American Spectator, The

The Continuing Crisis

[...] vavoom: the Angry Left's indignados might leave their Yoga studios, forsake their sex education classes, and pour into the streets burning American flags, chanting antiSUV jingles, and storming Wal-Marts. According to the New York Daily News, Miss Chelsea Clinton has entered into a serious adult relationship with Mr. Marc Mezvinsky, the callipygian son of former congresswomen Mrs. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, who lost her seat after voting for President Bill Clinton's 1993 tax increas...

A Bush Crack-Up?

There are the sensational stories that every leader occasions-war, economic setback, political upheaval-and there are the sensational stories that only a leader beset by a mass media could occasionthe president slept through a late-night aerial battle with Libyan jets, the president fell asleep during late-night phone sex with an intern, the vice president peppered a hunting companion with birdshot on a remote ranch and the White House did not report it promptly to "the networks." In the war...

Correspondence

at conferences-France also rewrote her textbooks to mitigate Islamic brutality throughout history; took an anti-Israel stance in foreign policy; helped create the fiction of a Palestinian people, and extended every diplomatic courtesy to Yassir Arafat instead of treating him like the criminal that he was.

Republican Doldrums

BUSH WORKED HARD IN 2005 to sell the nation on personal Social Security accounts, but he never had a plan of his own and surrendered any hope of passage in this year's State of the Union address (at which mention, jubilant Democrats rendered him a rare standing ovation). Bush, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and other Republican leaders have expressed varying degrees of interest in the proposed "Fair Tax": total repeal of the income tax, abolition of the Internal Revenue Service, and replaceme...

We Are All Post-Reaganites Now

First there was the "No Child Left Behind" education bill, then the multi-billion dollar manned mission to Mars, then the massive hike in foreign aid, the obese farm bill, and the biggest sellout of all, the multi-trillion dollar Medicare prescription drug bill.

The Battle of New Orleans

[...] the fourth crucial fact is that New Orleanians cannot rebuild their own city if they have nowhere to live while doing it-and that if they cannot return to their properties or pay their mortgages, the ripple effects from bankrupt citizens and distressed lending institutions could damage the national economy and require federal payouts far more expensive than the cost of having the government do the work of re-creating the New Orleans housing market from scratch. (Never mind that the Whi...

He Put Us in a Hole

If he had been, his national security adviser would have been, like Henry Kissinger, an inventor of agendas-the type that bullies senior cabinet officers. GEORGE W. BUSH CLAIMS that the nonrecurrence of attacks on the scale of 9/11 is due to his of team's competent security measures, especially intelligence.

The Blunder of 1968

The Republican Party, it was widely assumed, would revert to control by its long-dominant and relatively liberal Eastern Establishment, now led by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and America's future would resume being disputed between this version of the GOP and a Democratic Party well to its left. Most important of all, just two years after the disaster of 1964 an outspokenly conservative and highly attractive newcomer to politics, Ronald Reagan, defeated the re-election bid of incum...

Current Wisdom

The man who ended the Cold War and launched democratic reforms that broke the repressive Soviet regime continues to enjoy the limelight, globe-trotting on behalf of his political foundation and environmental group and taking part in charity projects. AN ORAL BIOGRAPHY OF AMERICA'S CHARISMATIC, CONTROVERSIAL, CONFOUNDING 42nd PRESIDENT, in which Bill Clinton is revealed through the recollections of friends and foes, high school teachers and secretaries of state, to construct a mosaic that cov...

Note From The Publisher

Underwhelmed

By the time Nixon had imposed wage and price controls, had accelerated détente with the Soviet Union, had increased domestic discretionary spending over Lyndon Johnson by 60 percent, had created the Environmental Protection Agency (by executive order), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Consumer Products Safety Commission, giving these new agencies some of the most far-reaching regulatory authority in the history of the federal government, and had sold Taiwan down the ...

Capitol Ideas

Saving an Unstable Currency

A straw in the wind was the recent Senate vote to extend the currently reduced (15 percent) tax rates on capital gains and dividends. The American Enterprise Institute's James Classman, an old friend and one of the people I listen to on matters financial, had told me that "if the capital gains, and just as important the dividend rate reductions, are allowed to expire, the stock market consequences will be negative and possibly dire." The key variable to watch is any looming change in margin...

Politics

Prescription for Political Disaster

Barnes admits that "Reagan would not have liked the program" even though he would have cheered the plan's expansion of health savings accounts, "which gives more choice, and more competition in health care markets." The final product was rammed through on one of the longest roll-call votes in House history, a three-hour marathon that ended shortly before 6 A.M. GOP members were bullied into voting for the bill by being told that if this effort failed, the House leadership would call up the e...

Ben Stein's Diary

Dreams and Nightmares

By that time I was in a daze from stomach pain, that horrible feeling of being lost, and the lingering effects of my horrible dream.

High Spirits

Benedictine Beauty

For each one of St. Benedict's 12 steps to humility are spiritual mountain climbs such as "not to like having our own way" (No. 2); "to accept without complaint really wretched and inadequate conditions" (No. 6); "to believe in our hearts that we are less important than others" (No. 7); and "to make the humility of our hearts apparent by our bodily movements" (No. 12). Whether it is serving their guests at meals, or gliding in silent anonymity through the cloisters, or slipping into their st...

Books In Review

The Vain Assassin

IN HIS RECENT BOOK, Heritage Foundation legal scholar James Swanson relates the all-true adventures of a famous actor endowed with an unquenchable hatred for Republicans and a fervent belief that the sitting president is an illegitimate, constitutional rights-trampling tyrant. Deprived of such contemporary tools of dissent as the press junket and a login name at The Huffington Post, Booth ended up using his wealth and reputation (think Alec Baldwin with A MOUSTACHE AND the ability to pull of...

Lost in America

The Atlantic Monthly commissions Bernard-Henri Lévy, the leading French intellectual of our day, to follow in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville and write a series of articles about the condition of the United States, Random House makes a book out of them, and-hey presto!-a new Democracy in America. To be fair to Levy, he is not just a posturing lightweight, but a leader of the nouveaux philosophes who, in the early 1970s, rejected the Marxist consensus and championed thinkers such as To...

It Could Have Been Hotter

Three months later, secretary Marshall formulated his aid plan to restore Europe's shattered economies, and it was Stalin's refusal to allow Communist Eastern Europe to benefit from Marshall aid that turned the division between East and West into an economic as well as a military fact. There were too many middle-of-the-road politicians in Western Europe, and indeed in America, who were scared of using the full resources of capitalism to expose the ever-widening gulf between the productive ca...

All Roads Lead to ...

Dave Shiflett, described by Chuck Colson as "one of the most astute culture watchers and writers I know," has written Exodus to explain the phenomenon summarized in the subtitle: "Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity" An accomplished journalist and long-time contributor to this and other conservative publications, Shiflett writes in a breezy and personal style from a perspective that fairly represents the liberal churches but clearly favors religions that d...

College Avenue

Scholarly Mesearch

University of Oregon Associate Professor of Sociology Michael Dreiling, for example, allows his students to submit an "alternative method of evaluation" for his course on "Nonviolent Social Change," a model for which he generously provides: "I imagine my needs for play, learning and sharing will be met by applying my talents to the development of a website on Nonviolent Social Change, with sections including personal reflections and poetry." The institution's goal (besides playing off the na...

Public Nuisances

Secretive and Smug

Dana Milbank's report of the Conservative Political Action Conference's debate on civil liberties, moderated by me, is inaccurate in matters large and small.

Showdown at Harvard State

Earlier President Summers, an economist and one of the few Clinton administration cabinet members never investigated by an Independent Counsel (the administration attracted seven!), created controversy when he advised black studies professor Dr. Cornel West to give up composing rap songs and try his hand at scholarship.

The Talkies

Humanized Without Honor

In any properly organized society, this nomination would be a scandal, but the media have been too busy lately desperately trying to strike a spark of scandal in the wet tinder of Dick Cheney's hunting accident or the Bush administration's selling out our ports' security to a pack of A-rabs or its failure to stop Hurricane Katrina from devastating New Orleans to pay any attention to the movie industry's kudos for a cinematic apology for murderers. Once again, the effort to humanize the act o...

Last Call

Thinking About Tomorrow

The President reviewed the transition briefing documents over breakfast in the private residence, and has given Chief of Staff Webb Hubbell a directive to reverse the tax cuts for the rich, scrap the "No Child Left Behind" program, and recommend legislation to ensure healthcare coverage is available for every American, no matter their age, race, or sexual orientation and sexual history. However, as President Rodham stated in her Inaugural Address yesterday, the decisions of her presidency wi...

Letter From Paris

Celebrating 70 Years of Socialism

Baverez, a top corporate lawyer and economist and author of the best-selling France in Decline, is one of a growing number of French analysts who warn that their country is heading for the wall. Wealthy Frenchmen are leaving the country in droves-one estimate puts it at one millionaire a day over the last decade, including members of 13 of France's 25 wealthiest families-to escape punitive taxes on success, particularly the wealth tax on assets over $875,000. Over opposition from the Social...

The Tory Spectator

Conservatism Abandoned

In his first parliamentary encounter with Tony Blair, the new Tory leader criticized the Prime Minister for not pressing hard enough for a successor to the Kyoto treaty on climate change, which would enforce a new set of rigid targets for carbon emissions. Since the Tories also argue that the country is running a large structural budget deficit, they risk being trapped into plans for substantial tax increases at the next election. The party is backing away from welfare reform and from fisca...