SCRAPBOOK
Scrapbook THE CLINTON DOCTRINE As NATO consolidates its victory in Kosovo, unnamed senior White House aides have begun wondering aloud— though always on background—whether it isn't time for the...
...As a presidential candidate, Clinton was adamant in his recognition of Jerusalem as "Israel's eternal capital...
...They are doing this on background, sheepishly, because the phrase "Clinton Doctrine" already exists as a term of derision for the administration's notoriously feckless handling of international security affairs...
...Send resume to Karis Kercher, The Public Interest, 1112 16th Street, NW, Suite 530, Washington, DC 20036...
...Shameless...
...But President Clinton, you'll recall, has claimed an affinity with Darkness at Noon...
...It was also enough time—according to the New York Times account by the excellent religion reporter Peter Steinfels—for Gore to race through an impressive list of impressive thinkers who, the vice president explained, had influenced his thinking on religion...
...Scrapbook THE CLINTON DOCTRINE As NATO consolidates its victory in Kosovo, unnamed senior White House aides have begun wondering aloud— though always on background—whether it isn't time for the world to acknowledge the existence of a "Clinton Doctrine" worthy of mention in the same breath as other famous presidential foreign policy doctrines: Monroe, Truman, Reagan, and so forth...
...If it ever happens again, we hope we'll be able to stop it, if we have the power to stop it, and if we don't move too slowly or fail to move at all, which we acknowledge we sometimes do...
...That is, frankly, what we failed to do in Rwanda, where so many died so quickly, and what I hope very much we'll be able to do in Africa if it ever happens there again...
...HELP WANTED National Affairs Inc...
...Fulfilling his promise to explain his proposals for a "new partnership" between government and faith-based organizations, Al Gore gave an interview on religion to seven reporters on May 29...
...A/R, payroll, and benefits) and general administrative duties...
...I don't wear it on my sleeve...
...Other districts have used a parental-request clause in 227 to slow down the transition to English instruction...
...Now he has misapplied a waiver provision in the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act to prevent the U.S...
...Of course, the interview lasted only 45 minutes, but that was enough time for the vice president to offer such mots as "Faith is at the center of my life...
...Previous bookkeeping experience required...
...Not uncharacteristically, he is wrong on both counts...
...More mush from the eternal dissembler...
...In Cologne, Germany, on June 20, CNN's Wolf Blitzer caught up with the president himself, and questioned him about his purportedly coherent foreign policy principles...
...But West Jerusalem—^where the embassy would be located—has been in Israeli hands since the end of the War of Independence in 1948...
...In Washington, they still don't actually know what they're doing—even when they do it right...
...Is there, in your mind, a Clinton doctrine...
...Merleau-Ponty...
...First, he misused a recess appointment (generally reserved for emergencies) to make gay-rights activist James Hormel the ambassador to Luxembourg...
...The job involves bookkeeping (A/I...
...That is what we did and are doing in Kosovo...
...Last year's seventh graders scored in the 4th percentile on the test's reading portion, meaning 96 percent of students nationwide scored better than they did...
...There were similarly startling improvements in math, spelling, and other subjects...
...He compared himself, during the impeachment trial, to Koestler's wrongly accused hero, Rubashov...
...embassy's scheduled move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem...
...Yeah, well, the president's image handlers plead, couldn't we now, at least, with Slobo practically in handcuffs, finally admit that there's a there there...
...Arguably, he is harming the chance for peace by yet again raising unrealistic Palestinian hopes over the status of Jerusalem...
...Some even had the audacity to claim that the increases are the result of students' previous time in bilingual ed...
...After less than a year of English immersion, this year's seventh graders scored in the 23rd percentile, a dramatic improvement...
...Despite a 1992 campaign promise to move the embassy to Jerusalem, the undisputed capital of Israel since 1967, Clinton has now used the waiver provision to delay the move for six months...
...Furthermore, while Jerusalem may not be the safest place in the world, it is a veritable paradise when compared with Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, or even Beijing...
...According to Clinton, we could not risk moving the embassy now for two reasons: It would endanger both the prospect for a comprehensive Middle East peace and the lives of American embassy personnel...
...NEXT YEAR IN TEL AVIV Going behind Congress's back is becoming a habit for Bill Clinton...
...And that is what we did but took too long in doing in Bosnia...
...As Maria Trejo of the state's department of education told the San Diego Union-Tribune, "Our suspicion in the state is that, yes, many [non-English-speaking] students are going to do well on the SAT 9 because they've been in a good [bilingual] program...
...Blitzer asked...
...But the waiver was only intended to be used in an emergency, if it was deemed "necessary to protect the national security interests of the United States...
...In Oceanside, Calif., where implementation has been immediate and aggressive, and where one-fifth of the students were non-English-speakers, scores on the SAT 9, a nationwide achievement test, have skyrocketed in every subject and grade level...
...They may want to reconsider in light of Oceanside's achievement...
...There was a glance at Reinhold Niebuhr, a nod toward Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a gesture toward Edmund Husserl, and a bow to Maurice Merleau-Ponty...
...The 1995 act, with overwhelming support from Congress, called for the embassy to relocate by May 31, 1999...
...Actually, no, we can't...
...Conservatives have argued all along that bilingual ed was less about helping non-English-speaking students than about promoting multiculturalism and ethnic separatism...
...AL GORE'S LEFT BANK One more item for the "A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing" file...
...Could our well-read would-be president simply be rattling off a dimly remembered reading list from freshman year at Harvard...
...Take heart, ye bloodthirsty tyrants of the world...
...It gets an A...
...Oceanside's seventh grade English-language results are most telling...
...And that is that while there may well be a great deal of ethnic and religious conflict in the world—some of it might break out into wars—that whether within or beyond the borders of the country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing...
...The French philosopher in question was the author of the 1946 Humanism and Terror, the book that tried to answer Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon by defining Stalin's murderous Moscow show trials as true humanism, rightly understood...
...publisher of The Public Interest and The National Interest) is looking for an assistant to the editors...
...People ought—innocent civilians ought not to be subject to slaughter because of their religious or ethnic or racial or tribal heritage...
...Thus it should come as no surprise that the state's education bureaucrats have poor-mouthed Oceanside's improvement...
...So perhaps all Gore is doing with his citation of Merleau-Ponty is finding yet another way to distance himself from the troubles of that man in the White House...
...Some "doctrine...
...HASTALAVTSTA, BTLTNGUAL ED The early report card is in on Proposition 227, which ended bilingual education in California last year...
...Here's Clinton's response: "Well, I think there's an important principle here that I hope will be now upheld in the future, and not just by the United States, not just by NATO, but also by the leading countries of the world through the United Nations...
Vol. 4 • July 1999 • No. 40
