FROM THE ARCHIVES.

20

YEARS AGO

May 1999

"Earth Day is a designer holiday crafted to dramatize the ascendancy of style over substance, a feel-good feast enabling sentimentalists to live out the ultimate power fantasy: patronizing an entire planet. Nobody has calculated the cost of Earth Day in terms of wasted resources, but during the nearly 30 years since its founding, this foolish fete has surely racked up billions."

TAMA STARR

"April Frauds"

"In 1999, Washington discovered the politics of the insane. President Bill Clinton, fresh from procedural exoneration in a dismal impeachment trial, was credibly accused of having brutally raped a woman 21 years earlier. Then, nothing happened."

CHARLES PAUL FREUND

"The President in the Attic"

"It's the public policy version of one-stop shopping. Those who manufacture the problem sell you their solution. When a policy flops--hey, who better to peddle the next sure-fire fix? The marketing campaign is impressive and well-established: congressional hearings, press conferences, cable talk shows, the televised speech on C-SPAN."

THOMAS WINSLOW HAZLETT

"Prosecutorial Abuse "

30

YEARS AGO

May 1989

"When the vice president of the United States argues for Stealth weapons technology because he reads about it in a Tom Clancy novel, when television preachers lose their pulpits in sex scandals straight out of a Jackie Collins miniseries, when Spiderman gets married before 55,000 people at Shea Stadium, and when Americans take their drinking-and-driving advice from a dog named Spuds, we can only come to one conclusion: the boundary between fact and fiction has been breached!"

T. KEATING HOLLAND

"Modern Living: The Movie"

45

YEARS AGO

May 1974

"The minute the very idea of decriminalizing crimes without victims rears its head, the conservative 'movement' falls into pieces, one side, mine, taking a strict libertarian line, the other retreating to the collectivist fold: let us have government enforce morality, by all means, by any means, some say. Mr. Stanmeyer's forthcoming book should make its case well, as he did in debate with me in Philadelphia. I fear that his view is destined to prevail for some time yet, perhaps for many decades more. It is repugnant to the libertarian mind, but then, the American is no more a libertarian than he is a vegetarian, perhaps less the former than the latter."

DAVID BRUDNOY

"The Individual, the Government, and YAF"

"It is worth noting that, at least since the Renaissance, the frauds and thefts of...