The Real Steel Deal
Paul Veryser’s steel-parts company, Stampings Inc., is in big trouble. Tariffs on steel imports, imposed by President George W. Bush in March, have pushed the cost of steel up by more than half on the American spot market, and this has added a whopping 25 percent to the cost of the air-bag, seat-belt and steering-wheel…
Books in Review
Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice By William A. Galston. Cambridge University Press, 152 pages, $19.00 No living American political theorist has come closer than Bill Galston to serving in the classical role of philosopher to princes. A prolific and influential scholar and a founder of the New Democrats,…
Books in Review
Bush at War By Bob Woodward. Simon & Schuster, 376 pages, $28.00 It was 3 p.m. when the phone rang. “Ring, ring, ring.” It was the same sound it usually made, but this time with a difference. The nation was at war. And Bob Woodward had a new book out about it. So when the…
Children Left Behind
In early October, Nakia Burgess had just gotten a job as a transcriber in Atlanta. She had already lost two other jobs because of her inability to secure reliable and affordable child care for her 3-year-old daughter, Asan’te, who had Down syndrome. So when the temp agency she had signed up with sent her out…
The New Poll Tax
One of the recurring scandals in American politics since passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is the discriminatory use of so-called “ballot security” programs. These programs are invariably presented as good government measures necessary to prevent voter fraud, but far too often they are actually designed to suppress minority voting — and for…
Put a Face on Your Fears
They had to wage a campaign in equal parts deceitful and dynamic to get there, but when Congress convenes in January, Republicans will control the Senate. The Democrats’ capacity to impede the Bush agenda has been whittled down to the occasional filibuster. Their ability to inquire about the administration’s most glaring lunacies is gone. Not…
Flunking Statistics
When William F. Buckley Jr. launched America’s conservative movement half a century ago, the requisite foe came readily to hand. In God & Man at Yale, Buckley identified the university he had just left — and, by implication, the country’s entire higher-education establishment — as the driving force behind “agnosticism and collectivism” in American life.…
Hair-Raising Hair Triggers
Thousands of ready-to-fire U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons are susceptible to unauthorized launches by terrorists, who might either capture a missile or electronically hack into a missile launch-control system. This reality has gotten nearly zero attention in the press. And it gets worse. Cyber-terrorists might also succeed in fooling early-warning systems, inducing a false attack…
Gen. Election
In the lobby of the Jerusalem Convention Center, glossy campaign leaflets of wannabe Knesset members carpeted the floor. Activists flowed from the hall where the Labor Party’s newly chosen leader, Amram Mitzna, had pledged to order Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip upon becoming prime minister. The party convention was ending unexpectedly early, as Mitzna’s…
Whose Town?
When Joanne Woodward was picking shows to produce this summer, Our Town was an easy choice. Thornton Wilder’s play about life and death in turn-of-the-century Grover’s Corners, N.H., is one of the most popular works in American theater. What’s more, Woodward’s husband wanted to play the central, narrating role of the Stage Manager — no…
The Cult of Karl
So who you gonna believe, Bob Woodward or Ron Suskind? In Bush at War, Woodward’s new behind-the-scenes account of the White House in wartime, mighty battles are waged between the Powellites and the Cheneyistas over the fundamentals of foreign policy. Multilateralists duke it out with unilateralists, leaving the president to choose between, or meld, two…
Comment: Sins of Commission
The appointment of Henry Kissinger to chair a commission on the September 11 attacks has provoked widespread clucking. As Maureen Dowd aptly put it, Henry Kissinger isn’t whom you hire to get to the bottom of something. “If you want to keep others from getting to the bottom of something, you appoint Henry Kissinger,” she…
Persian Gulf—or Tonkin Gulf?
In a pair of editorials after the 1991 Gulf War, one of them titled “Don’t Shoot Down Iraqi Aircraft,” The New York Times called the plan to create vast “no-fly zones” (NFZs) in Iraq “legally untenable and politically unwise.” The editorials, based on a careful reading of United Nations resolutions, were explicit: “The [cease-fire] accord…
Al in the Family
Does Al Gore know what he’s doing? Close readers of his two new books, The Spirit of Family and Joined at the Heart: The Transformation of the American Family, cannot help but wonder. Certainly no other serious politician in America has written so honestly, so refreshingly and so, well, earthily, about the contemporary American family.…
