The Washington Times

Every now and again, D.C. politics contrives to produce an entirely irrational result. Such is the case with the D.C. Council’s vote last week to require all city employers offering prescription drug plans to include coverage for contraceptives.

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The Washington Times

How close will the presidential election be? Everybody seems to say it’s going to be very close. Whether that is out of respect for the principal contenders or out of disdain for them, people seem to think that Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush are pretty evenly matched.

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The Washington Times

When Norman Podhoretz retired in 1995 after 35 years as editor of Commentary magazine, it was only after having lived one of the great American intellectual lives. The story will be familiar to his readers over the years, since he often found in his own experience a direct route to the heart of the American experience. “One of the longest journeys in the world is from Brooklyn to Manhattan – or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.” So begins “Making It,” his 1967 autobiographical account of the progress that took him from childhood poverty in Brownsville to Columbia University and Cambridge, then on to the editorship of a magazine that he would establish first as the leading intellectual voice of the New Left, later as the leading voice of the “neoconservative” attack on New Left radicalism and defense of the principles and civilizing ideals of the “Free World,” unambiguously and unironically so-called.

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The Washington Times

REYKJAVIK. – Iceland looks so old, someone once remarked, because it is so new. The 40 minute drive from Keflavik airport into the capital, Reykjavik, juxtaposes to the east an impossibly craggy rolling landscape of near-lunar desolation and to the west, the implacable steely cold of the sea. They combine in a declaration of permanent hostility.

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The Washington Times

Why, conservatives sometimes ask, were the 1980s reviled as the “decade of greed” when the 1990s get off scot-free, notwithstanding the obvious excesses of the “New Economy”? To many, the answer is obvious: because Ronald Reagan was in the saddle in the 1980s and Bill Clinton has been president in the 1990s. The very people who railed against the “decade of greed” are Bill Clinton’s staunchest defenders; ergo, no problem. In fact, there are a number of left-wing Democrats, especially those around the lively American Prospect magazine, who are unhappy with Bill Clinton on “decade of greed” grounds. They think he has sold out the party’s traditional mission as guardian of the interests of the poor and dispossessed in favor of an unholy alliance with Wall Street.

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The Washington Times

Conservatives, myself included, have not infrequently found ourselves puzzling over the following question: If the 1980s were “The Decade of Greed,” what about the 1990s? Why isn’t the 1990s, likewise, a decade of greed?

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The Washington Times

Today in New Jersey’s 5th Congressional District, moderate Republican Rep. Marge Roukema faces a primary challenge from conservative state Assemblyman Scott Garrett. Mrs. Roukema narrowly defeated the underfinanced Mr. Garrett in a primary two years ago. This time around, the race is drawing attention nationally because of the involvement on Mr. Garrett’s side of the Club for Growth, a group of Republican activists dedicated to funding conservative Republican candidates, even against Republican incumbents.

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The Washington Times

One day in May, the American electorate woke up to find itself worried that the nation is on the wrong track.

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The Washington Times

In an abrupt reversal last week, the Senate decisively rejected an amendment to a defense construction bill that would have forced withdrawal July 1, 2001, of the 5,900 U.S. troops from the 39,000-man peacekeeping force in Kosovo – unless the administration got congressional authorization to keep the troops there. The vote was a test of the seriousness of the ongoing U.S. commitment to European security through NATO. In a way, it opened the next phase of the debate on that commitment.

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The Washington Times

Kosovo, more or less from the moment the issues there became critical in the fall of 1998, has not exactly been Congress’ finest hour. The nadir, perhaps, came a year ago during NATO’s air campaign itself, when the House of Representatives voted within a short span not to support the campaign and to double funding for it. The main casualty here was the House’s credibility. A year later, the Senate may be getting set to damage its own credibility, once again over Kosovo.

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