This issue: July 18, 2011 (Vol. 16, No. 41)

Grand Old Doves?

BY MAX BOOT

Opinion polls consistently show that the U.S. military is the most trusted institution in America. Republicans have benefited indirectly from that hard-won reputation because since the 1970s they have been seen as the strong, hawkish party, while Democrats have had to fight the stigma that they are weak and dovish. Republicans wouldn’t throw away that aura—one of their strongest electoral assets—just to reach a budget deal with President Obama. Or would they?

There are persistent and worrisome reports that they might. The Hill newspaper, for instance, claims that Republican budget ...

The Democrats’ Fuzzy Math

Yes, Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan would lower costs.

BY JEFFREY H. ANDERSON

President Obama and the Democrats claim that the Medicare reforms proposed by Paul Ryan and the Republicans would shift the burden of health costs onto the backs of seniors. This has been the central—and essentially the only—argument the Democrats have made against the GOP plan. But the Democrats’ claim is contradicted by four decades’ worth of empirical evidence. 

Under Ryan’s proposal, the government would provide premium support to future seniors (who are now under 55) to help them purchase a private health plan of their choice. Participating insurers would have to cover all comers and couldn’t vary premiums based on health status. The poor would get additional help. The reforms are designed to facilitate competition and choice, without having government ...

The Burkean Justice

Samuel Alito’s understanding of community and tradition distinguishes him from his Supreme Court colleagues

BY ADAM J. WHITE

In the Supreme Court’s last decade, the most politically heated cases have reliably been the most closely decided. From the deadlocked Bush-Gore election, to partial-birth abortion, to Second Amendment rights, to corporate political expenditures, to Guantánamo, the Court fractured along familiar right-left lines. How strange, then, to see this year’s most emotionally charged case ending not in acrimony but near-unanimity. 

When the Supreme Court convened for oral argument in Snyder v. Phelps, judicial formalities only thinly veiled the intense bitterness smoldering among the parties and their supporters. At one table sat counsel for Albert Snyder, father of the late Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, who was ...

A Moderne Master

‘Who can unravel Ravel?’

BY GEORGE B. STAUFFER

Ravel

by Roger Nichols

Yale, 420 pp., $40

In April 1928 Maurice Ravel received a request from the ...

Exotic Climbs

Christopher Caldwell, Careful Climber

BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL

W ith the afternoon off from a conference near Lisbon, I hired a guide to take me to Sintra—stronghold of the Moorish invader 1,200 years ago, center of monastic learning in the Middle Ages, pleasure garden of Portugal’s monarchy in the 19th century, and all of it spread across an upland pine forest knit together with hiking trails. It takes a guide to make sense of it all.

Just not the guide I got. Vasco (let us call him) was an affable man with a newish Mercedes and a confidence that his grand car would make up for any shortcomings in historical knowledge, English proficiency, or exertion. 

“What are we going to see?” I asked, ...

The Achievements of Otto, Catch 'The Wave,' & More

Reading, Writing, and RuPaul

The headline in the Christian Science Monitor pretty much says it all: “Could California lead nation in teaching of gay history in schools?” On July 5, the state’s Democratic-controlled assembly passed the FAIR Education Act by a 49-25 vote. The bill would “require California public schools to acknowledge the accomplishments of gays, lesbians and transgender Americans to be included in its teaching materials,” according to Time.

Color us old-fashioned, but transgender Americans? The Scrapbook eagerly awaits the shrieks branding parents that object to this as demonic bigots, ...