The New Republic

It would seem, on the face of it, that the only thing standing between George W. Bush and the presidency is a persistent reservation about his intellect. The doubts have crystallized around a reporter's now-famous pop quiz, in which the Texas governor could not identify various difficult-to- pronounce heads of state. Bush,… more

The annual budgetary fight between the president and Congress has, this year, boiled down to a heretofore arcane accounting question: Should Social Security be counted as part of the federal budget or separate from it? This topic used to interest almost nobody outside the pocket-protector crowd. This fall it has precipitated a… more

Were he not a reactionary and a demagogue, I would feel sorry for Pat Buchanan. Not long ago he held a respected position within the Republican Party, wherein he gave keynote speeches at political conventions, represented the conservative viewpoint on TV talk shows, and was courted by party leaders. Now he has… more

If the details of the proposed Republican federal budget were widely known and understood, it is hard to believe that even one American in ten would vote to keep the GOP in control of Congress. Thankfully, few or none of the abominations that Congress proposes will actually survive a veto--the Republicans' political… more

Congress has spent the summer in the thrall of a weird kind of giddiness. The discovery that the budget surplus may be a trillion dollars larger than previously believed has prompted visions of a kind of domestic End of History. No more scrimping and scrounging: there is talk of new tax cuts, paying off the national debt, new prescription drug coverage, and, well, pretty much anything anybody wants.

Yet somehow, even while it dreams of untold abundance, Congress finds… more

Speaking at a Salvation Army center in Atlanta last month, Al Gore announced his support of expanded government subsidies for religious groups that were using the "unique power of faith" to fight America's social ills. With his heavily promoted speech, Gore prominently allied himself with an idea that has, until recently, been associated with the "compassionate conservatism" his leading Republican rival, Texas Governor George W.… more

Say what you will about Dan Crippen, the new director of the Congressional Budget Office, but you always know exactly where he stands on the issues of the day. Since taking office in February, Crippen has shared his opinions on topics such as President Clinton's plan to pump funding into Medicare (it "would do nothing to address the underlying problem"), proposals to build up reserves for retirement programs (they "never… more

Whatever else Germaine Greer's new book will be called, it will almost certainly be called a work of feminism. There are reasons for this, but they have almost nothing to do with the book itself, which is a sour and undiscriminating litany of charges agai nst men--all men, men as nature created them--wrapped around the willfully obtuse argument that little or nothing has improved for American and European women over… more

Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America by Philip Jenkins (Yale University Press, 302 pp., $30)

Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting by James R. Kincaid (Duke University Press, 352 pp., $24.95)

Pictures of Innocence:  The History… more

The most irritating thing about newspapers is their convention of presenting disagreements on matters of fact as nothing more than differences of opinion. Recently, a city official here resigned because he used the word " niggardly." A Washington Post story reported that the word "means different things to different people." Most of the Washingtonians quoted felt it could be taken as a slur, but others did not. And who is… more