)
March 10, 2003... Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear, by Paul Fussell (Houghton Mifflin, 192 pp., $22) For a six-year-old Jewish boy growing up in Southern California in 1971, I had an unlikely obsession: to find and buy a miniature replica of a World War II...

A Cinema Classic, Updated.(The New Biographical Dictionary of Film)(Book Review)
March 10, 2003... The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 4th ed., by David Thomson (Knopf, 963 pp., $35) David Thomson's New Biographical Dictionary of Film is one of those unclassifiably quirky books, like Pictures from an Institution or Black Lamb and...

City Desk: Sick in the City.(being sick in New York City)
March 10, 2003... Being sick in New York is, in most ways, like being sick anywhere else. The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed 12,000 New Yorkers, and 15 to 20 million victims worldwide; according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (12th edition) only St....

Shelf Life: The Gioia Creation.(Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture)(Hitler and His Generals: Military Conferences, 1942-1945)(Book Review)(Brief Article)
March 10, 2003... --Dana Gioia, one of America's most distinguished poets, was recently confirmed by the Senate as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts -- which is great news for the arts. To understand why, read his splendid collection of literary...

On the Right.(US relations with Middle East and North Korea; NATO protection of Turkey; French foreign relations)(Column)
March 10, 2003... A Hard Day's Viewing NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 4 The History Channel on television had an hour on the First World War. It focused on the attempt by the British to build parallel tunnels that would permit explosives to be detonated inside the...

What's Right.(US relations with Iraqi National Congress)
March 10, 2003... Our Man for Iraq There's an old joke about the Air Force major assigned to brief a superior officer about the latest Cold War contingency plan. He finishes triumphantly: "And that is how we intend to destroy the enemy!" The superior...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
March 24, 2003... --In "Originalist Sin" (March 10) Ramesh Ponnuru argues that the Constitution doesn't prohibit state universities from discriminating on the basis of race and that civil rights laws shouldn't. It's unclear why he thinks the Constitution...

The Week.(Column)
March 24, 2003... -- Michael Moore's Stupid White Men won Great Britain's Book of the Year prize, thus proving its point. -- The arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Pakistan was a blow to al-Qaeda. Mohammed, a high-level planner and coordinator, helped...

Notes & Asides.(Column)
March 24, 2003... -- Dear Mr. Buckley: For quite a while during 2002 you had a discussion going on as to how to have the various diacritics print out properly on a computer. Instead of having to use particular computer codes for everything, there is a very...

The Rise and Fall of Saddam: Getting into the Supreme Leader's mind.
March 24, 2003... In the recent history of Iraq, each ruler has been butchered by his successor, who himself has been butchered in turn. The one exception is Saddam Hussein, strangely enough, who spared the life of his predecessor and patron Ahmad al-Bakr,...

His Finest Hour -- for How Long?: The shaky world of Tony Blair.
March 24, 2003... Back in the unlamented 1960s in Britain, in the sour political atmosphere following the failed 1967 devaluation of the pound, a joke spread rapidly through the governing classes at the expense of the reformist Labour prime minister of the day....

Caring for Illegals, Losing Their Shirts: The effect of the wave on border- state medical services.
March 24, 2003... Jim McNeal remembers the night like it was yesterday. "We got a call at about 11 o'clock saying there'd been a bad accident -- a van had crashed out in the middle of nowhere, and it was stuffed with 26 illegal aliens from Mexico." McNeal's...

A Bright Idea on Taxes: How the BRIDGE Act can help small businessmen and America.
March 24, 2003... A new idea in Washington has more trouble gaining traction than the city's commuters on icy streets. While there will be pitched battles over accelerating tax-rate reductions and eliminating the tax on stock dividends, lawmakers agree on the...

Getting Hurt, Getting Paid: The curious politics, psychology, and sociology of medical compensation.
March 24, 2003... The late C. E. M. Joad, the Oxford-educated professor of philosophy at London University, once remarked that, while money cannot buy you happiness, it can at least buy you misery in comfort. This is the great principle upon which the...

They Have to Break a Few Eggs: The French way of dealing with life.
March 24, 2003... A few years ago, at the end of a happy dinner in an atmospheric Paris restaurant, of the twelve or so at the table half wanted a cheese course, and the others wanted to go directly to dessert. It was late, even for Paris, and I knew that one of...

The President of the Left: No, he's not president. Martin Sheen only plays one on TV. But . . .
March 24, 2003... If there is anyone more sanctimonious than The West Wing's Jed Bartlet, it's the moralizing old ham who plays him. But prissy, preachy Martin Sheen wasn't always this way. There were times, back in the depths of the wicked, whacked-out 1970s,...

The Empire of Freedom: Where the United States Belongs: The Anglosphere.
March 24, 2003... We can't say we weren't warned. The end of the alliance between Western Europe and the United States has been predicted since before the end of the Cold War. The disappearance of the external threat to the Western alliance was bound to magnify...

Objectivist Sex -- and Politics.(Interview)
March 24, 2003... An interview with WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. The early 1960s were a turning point for American conservatism. Would the movement be taken over by the paranoid fringe of the anti-Communist conspiracy theorists? Or would it be captivated by the...

The Long View.
March 24, 2003... Transcript from Larry King Live, May 23rd, 2003 larry king: "Hello! You're on the air with Sonya Griff-Martine and Howard Zeiff, a couple of former human shields! What's your question?" caller: "Hi. I'd like to know if either one of...

Annals of Ignominy.("Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First")(Book Review)
March 24, 2003... Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, by Mona Charen (Regnery, 308 pp., $27.95) We're a forward-looking people, we Americans. That's a good thing, no doubt. We do not glance back, but keep...

The Whole Shoe-Bang.("Khrushchev: The Man and His Era")(Book Review)
March 24, 2003... Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, by William Taubman(Norton, 768 pp., $35) The further Soviet Communism recedes into history, the more bewildering the whole experiment appears. Portentously claiming to be changing human nature, the Soviet...

Campus Crusader for Conservatism.(Book Review)
March 24, 2003... Letters to a Young Conservative, by Dinesh D'Souza(Basic, 224 pp., $22) Few college conservatives in the past 20 years can have missed a Dinesh D'Souza visit to their campus. My opportunity came when I was a freshman (not so long ago). We...

The Straggler: I Was an Illegal Alien.
March 24, 2003... Immigration, people tell me, is the hot-button political issue of tomorrow. Public anger is swelling. The 9/11 attacks got everyone thinking. Citizens' groups are springing up all over. Congressional and presidential candidates in 2004 are...

Shelf Life: The Old Mill Stream.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
March 24, 2003... John Stuart Mill is part of the air we breathe. Millions who have never heard his name quote him unawares, and give thanks that they live in a society that reflects, in significant measure, his classical-liberal principles. His treatise On...

Books in Brief.("In the Forest of the Night")(Book Review)(Brief Article)
March 24, 2003... In the Forest of the Night, by Larry Ellis (iUniverse, 272 pp., $15.95) A reader who has himself "been there" sometimes simply knows when a writer is "from there." The descriptions are just right: The subtlest shadings, not merely of...

On the Right.
March 24, 2003... The London View of It NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 18 The Times of London ran heavily on Monday with news and analysis of the antiwar protest, though it had to struggle a bit with the paradox of its former editor William Rees-Mogg. In his...

What's Right.
March 24, 2003... Low, Dishonest . . . Radicals who came of age in the 1990s were truly rebels without a cause. Socialism was gone and so was the nuclear arms race; and the causes that remained lacked -- well -- a certain oomph. Who could get excited about...