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
Here’s one simple measure of how out of sorts the Republican Party is these days: Nearly all of its aspirants to the 2008 Presidential nomination are keen to brand themselves in the image of Ronald Reagan—the only G.O.P. President of the postwar age to remain popular for two full terms in office. But Reagan also Read More
A WOMAN IN CHARGE: THE LIFE OF HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
By Carl Bernstein
Alfred A. Knopf, 628 pages, $27.95
It’s the piety, stupid. Carl Bernstein’s mammoth new study of Hillary Clinton goes beyond the familiar theorizing about the gender politics of the New York Senator’s career, and instead homes in on her stolid Read More
THE ASSAULT ON REASON
By Al Gore
The Penguin Press, 308 pages, $25.95
If anyone has the right to fulminate on the irrationality of American political debate, it’s Al Gore. During the 2000 Presidential campaign, the national media turned him into a hapless unofficial extra from Revenge of the Nerds, Read More
In virtually any other Presidency, Alberto Gonzales—a clumsy prevaricator, a talentless hack and a dangerously indifferent advocate of the rule of law—would be a dead man walking. In the Bush White House, though, he is the walking dead—a curiously lifeless drone who seems to draw strength from the leadership vacuum surrounding him.
And he Read More
On a recent Saturday morning, Conference Room D outside the Ballston Westin Gateway hotel’s F. Scott Fitzgerald Ballroom was filled with bloggers. So, naturally, there was lots of fulminating about the mainstream media.
But when a man from the crowd stepped up to put a question to the no-less-inevitable panel of bloggers, it was Read More
“Let me live again!”
Cable talk-show host Joe Scarborough was standing near the front windows of Christopher Hitchens’ enormous apartment in Washington’s embassy-heavy Kalorama district. He was trying to sum up his reactions to the comedy stylings of Rich Little, who had by near-universal consent royally stunk up this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association Read More
