This issue: October 24, 2011 (Vol. 17, No. 06)

Speak Softly .  .  . and Fight Back

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

The foiled Iranian plot to blow up the Saudi ambassador to the United States has met with a tough U.S. response. Tough talk. And lots of it. If words were dollars, the federal budget deficit would have disappeared, as U.S. officials from President Obama to Vice President Biden to Secretary of State Clinton have been waxing eloquent against assassinating ambassadors, condemning any and all who would order such a thing, insisting there will be repercussions, and promising “accountability.”

There’s been plenty of talk. But of course no action.

Boneheaded Economics

Magical thinking about jobs from liberal ­Democrats.

BY FRED BARNES

It’s not just the Occupy Wall Street rabble who are promoting unorthodox ideas (to put it kindly) about our economic plight and how to create jobs. They have friends in Washington. A few examples:

Barbara Lee, a House member from California, is upset about computerized checkout lines at grocery stores. She avoids lines with no flesh-and-blood checker. “I refuse to do that,” Lee said at a House Appropriations Committee hearing, “I know that’s a job or two or three that’s gone.”

Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois is up in arms about the iPad, ...

Time for Another Harding?

How a much-derided Republican president actually succeeded in cutting the budget and fixing the economy.

BY ALLIS RADOSH and RONALD RADOSH

The presidential campaign was heating up, and the progressives in office were nervous about their chances of holding the White House. It was unclear at first which contender for the Republican nomination would get the nod, but when the candidate eventually was chosen they denounced him as “a confirmed and hopeless reactionary.” 

The year was 1920, and they were talking about Warren G. Harding. The editor of the New Republic foresaw dark days: Though no fan of the Democratic candidate (James Cox), Herbert Croly expected Harding’s Republicans to concede nothing to the progressives. The United States, he wrote shortly before the election, was about ...

City of Faiths

What Jerusalem means to the world.

BY BENJAMIN BALINT

In the encounter between writer and city, there is a certain distance of perspective—neither blurringly close nor loftily Olympian—at which the urban subject comes into sharpest focus. In this well-proportioned narrative history of Jerusalem, Simon Sebag Montefiore pulls in close and trains a microscope on the lives of the more or less representative individuals who built, occupied, and razed this most storied of cities, and on the families—the Davidians, Herodians, Maccabees, Umayyads, Fatimids, Hashemites, and Husseinis—who forged it.

Taking in a thousand years of Jewish rule, 400 of Christian control, and then 1,300 years of Muslim governance, Montefiore, a British historian of Catherine the Great and of Stalin, divides Jerusalem ...

Batman and the Gray Lady

Jonathan V. Last, comic collector

BY JONATHAN V. LAST

It’s never good when the New York Times covers comic books. 

Comics have existed in their own, mostly subterranean, culture for about 80 years, attracting very little notice from the wider world. Superheroes are born, villains are vanquished, and the people who care about comics indulge in their guilty, four-color pleasure in comfortable obscurity. 

But every once in a while, something in comics attracts public ...

Occupy the Washington Post

One of the many unwritten rules of journalism is that business reporters should be temperamentally hostile to business. This is the opposite of another unwritten rule​—​that environmental reporters should be propagandists for environmental organizations​—​but, given the ideology governing most American newsrooms, it makes sense. On the business pages of most American newspapers, you will find business treated as a semi-criminal enterprise, and businessmen with disdain. 

The Washington Post is no exception​—​although the Post Company is a business enterprise like any other, if slightly more rapacious than most. Steven Pearlstein ...