David Tell

Manchester, New Hampshire

FIVE MONTHS AGO, on September 24, 2002, an FBI electronic surveillance team recorded a telephone conversation between two Tampa, Florida, residents: a woman named Fedaa Al-Najjar and her friend Hatim Naji Fariz, the manager of a local medical clinic. The subject was Al-Najjar's husband, Mazen, a long-detained illegal alien--a prisoner of conscience, according to Amnesty International and a great many like-minded people here in the States--who just weeks before, after a multi-year legal battle, had finally been deported by the INS. Not surprisingly, Mrs.

NEEDLESS TO SAY, everyone in Washington politics and journalism is accomplished and popular and physically attractive. But even here, there are some among us whom Allah has clearly singled out for special blessing. And Adel al-Jubeir is one of them. He's the 40-year-old "foreign policy adviser" to Crown Prince Abdullah, managing partner of Saud and Sons, the well-established and widely respected Middle Eastern tyranny.

THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.

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Reading J. Bottum's The Usefulness of Daniel Goldhagen, it appears that there is no end to Goldhagen's outrageous lies and exaggerations. One case in point is his statement about the World War II Croatian Nazi puppet state's Jasenovac camp.

THIS YEAR it's really, really bad--so bad that I'm going to admit it publicly and ask our readers for help.

Gearing up for next Tuesday's installment of Your Democracy in Action, the Board of Elections here in Montgomery County, Maryland (Charles Moose, chief of police), has just sent me an "official specimen ballot." I get this rather infelicitously titled mailing right before every primary and general election, with instructions to "study carefully the facsimile, provided here, of the ballot that you will be voting on Election Day and become familiar with all of the candidates and i

THE NEW YORK TIMES has lately come under a barrage of media criticism, not all of it from "the right," about the extent to which editorial bias has infected the paper's hard news columns. And already some of that criticism has been directed specifically against the paper's A-section reporting on its own, proprietary public opinion research (commissioned in partnership with CBS News). So what I'm about to offer isn't exactly without precedent. The bias in question, however, may well be without precedent; I can't remember anything quite like it, at least.

IN LAST WEEK'S EPISODE, much of respectable Washington was aghast that the Bush White House had "politicized" the possibility of war by questioning the patriotism of congressional Democrats who opposed the president's Iraq policy. Respectable Washington was mistaken about all this. First off, war is an intrinsically and legitimately political issue, partisan debate about which is nothing to be aghast over. And while it would indeed have been beyond the pale for the president and his men to smear Democratic dissent as per se disloyal, no such smear had actually been forthcoming.