This issue: September 12, 2011 (Vol. 16, No. 48)

The 9/11 Generation

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

As we approach the tenth anniversary of 9/11, we’re pleased to let two men of distinction speak for us. Here’s the president of the United States at the American Legion convention in Minneapolis last week:

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“Next weekend, we’ll mark the 10th anniversary of those awful attacks on our nation. In the days ahead, we will honor the lives we lost and the families that loved them; the first responders who rushed to save others; and we will honor all those who have served to keep us safe these 10 difficult years, especially the men and women of our ...

Mugged by Mythology

Liberals believe the darnedest things.

BY JEFF BERGNER

Sometimes talking with liberals is perplexing. You never know what claim they will make next or what name they will call you. Take David Axelrod’s response to Standard & Poor’s recent credit action: He calls it the “Tea Party downgrade.” Amazingly, he blames the United States’ loss of its AAA bond rating on the one group that has sounded the alarm about our fiscal crisis. How did the president’s leading adviser come up with a label so detached from reality? 

Comforting as it would be to dismiss this as a one-off comment, Axelrod’s words spring from the mental universe of liberalism. It is a vast sphere of assumptions that are found nowhere else. In an ...

The Universities’ 9/11

Prepare for a season of intellectual posturing and Islamic outreach.

BY CHARLOTTE ALLEN

America’s colleges and universities, like most of the rest of the country, will soon be commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11, that preternaturally sunny day in early September a decade ago when 19 al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists commandeered four U.S. commercial air-liners and crashed them deliberately, killing nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington, and a field in southwestern Pennsylvania that was believed to lie along an intended flight path for hijackers who targeted the U.S. Capitol or the White House.

Unlike the commemorations in most of the rest of America, however, the academic commemorations for the most part won’t focus on, say, the 403 New York firefighters, ...

Cheney Speaks

What he says, and doesn’t say, is revealing.

BY STEPHEN F. HAYES

On page 251, Dick Cheney admits a mistake. He had shot his friend Harry Whittington in the face, and in the hours that followed, did not put out a statement about the accident. “In retrospect,” he writes, “we should have.”

This is not an important moment in the book, or in Cheney’s vice presidency. But since the earliest days of his first term, reporters and commentators have demanded that Dick Cheney apologize for something—anything—that he did in his official capacity as the country’s second in command. They won’t find many others in the pages of In My Time.

September 11, 2001

Matthew Continetti, witness to history

BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI

Mike was from Ohio and rowed crew. Andrew was from China and spoke little English. Jeremy, from Long Island, arrived on campus with a pet snake. Jacob was interested in architecture. Amy had cheerful eyes and long black hair.

There were close to 50 of them, all told: first-year students at Columbia who moved into the thirteenth floor of John Jay Hall in the late summer of 2001. I was a junior and the floor’s resident adviser. I was supposed to answer questions students might have, resolve conflicts between them (good luck), arrange study breaks where we’d eat pizza, and generally ease their passage into college life. Or at least that’s what I assumed. I had no idea what was coming.

Green Jobs in the Red

It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for green jobs. Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturing company much ballyhooed by the Obama administration, declared bankruptcy. The company had received $535 million in September 2009 from a Department of Energy grant program funded by the stimulus. Supposedly, the grant would create 4,000 jobs—at a bargain basement cost to taxpayers of $133,750 per job.

At the time the grant was issued, Joe Biden proclaimed that the investment in Solyndra is “exactly what the Recovery Act is all about.” In hindsight, The Scrapbook agrees with the vice president wholeheartedly.