The Washington Times

The Democrats are putting on a wonderful party. It is not a party likely to win in November, but it is great fun in August. At The Mondrian – one of the trendy West Hollywood hotels where the best after-hours Democratic parties are being held in the hotel’s Skybar – the management optimistically passes out intimacy kits consisting of: two Durex lubricated, spermicide (Nonoxynol-9) prophylactics, two obstetrical towelettes – and one package lubricating jelly. In my hotel in Philadelphia I got a sewing kit and a shower cap.

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The Washington Times

For some years now, Republicans have complained about Democrats “stealing” their issues. From crime to welfare to balancing the federal budget, Democrats succeeded in operating successfully on what the GOP had grown accustomed to thinking of as its turf, and the result was a constant source of irritation for Republicans. President Bill Clinton was under their skin, and they had to scratch the itch – with unpleasant and self-destructive consequences familiar to the parent of any 5-year-old with a mosquito bite.

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The Washington Times

The inclusion of New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, who was entirely implausible as a vice presidential nominee at this stage of her political career, seemed mainly to provide a small counterweight to the white maleness of Al Gore’s short list for vice president. It’s now clear, however, that Mr. Gore’s short list was only superficially universe. It seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s Jewishness was a central point in his favor from the beginning.

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The Washington Times

For one brief moment in the summer four years ago, Republicans were happy. The moment came just as they met for their convention in San Diego, when Bob Dole announced that Jack Kemp would be his running mate. The surprising choice united the party, as intended, and produced a short-lived emotional GOP high in which it became possible to imagine beating Bill Clinton.

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The Washington Times

On the eve of the GOP and Democratic conventions, the real opening of the general election season, it might be useful to take a step back from the close-quarters combat of national electoral politics to see how far we’ve come in the past decade.

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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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