Monthly Archives: September 2003

Days of awe: Meeting with President Bush

On Sunday night I wrote that our rabbi (Jonathan Ginsburg of St. Paul’s Temple of Aaron) would be meeting with the president on Monday afternoon. Here is Rabbi Ginsburg’s account of his meeting yesterday with President Bush, retaining Rabbi Ginsburg’s subject headings. It started with a phone call from Senator Coleman the Monday night before Rosh Hashanah telling me that the President wanted to meet with a few rabbis right »

A life in letters

In the past few months I have had the privilege of meeting with former Reagan arms control ambassador Kenneth Adelman and former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, both of whom shared stories about Reagan that I had never heard before. As highly as I think of Reagan, these men persuaded me that we have not yet taken his measure. Andrew Sullivan contributes to this feeling through his own attempt to wrestle »

An encounter with Madeleine Albright

A Miami-based attorney who describes himself as “mild-mannered” attended the presentation of Madeleine Albright shilling her new book at Temple Judea in Coral Gables, Florida. His account of her comments and the audience response is disturbing. Fortunately, the attorney nevertheless had the presence of mind to ask Albright the following question: “Although I am not Jewish, myself, I strongly support Israel as being the civilization that is in the vanguard »

Not Another One

A third Arabic-speaking Guantanamo Bay employee, this one a civilian translator, has been arrested. Early reports indicate that he was arrested at Boston’s Logan Airport as he returned from Egypt. Documents and CD roms found in his possession were seized; he denied the documents were his. Which doesn’t look good, obviously, for his innocence. Either security procedures at Guantanamo have been horribly lax, or the military has carried out a »

Britons Think Blair Lied

A new poll says that 59% of respondents believe that Tony Blair “lied” to the British public about Iraq. This is much worse than prior polls, which have found that most people think he “misled” the country, but the largest share say such misleading was unintentional. Apparently the Hutton inquiry has contributerd to the latest, more negative assessment, even though the testimony in that forum contained no evidence of any »

New California Poll Data

The Hoover Institution has been doing some polling in California; the full results are not out yet, but there was an interesting preview in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle. What is unique about Hoover’s survey is that they are interviewing voters in person and actually showing them the paper ballot with all 135 names. All other polling that has been reported is the usual telephone variety, and you can’t read 135 »

The presidency wars

Deacon’s final word on Chaitred last week made the brilliant point that “If we are in a culture war, and it seems pretty clear that we are, then I expect that every president from now until that war ends will be hated by the other side…There’s not much point, in the context of a discussion about hating, in debating the comparative merit of the justifications offered for the hatred. In »

In praise of Neville Chamberlain

As a distant lover of Israel, I have been genuinely puzzled by its failure to produce a statesman equal to the challenges faced by the country over the past 20 years. In every area of modern life the country boasts a genius that on a per capita basis must be unrivaled. Yet on the world stage its politicians seem almost retarded. The country has never had a public accounting for »

Ship of fools

In retrospect, the first World Trade Center attack in February 1993 looks like an unheeded warning and the foreign policy of the Clinton administration an excursion into dreamland. Richard Miniter’s new book Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror explores the evidence on these points; we linked to four excerpts from the book that the Washington Times ran during the first week of this month. Today OpinionJournal »

The new face of Yale conservatism

The current issue of the Yale Herald features an excellent cover story on “The new face of conservatism at Yale.” The story is a long and encouraging look at several thoughtful young ladies and gentlemen (including Little Trunk) who are seeking to create a campus atmosphere conducive to the expression of support for God, for country and for Yale. UPDATE: Little Trunk considers the story under the heading “Yale conservatives: »

Good News from CNN

Responding to its critics, CNN has announced that it will begin reporting good news from Iraq. This item, scheduled to run today, is typical: “Monday: U.S. troops teach Iraqi orphans how to play American football. These children were not orphaned during the American invasion which brought devastation upon so many Iraqi families due to errant bombs and trigger-happy soldiers. These are just orphans whose parents died of natural causes, or »

Income, Spending Up Again

Over the weekend, every newspaper in the country headlined “Poverty rate up, median income down “ or something similar. The story, of course, was about the 2002 Census Bureau data on incomes and poverty. Democrats hailed the bad news as welcome evidence that the administration’s economic policies have failed. But the 2002 data are now nearly a year out of date, and the news this year, especially since the income »

Post Misquotes Cheney Again

Two weeks ago, we noted that Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank had misquoted statements made by Vice President Dick Cheney in an interview Cheney had done on Meet the Press the day before. Milbank’s distortion of Cheney’s words was so grotesque–he Dowdified them to precisely reverse the meaning of Cheney’s statement–that the Post was forced to run a correction. Now the Post is at it again, as reporters Dana Priest »

An odd kind of empire

We somehow missed James Woolsey’s essay on the contribution of Judaism to the rule of law when it appeared in Friday’s Jerusalem Post on the occasion of the Jewish New Year. It is a moving declaration of solidarity and respect: “We are all Jews.” Responding to the notion that the United States today is an imperial power, Woolsey points to our distinctly unimperial presidents. Woolsey writes: “People (and smaller nations »

Too successful?

In conjunction with Trunk’s defense of police officers from charges of racism, posted below, here is George Will on the dramatic success of policing in the past decade. Will cites Heather Mac Donald who, along with Trunk, has been at the forefront of exploding the myth of pervasive racial profiling. He quotes Mac Donald’s warning that “if the police are now to be accused of racism every time they go »

Days of awe

This evening Jews all over the world completed their two-day celebration of the anniversary of Creation, the Jewish New Year. The ten days between the New Year and the Day of Atonement are traditionally known as the Days of Awe. This year brings special meaning to the term. Last week our rabbi received a call from the White House inviting him to meet with President Bush and fifteen other rabbis »

Schwarzenegger Pulling Away

A new CNN / USA Today / Gallup poll has 63% of Californians favoring the recall, with Arnold leading Cruz Bustamante by 40% to 25%. It could be lights out for the California Democrats on October 7. If they have anything more on Arnold in their closet, we’ll see it over the next few days. But it won’t matter. »