Author Archive

Time for the UNICEF Halloween Shakedown; Security Scan Scam; Ramadan Rumsfeld

Written by Christopher Caldwell on November 6, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Against UNICEF I wonder how many of the kids who ring my doorbell this Halloween are going to come shaking boxes for the United Nations Children’s Fund. Probably a shockingly large number. I had friends who did such box-shaking decades ago, but I always assumed that UNICEF was part of a 1970s fad-cluster (including macrame
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Hitchens Takes a False Step; What Kind of Nazis Are the Al Qaeda?; Thievin’ Heroes

Written by Christopher Caldwell on October 23, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Christopher Hitchens has taken his first false step in the terrorist war–or, better put, he’s been proved wrong by events for the first time. Up till now Hitchens, astonishingly enough, has been as reliable a guide to the war against terrorism as we have. His characterization of the terrorists as "death squads" and the movement
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Kabul Market; Profiling in Courage; Wahhabben?

Written by Christopher Caldwell on October 2, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

I was in Oakland the day of President Bush’s address to the nation. For lunch, a friend and I drove 20 miles down to Fremont, the biggest Afghan neighborhood in the country, just to see what the mood was like. We chose a kebab joint, about the size of a modest office cubicle, that had
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Rest in Peace… And Then What?

Written by Christopher Caldwell on September 25, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Rest in Peace Since there are no words to match the woe, let’s leave it at that, and pray for the dead as best we can. And Then What? Now we have to do what we can to render this (retrospectively) the biggest mistake the attackers ever made, and to reduce such incidents in the
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Advance, Australia Unfair: New Zealand’s Prime Minister Helen Clark Shows Integrity and Courage

Written by Christopher Caldwell on September 11, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

One of the great international dramas of the new millennium unfolded in the Indian Ocean over the last several days. It involved at least a half-dozen countries, but because the United States wasn’t one of them, the story barely scraped onto page C-28 of a couple of American newspapers. I’m referring to the Tampa incident.
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Rocky Start: Bush Takes Some Side Trips on His Summer Vacation

Written by Christopher Caldwell on August 28, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

President Bush–whose 43-beats-per-minute heart rate will be the envy of anyone who stays up until 3 a.m. writing columns half the nights of the week–spent the last few days in the Rockies and Southwest. He communed with the spirit of the mountains, bucked up struggling schoolchildren and raked in $2 million for Gov. Bill Owens
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I’m Not Impotent, I Just Like Willie Dixon!

Written by Christopher Caldwell on August 21, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Last week’s announcement that in the coming months Bayer and Eli Lilly are going to enter the impotence-pill market that has heretofore been monopolized by Pfizer’s Viagra brought to mind a problem I have. I’m developing a reputation for impotence by accident. n I’m not generally a big fan of the blues. But there’s one
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McCain, Again; , W’s Immigration Proposal Is a Human-Rights Imperative

Written by Christopher Caldwell on August 14, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Something strange is happening to John McCain. After a solid 18 months during which he had been invisible except on Democratic issues, he suddenly reemerged last week as a hard-line, even hyper-partisan, conservative. He sounds like Phil Gramm. n In fact, he was working with Phil Gramm–to block a labor-sponsored measure to keep Mexican trucks
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Joleen McKay Confirms a Lot We Already Knew in the Condit Affair

Written by Christopher Caldwell on August 7, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Joleen Argentini McKay is the woman who gave Gary Condit a Tag Heuer watch, in a box that he was seen surreptitiously jamming into an Alexandria, VA, garbage can a few weeks ago. Her entry into the Condit case has done more than give us the Condit equivalent of O.J. Simpson’s Bruno Magli shoes. It
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The Beach Is Back

Written by Christopher Caldwell on July 31, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Deep down, those who didn’t live through the decade of the 1970s are mystified that those who did reacted so violently against it. Youngsters accept that Ronald Reagan’s election answered a pressing felt need to take the decade out behind the shed and club it to death with drug laws and tight money. They’ll nod
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