This issue: January 31, 2011 (Vol. 16, No. 19)

2012: ‘An Open Field and a Fair Chance’

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

"We need a candidate!” You can’t have a conversation with a Republican here in Washington without hearing that plaintive wail. Indeed, as President Obama stages a bit of a comeback, and it seems that 2012 won’t be a cakewalk, the plaintive wail has become an imploring request—even a pathetic and desperate cry: “WE NEED A CANDIDATE! NOW!”

No we don’t.

Or rather: Of course we do—by the summer of 2012. But not now. In fact, to get a strong candidate next year, what we need this year is lots of candidates competing. ...

In the Dock

Get ready for two years of Obama administration oversight by the House GOP.

BY FRED BARNES

Here’s what Republican Fred Upton of Michigan, erstwhile moderate, frequently accused of being a RINO, sometimes faulted for being too friendly to Democrats, said last week to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, of which he is the new chairman:

We are in the middle of the largest fiscal crisis the country has ever faced. The national unemployment rate has topped 9 percent ...

Another Triumph for the Greens

To go with toilets that don’t flush and light bulbs that don’t light, we now have dishwashers that don’t wash.

BY JONATHAN V. LAST

My dishwasher is the Bosch SHE58C—an amazing machine. Stainless-steel front, concealed controls, six cycles to choose from. The manual runs a brisk 63 pages. When we got the Bosch, I read it cover to cover, highlighting and annotating as I went, marking the manufacturer’s preferred method of arranging dishes and the proper way to sit utensils in the dedicated wash basket. I took some pains to relay this information to my wife, though it did not please her as much as I imagined it would.

At first, my Bosch was wonderful. Quiet as a wind’s whisper, the dishes were so clean you could eat off of them. But a few months ago I started noticing ...

Yeats in Love

‘A woman won or a woman lost’

BY MICHAEL DIRDA

W. B. Yeats and the Muses

by Joseph M. Hassett

Oxford, 264 pp., $110

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) composed poetry about history and Ireland and the occult, about swans and gyres and ancient Byzantium, but fundamentally he almost always wrote about love. At the end of his life, a seventysomething smiling public man, he intended “Politics” to be the last of his published poems:

The Shelves of Yesteryear

Joseph Bottum, unapologetic middlebrow

BY JOSEPH BOTTUM

The man with the sidewalk table was selling The Man with the Golden Arm. Blowing on his hands, his steaming breath rising in the winter sun that slanted through Union Square, he offered almost-pristine copies of Ship of Fools and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. 

To say nothing of Games People Play, Eric Berne’s 1964 pop-psychology bestseller, and Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl’s 1948 account of adventure on an ocean raft. Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror—perhaps a hundred books, each carefully ...

The Disappearing Helen Thomas Awards

It’s often forgotten​—​although The Scrapbook certainly remembers​—​that Stephen Colbert’s famous excoriation of President Bush at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner was only briefly about George W. Bush. It was actually part of an extended tribute to Helen Thomas, who was still writing her Hearst column at the time, was featured in a long (purportedly comic) video with Colbert, and sat beaming at the proceedings. When Colbert finished his performance, he motioned toward his heroine with an outstretched hand, and declared, “Helen Thomas, ladies and gentlemen!”

Well, that was then. It’s been less than a year since Helen Thomas urged Jews ...