How Vice President Gore Will Run Against Governor Bush.

View this article at The Weekly Standard

Fast forward to January 20, 2001. The steps of the U.S. Capitol. The president-elect raises his hand to take the oath of office. Forming the backdrop to the scene: a who’s who of the best and brightest of the Republican party, now preparing to sit as the most illustrious cabinet in a generation; the vice president-elect, whose choice unified and galvanized the party; and, of course, the 41st president of the United States, looking on with paternal pride as the fateful words mark the start of the administration of the 43rd: “I, George W. Bush, do solemnly swear . . .”

Pause button, please. Agreeable as it no doubt is for Republicans to fantasize about how sweet will be their victory in 2000, history is bereft of a fast-forward button. Politics unfolds day by day, often slowly and painfully, always full of surprises. George W. has not even won the GOP nomination yet, much less the general election. Those currently focused on the fruits of his triumph are way ahead of themselves.

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The Washington Times

Hardly a day passes in Washington without someone’s remarking upon the disarray of the Republican congressional majority—in the House especially, but to a degree in the Senate as well. The latest incidents have turned on the difficulty of moving forward with appropriations bills and defense-spending authorization. Gun control has also been an issue of surprising political volatility in the wake of the school shootings in Colorado and Georgia.

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Policy Review, June/July 1999

MARK BOWDEN.  Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War.  ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS.  386 PAGES.  $24.00 

FOR MOST of this century, the cultural depiction of war has centered on the soldiers doing the fighting. The result has been one intimate portrait after another of horror, brutality, and violent death designed to engender in the reader or viewer sensations of mortal dread, of hope mixed with desperation, of confusion and uncertainty, akin to those soldiers feel in the heat of battle. This intimate perspective on war flourished first in highbrow literary circles in the aftermath of the incomprehensible carnage of World War I. Since then, it has become virtually ubiquitous. Long before Saving Private Ryan, the soldier’s perspective became our standard perspective on war at all levels of cultural seriousness, from comic books to newspapers to bestsellers to movies and television shows to those works short-listed for literary prizes.

The soldier’s-eye view of war is not the only possible cultural perspective on war, of course. Clearly Shakespeare attaches more importance to what Henry V has to say that St. Crispian’s Day than to what the rest of the band of brothers might be thinking on the eve of the battle of Agincourt or during it. Nor does Shakespeare’s Henry fail to speak to us to this day.

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