It was like watching a mechanical rabbit spring onto the rail of a greyhound track: Over the weekend, the Des Moines Register reported the results of an October poll showing Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton pulling away from her two main competitors for the Hawkeye State’s January caucus vote. And the nation’s pundit corps rallied to Read More
It’s certainly no news to New Yorkers that former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has a taste for the theatrical. Long before the World Trade Center towers fell, the mayor had a penchant for making morbid cameos at accidents and crime scenes, usually just as 11 p.m. news crews arrived, as though Mr. Giuliani were both Commissioner Read More
In virtually all the ways it was intended to, the Iraq surge has worked. That is to say, it’s shifted the focus in American politics away from the gaping flaws in the messianic American reflex to remake the Arab Muslim world into its own image and onto crisply technocratic matters of timing and modulation.
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With Monday cable coverage caroming back and forth from the resignation of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to the plea agreement for disgraced NFL quarterback Michael Vick, viewers could be forgiven for thinking that a White House now run by one of the world’s more ineffectual Major League Baseball franchise owners could benefit from a Read More
It’s true that August is a bad time for a product launch, as Andy Card famously said of the American invasion of Iraq. But it’s an ideal time for a product dump—which is no doubt why Karl Rove waited until Congress had adjourned for August recess and elite media apparatchiks in metro D.C. had repaired Read More
All the conspicuous alarm over the first-ever YouTube presidential debate becoming terminally inane now seems quite overblown. Trivializing presidential runs is clearly still the specialty of the campaign press—which has devoted a week’s worth of coverage to taking one of the most substantive questions raised in the Charleston, S.C., Democratic forum and reducing it to Read More
CHENEY: THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICA’S MOST POWERFUL AND CONTROVERSIAL VICE PRESIDENT
By Stephen F. Hayes
HarperCollins, 578 pages, $27.95
“Untold story” is right. Weekly Standard senior writer Stephen Hayes prefaces this doorstop biography of America’s slant-mouthed branch-of-government-unto-himself with an admiring note on the breadth of his own research: “I conducted more than six hundred Read More
It seems only a matter of time before the 2008 G.O.P. presidential field is minus its onetime presumptive front-runner, Arizona Senator John McCain.
It was a colossally bad week, with the campaign’s manager, chief strategist and communications team hitting the bricks as its once-flush fund-raising accounts veered into the red.
All of which Read More
Amnesty lives, after all. A week after the conservative base of the G.O.P. rallied to block the Senate’s plan for comprehensive immigration reform, President Bush commuted the 30-month prison sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The president’s procedural end-run around the justice system came just after the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Read More
“You know, it’s a new wrinkle. I never thought I’d make a killing on some guy’s ‘integrity.’”
Thus spake Sidney Falco, the slimy antihero of the classic mid-century study in seedy noir ambition, Sweet Smell of Success. But it’s also an apt motto for the Democratic primary field, which can’t seem to go about Read More
