The Banality of Irving
The libel suit historian David Irving waged against professor Deborah Lipstadt turned on the question of whether it was correct to call him a “Holocaust denier.” The Holocaust occurred, Irving says; it just wasn’t what everybody says it was. For example, it didn’t include gas chambers, especially not at Auschwitz, and it involved no custom-built…
Are Men’s Fingers Faster?
“Can anyone explain this to me?” Regis Philbin asked his Who Wants to Be a Millionaire audience of 30 million one evening in February. “Why is it that nearly all of our contestants are white men? I’m a white man, so you know I have nothing against them, but come on… . We would really…
A New China Deal
The upcoming fight over China trade will test not just the clout of organized labor but, more specifically, the price labor can extract from big business as a condition for accepting the deal. And it seems clear that unless the AFL-CIO goes along with the White House proposal to grant China full trading privileges on…
Delinquent Justice
@body no indent=[S”body”,”body”,”body”] hortly after the recent killing of six-year-old Kayla Rolland by her six-year-old classmate in a Michigan public school, President Clinton exhorted Congress to pass gun control measures that have been stalled in committee for the past eight months. Then he met with Kayla Rolland’s mother. It was a familiar political moment, and…
Union Man
Steve Rosenthal, political director of the AFL-CIO, is perhaps the only one of America’s thousands of political strategists who genuinely has armies to deploy. And as Rosenthal sees it, the time to elect Al Gore is now. “The campaign is going to be won or lost between now and August, not after Labor Day,” he…
The Odd Couple
On a recent Thursday morning, not long after the Amadou Diallo verdict, Al Gore stopped by New York City’s P.S. 163 to talk up his education proposals. Anti-Gore elves had been up early, stacking “Ask Al Gore” leaflets on tables at the entrance: “If you want to know how African Americans became identified … as…
Comment: After Ideology
In late March, leaders of European Union member nations agreed at their annual summit meeting, in Lisbon, on a program of sweeping economic liberalization aimed at bringing Europe into the Internet age. For the most part, the talk was of sweeping away the remnants of state regulation and welcoming the bracing winds of private enterprise.…
The Courting of John McCain
Can George W. Bush get John McCain’s endorsement? That may turn out to be the most important political question of the spring. Bush isn’t off to a good start: He’s made a series of remarks antagonizing the McCain camp, even as both his and McCain’s surrogates have been trying to bring the two sides together.…
The Adventures of … Money Man!
Robert Torricelli, junior senator from New Jersey and the man leading the Democratic effort to regain the Senate, is on the move. Sitting in the back seat of a black Lincoln Town Car on the way to a speech at a Jersey shore hospital, he’s discussing his success raising money for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign…
Al Gore and the Temple of Doom
The Clinton re-election campaign of 1996 exemplified much that is wrong with our campaign finance laws. The campaign turned a small loophole in our campaign laws–which allows parties to raise unrestricted money for “educational” expenditures–into a yawning cavity. Campaign officials also broke existing laws against laundering contributions and raising money from foreign nationals. But did…
Beer and Debates
“Ladies and gentlemen, this year, this Bud’s not for you,” the American Reform Party (ARP), a Reform Party splinter group, announced in January, telling members to stop drinking Anheuser-Busch beers, including Budweiser and Michelob. Why boycott beer? After all, Donald Trump, the famously teetotaling tycoon who briefly contemplated angling for the nomination, has withdrawn. And…
Checking Pandora’s Box
Census Director Kenneth Prewitt officially launched the 2000 Census effort in January by riding a dog sled into Unalakleet, Alaska, where he was feted by residents of this tiny fishing village on the Bering Sea with a potluck dinner of moose liver and muktuk (whale skin) and entertained by enumeration-minded cheerleaders who chanted, “Census, census,…
Makhmalbaf’s Moment
In the remarkable opening moments of a 1995 film by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a cameraman sits on the roof of a car as it makes its way slowly through a mob of Tehrani males–most of them thin, mustachioed, hungry-eyed. The camera records, the throng pushes and swells, and soon a near-riot breaks out as…
First Person Singular
I’ve always thought of my portraits as my own version of the Museum of Natural History,” Errol Morris said a few years ago, “these very odd dioramas where you’re trying to create some foreign exotic environment and put it on display.” Those portraits–in nonfiction films such as Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, A…
Clues to corruption
ACROSS: 1 A + D(MON)ISH; 5 S + HOT; 9 SIMB + A (IBM’s anag.); 10 DIG + IT + AL(l); 11 IN(BOR)N (Rob rev.); 12 ORDER (hidden); 14 P + ROM + PT; 16 SECRET (anag.); 19 ANEAR (anag.); 21 P(ROOF)S; 24 SHUT + TLE (let anag.); 25 I + DAH + O (had…
