National Review articles from May 2001

National Review archives from May 2001

For the Record.(brief news about politicians)(Brief Article)
May 14, 2001... President Bush, speaking on April 15: "Excessive federal spending threatens economic vitality. What we want is a stronger economy, not larger federal government." . . . Tax Freedom Day arrives on May 3, latest date ever, according to Tax...

The Week.(current political events)
May 14, 2001... Steven Spielberg quit the board of the Boy Scouts-thereby earning a merit badge in Hollywood. The leaders of 34 nations met in Quebec to reiterate their interest in a "Free Trade Area of the Americas" including every Western Hemisphere...

Taxes: A Misplaced Fear.(tax policy)(Brief Article)
May 14, 2001... When it comes to the economy, President Bush has been tongue-tied. This is not just a result of his famously mangled diction. His well-spoken aides have the same problem. Sometimes they say that signs of an economic slump are reasons to pass...

Taiwan: EgrAegis.(negative effects produced by arms sale to Taiwan)(Brief Article)
May 14, 2001... The administration's long-awaited decision on arms sales to Taiwan turned out to be a mixed bag. Some weapons were approved for sale, and some others were deferred, most significantly the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers bearing the Aegis...

Education: Failing Marks.(efforts to improve education policy are faltering)(Brief Article)
May 14, 2001... 'The president has made bipartisan education reform the cornerstone of his administration." So reads one of the talking points the White House released at the end of its first 100 days. As the education bill heads through committee markup...

The Environment: Green Bush.(environmental regulations introduced by Pres Bush)(Brief Article)
May 14, 2001... After being hammered for taking a second look at some of the many environmental regulations cranked out by Bill Clinton during his final weeks in office, the Bush administration began trying to improve its image by issuing new regulations of...

Meldrim Thomson, R.I.P.(former New Hampshire governor)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
May 14, 2001... Meldrim Thomson was elected governor of New Hampshire in 1972, defeating a Republican incumbent in a primary. He transformed the state Republican party and, through imitation, the state Democratic party. His influence, after he completed three...

Go, Bush! Remarks, and advice, from a skeptic.(Pres Bush)(Column)
May 14, 2001... Not long ago, I was asked to give my judgment on the early days of the George W. Bush administration and throw in some advice to the new president. Perhaps the editor in question recalled my contribution to a 1989 Wall Street Journal symposium...

Segregation Forever? Where the GOP and the Black Caucus link arms.(Republicans support racial gerrymandering)
May 14, 2001... It isn't every day that GOP operatives cheer on the liberal wing of the Supreme Court. Yet many of them couldn't have been happier on April 18, when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor abandoned her longstanding skepticism about racial gerrymandering...

What's Up, Docs? The Democratization of the AMA.(American Medical Association espouses Democratic Party ideas)
May 14, 2001... President Bush got a great deal of media attention when he ended the American Bar Association's special role in evaluating federal judges- but a few weeks later, the press largely overlooked Bush's slap at another white-collar professional...

A Case of the DDTs - The war against the war against malaria.
May 14, 2001... Militants from Greenpeace have been mounting protests in an effort to close down the only major DDT-production facility in the world, located in Cochin, India. The protesters won't be getting any support from Jocchonia Gumede, a domestic...

(War) Toy Story - Where have you gone, G.I. Joe?(enjoyment of toy guns by boys)
May 14, 2001... To Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, it is the moment of crisis, the turning point when it all starts to go wrong: "You see this picture of a little boy with a stuffed bunny in one hand and a Lego gun in the other." Society, she argues, will...

Slip on This - How George W. avoids the banana peel.
May 14, 2001... Charlie Chaplin once explained that there are two ways to film the old guy-slips-on-a-banana-peel joke. The first, unfunny, way goes like this: Cut to the guy walking, oblivious. Cut to the banana peel, lying in wait. Cut to a wide shot of the...

So Who's Afraid of a Deficit? Economic sense in an age of superstition.
May 14, 2001... The Bush economic plan will help the economy, but the way the administration is selling it risks doing serious harm. Probably the most important element of the Bush plan is the proposed reduction in marginal tax rates. These cuts account for...

China Trade -- Without Guilt - It is logical, moral, and right.
May 14, 2001... It's quite an accomplishment to do the bidding of U.S. corporations and accept Marxist premises at the very same time. But this is the nifty trick pulled off by advocates of free trade with China, at least according to their critics. Congress...

Hand It to Them - Rediscovering American Scripture.(American Citizens Handbook)
May 14, 2001... Looking idly at my bookcase the other day, I fixed on a volume I had never noticed before: The American Citizens Handbook. It had come to me, I realized, from an old friend who was moving and unloading some books. It had sat on my shelf,...

Judging Holmes.(Review)
May 14, 2001... Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes, by Albert W. Alschuler (Chicago, 325 pp., $30) Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the author informs us at the beginning of his book, "is the only justice of the Supreme Court to...

Servants of Power.(Review)
May 14, 2001... Napoleon and His Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship, by Isser Woloch (Norton, 281 pp., $29.95) Corsica, that fractious little island annexed by France in 1768, has traditionally supplied its unloved stepmother with two sorts of...

Keeper of the Flame.(Review)
May 14, 2001... Allen Tate: Orphan of the South, by Thomas A. Underwood (Princeton, 429 pp., $35) 'I doubt," the novelist Malcolm Cowley once stated, "that any other poet in this country is a better judge of his contemporaries than Allen Tate." Literary...

Going Places.(hurrying)(Brief Article)
May 14, 2001... I am a New Yorker, and I want to get there. Where is that? Wherever I'm going, but I want to get there fast. I was coming out of the 72nd Street subway station on the Broadway line recently when I was struck by this truth. This particular...

Games People Play.(Review)
May 14, 2001... For all its success, I wasn't aware of Helen Fielding's bestseller Bridget Jones's Diary until the movie version was making tsunamis at the box office. It is the journal of a 32-year-old London "singleton" who works in publishing; drinks,...

In Brief.(Review)(Brief Article)
May 14, 2001... Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work, by Jennifer Roback Morse (Spence, 300 pp., $27.95) Although libertarianism has great merit as a political and economic philosophy, its effects on the family have been...

In Brief (2).(Review)(Brief Article)
May 14, 2001... Absolute Power: The Legacy of Corruption in the Clinton-Reno Justice Department, by David Limbaugh (Regnery, 385 pp., $27.95) David Limbaugh's bestseller Absolute Power seems to be doing what it set out to do-making sure scandal-fatigued...

The Long View.(politics of Barbara Streisand)(Brief Article)
May 14, 2001... PALISADES MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC Malibu, California doctor's notes patient: Barbra S. insurance: SAG, AFTRA, DGA, ASCAP, WGA 6/16/00 Patient arrives, elated. Has just raised $2,300,000.00 for a political...

On the Right - Whom Do We Blame?(Young Americans for Freedom)(Brief Article)(Column)
May 14, 2001... NEW YORK, APRIL 10 There was a great event in Pennsylvania two weeks ago, but the background needs detailing. A student chapter of Young Americans for Freedom at Penn State was organized and, as routinely is the case on that campus,...

On the Right - The Remaining Questions.(Brief Article)(Column)
May 14, 2001... NEW YORK, APRIL 13 On the matter of the settlement, a few questions: 1. When do we renew our surveillance flights? If reports are to be believed, these flights have been going up "several" times per week. That is a lot more often than...

On the Right - Coming Up: Taiwan.(Brief Article)(Column)
May 14, 2001... NEW YORK, APRIL 17 The moment is not far away when we will face what is most conveniently referred to as The Taiwan Question. The tense fortnight following the EP-3 incident taught us nothing conclusive, but demonstrated once again the...

Misanthrope's Corner.(retelling of "Gone with the Wind" from African-American perspective)(Brief Article)(Column)
May 14, 2001... The new GWTW ripoff is the ebonically titled The Wind Done Gone, by Alice Randall, a black woman who tells the story via the diary of the mulatto Cynara, daughter of Gerald O'Hara and Mammy. Cynara is thus the half sister of Scarlett, whom...

For the Record.(President George W. Bush says he would like to carry California, if he runs again)(this and other quotations are presented)(Brief Article)
May 28, 2001... --President Bush, in Associated Press interview: "If I run again, I would like to carry California." If? . . . OMB chief Mitch Daniels, on CNN: "The president got the best deal any president has gotten in a long, long time. This will be the...

The Week.(CNN reportedly hopes to create a Bill Clinton talk show)(this and other items are discussed)
May 28, 2001... MAKING IT OFFICIAL: CNN is trying to develop a new talk show hosted by former president Bill Clinton. Our views on the Bob Kerrey matter line up with those expressed by editor-at-large John O'Sullivan elsewhere in this issue. Like most...

Foreign Policy: Cacophony.(a sense of disorganization and conflict in the Bush administration's State Department and Defense Department)(Brief Article)
May 28, 2001... The Bush administration's foreign policy is a work in progress. At the Defense Department, only five political appointees have been confirmed; that leaves 40 to go. It is too soon to issue definitive judgments. But it is not too soon to worry...

Missile Defense: Still Mad.(Mutual Assured Destruction)(Bush administration's plan for a missile defense system)(Brief Article)
May 28, 2001... The arms-control brigade has been out in force since President Bush announced his latest moves toward missile defense, but their weaponry is looking a little rusty. Most of it is 20 years old. There is, for example, the charge that developing a...

Appreciation: Ira Glasser, Retired.(American Civil Liberties Union)(Brief Article)
May 28, 2001... The retiring head of the American Civil Liberties Union is a singular figure. Ira Glasser has served as executive director of the ACLU since 1978, and has been a great personal presence owing to his intelligence and capacity to laugh. I...

Notes and Asides.
May 28, 2001... Dear Mr. Buckley: Upon hearing that I've become a Catholic, people frequently remark, "Oh. Have you read Angela's Ashes?"-the implication being, "If so, how do you justify yourself?" My husband dismisses them as victims of an ad hominem...

A Sense of Dishonor? The case of Bob Kerrey.(confusion over Senator Bob Kerry's war record in Vietnam)
May 28, 2001... What is most unnerving about former senator Bob Kerrey's defense against the charge that he is a war criminal is his apparent lack of indignation. An innocent man charged with rounding up and shooting unarmed civilians-including women,...

Brave New Reformer: W. proceeds with Social Security.(President Bush makes plans for Social Security reform)
May 28, 2001... If George W. Bush's father had run on the same Social Security plan in 1988 that the son did in 2000, Michael Dukakis would have been our 41st president. As President Bush forges ahead on entitlement reform, that thought should give him comfort...

Weak Non-Reformer: W. caves on education.(controversy over the Bush administration education reform plan)
May 28, 2001... It would be something of an understatement to say that the Bush education-reform program is distressing Hill conservatives. When House Republicans met on May 2 to be briefed on the details of the latest compromise, Rep. Jim DeMint from South...

Out of the Arena: Pat Robertson, past and present.(Pat Robertson, in a TV interview, declined to criticize China's forced abortions policy, although in a later statement he declared his opposition)
May 28, 2001... Pat Robertson recently committed what may be the most startling gaffe of his career. It was a big belly flop of a blunder, one that might have finished off his reputation among conservatives. What's truly amazing, though, is how little...

Wiped Away: The destruction of cultural artifacts-and identity.
May 28, 2001... Soon after Chairman Mao died, I went to China. That monstrous man had leveled without a trace the ancient and magnificent walls of the Forbidden City in Peking, now virtually a shantytown. I took a boat down the Yangtze. (Today, they are...

Summertime. . . and the livin' is dangerous.(Americans may worry too much about unpreventable death)
May 28, 2001... Just when you thought it was safe to lock the kids in the car and go spend a few hours on the putting green, child-safety advocates have come forward to remind us that closed cars can turn into death ovens during the summer months. A coalition...

Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Children in day care-and the mothers who put them there.
May 28, 2001... Contemporary culture values sensitivity and softness, the "nice" virtues, above almost all else: except, we have now learned, when it comes to one particular segment of the population. These are preschoolers who spend more than thirty hours a...

The Brawl over Judges: Washington gears up.(Senate controversy over Bush administration appointees)
May 28, 2001... Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, smiled a smile that didn't seem entirely . . . sincere. "Senator Hatch is one of the handful of senators I consider my closest, dearest friends," Leahy said of the man seated...

The Problem with 'Zero': On tolerance and common sense in the schools.
May 28, 2001... You know the stories. They have been cropping up in everyday conversation among all classes and conditions of Americans for four or five years now. --A Pittsburgh kindergartner was disciplined in 1998 because his Halloween firefighter...

Attack of the Killer Nurses: A look at a curious phenomenon.(nurses who kill their patients)
May 28, 2001... In August 1975, three patients suffered cardiopulmonary arrests within 15 minutes of each other at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. An astute anesthesiologist noticed that all three patients looked as if they had...

Up from Bohemia.(Review)
May 28, 2001... Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left, by Ronald Radosh (Encounter, 216 pp., $24.95) Ronald Radosh's memoir is a valuable addition to the literature of leftist intellectual disillusionment. Its chief...

See You in Court.(Review)
May 28, 2001... The Lost Art of Drawing the Line: How Fairness Went Too Far, by Philip K. Howard (Random House, 255 pp., $22.95) Philip K. Howard's book is a fine and important one in some ways, an unsatisfactory one in others. It tells a gruesome, hugely...

Abusing the Seventies.(Review)
May 28, 2001... The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, by Bruce J. Schulman (Free Press, 352 pp., $26) The last quarter of Bruce Schulman's The Seventies consists of a sustained attack on the presidency of Ronald Reagan,...

Radical Niceness.(Review)
May 28, 2001... Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice, by Alan Wolfe (Norton, 256 pp., $24.95) Alan Wolfe, a prominent public intellectual and sociologist of moderately liberal convictions, is fast establishing himself as our foremost...

Almost Famous.(Review)
May 28, 2001... Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart, by Steven Bach (Knopf, 462 pp., $29.95) Back in the golden age of radio, there was a popular series called The First Nighter Program whose eponymous host, Mr. First Nighter, had fourth-row-center...

Greatness,Here & Now.(opera great Olga Borodina)
May 28, 2001... Ladies and gentlemen, a star is born, or rather: a star is about ten years old at this point, given that Olga Borodina first made an impression on the music world in the early '90s. But it is only in the last season or so that she has come to...

False Friends.(Review)
May 28, 2001... It would greatly help With a Friend Like Harry to be just a little more believable. Michel, a teacher; Claire, his wife; and their three small, squalling daughters are driving to their modest country house in an old, sweltering station wagon....

Shelf Life.(Review)(Brief Article)
May 28, 2001... Jesus and Socrates left no written works, and man has suspected ever since that oral communication reaches closer to truth than does writing. The publication of lectures is the intellectual's method of splitting the difference: Here's what I...

The Long View - The ADVISOR.(business and investment advice; humor)(Brief Article)
May 28, 2001... Dear Advisor: A few years ago, I started an Internet content company-our website was "wackywacky.com"-which was a multi-portal web engine providing lifestyle and information content in a wireless-enabled format. It was a really fast-paced,...

On the Right - The Guns of Elkhart.(display of Ten Commandments leads to ACLU case)(Brief Article)
May 28, 2001... NEW YORK, APRIL 20 The ACLU rides again, as we are advised by the Wall Street Journal's Jess Bravin, reporting out of Elkhart, Ind. The script: In 1956, Cecil B. DeMille is promoting his movie, The Ten Commandments. A judge in St. Cloud,...

On the Right - Watch the Killer Get Killed?(debate over allowing large numbers of people to witness Timothy McVeigh executed)(Brief Article)
May 28, 2001... NEW YORK, APRIL 24 If attitudes, let alone rules, can be said to have been formulated at the dinner seminar, these would be they: 1. Nobody is saying that Timothy McVeigh is the wrong guy. There is no outstanding legal appeal in his...

On the Right - Invitations Ahead.(Yang Jiechi out of place at White House lunch)(Brief Article)
May 28, 2001... NEW YORK, MAY 1 Invitations can be tricky, as President Bush most keenly discovered on Monday when he invited the whole legislative gang to lunch and was greeted by only 193. We're told that Southwest chicken and Angus beef were served,...

Misanthrope's Corner.(stress and the American way)(Brief Article)(Column)
May 28, 2001... Another Sunday with the newspapers, another pile of stress articles. This is becoming such a regular experience that if This Is Your Life is ever revived and they decide to do me, they'll have to figure out some way to show it. I don't know how...