The Washington Times

Campaign-finance reform died as expected in the Senate, but the issue will soon be back, propelled by two things: the progress proponents made on the issue this year and some very interesting figures on fund-raising that point to the missing link in the debate so far.

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The Washington Times

American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has been characterized by substantial bipartisan agreement on the basics overlaid with sharp partisan quarreling at the margins. The fate of the test ban treaty defeated in the Senate last week is illuminating not because it is typical of partisan foreign policy tangles in recent years but because it is highly unusual. It brought into sharp relief a major area on which fundamental differences between the parties remain.

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The Washington Times

The substance of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, now enmeshed in controversy over ratification by the U.S. Senate, is something over which reasonable people differ. On one side, the treaty may, at the margins, create a regime that deters nations from acquiring a nuclear capability – though clearly, the treaty will do nothing to stop the nuclear ambitions of a North Korea or Iraq, to pick two international menaces, nor would it likely have done anything to check the determination of India and then Pakistan to get the bomb. Russian and Chinese nuclear programs likewise seem to be proceeding apace.

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The Washington Times

Twice in two weeks, George W. Bush has rapped the knuckles of the Republican congressional party. The first was a smack at a proposal to revise the Earned Income Tax Credit, spreading out the annual payment lower income workers now receive at tax time over 12 months instead. The Capitol Hill GOP proposed the change as a way to help meet budget targets this year. Mr. Bush denounced it as an effort “to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.” It’s dead.

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The Washington Times

Edmund Morris’ “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan” is a spectacular failure. It’s a compelling example of brilliance gone hopelessly awry – a portrait of an artist-biographer, beset by who knows what demons of history and personality, who tries to escape disaster by setting forth with grim determination on a course that can only lead to ruin of another sort. What else can one say about a decision by the authorized biographer of the 40th president of the United States to produce, in effect, an historical novel in which the twin protagonists are that president and a fictionalized version of the biographer himself, recast now as a contemporary of Mr. Reagan’s?

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