This issue: January 2 - January 9, 2012 (Vol. 17, No. 16)

A Time for Choosing

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

To the Republicans of the states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida:

At this moment of great peril for our nation, you have the privilege of beginning the process of selecting the 2012 Republican presidential nominee—the individual who will save us from the ghastly prospect of an Obama second term, and who will then have the task of beginning to put right our listing ship of state, setting our nation on a course to restored solvency, reinvigorated liberty, and renewed greatness.

Your responsibility is great. ...

Inconsequential Iowa

Ignore the caucus results. They won’t matter.

BY FRED BARNES

When Senator Paul Simon of Illinois was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, one of his first stops was in the backyard of a residence in Wartburg, Iowa. About 100 people had assembled to hear him. The first question: What’s up in Namibia?

Iowa is different. It was in 1988 and it is now. Nowhere else in the universe would a Third World country be the subject of the first question for a candidate for the White House. So Iowa is an odd place to have the first votes cast in a presidential race. Yet that’s what will occur on January 3 in Republican caucuses around the state.

Popular Culture and the Baby Boomers

One more thing we’ve ruined.

BY P.J. O'ROURKE

Did the baby boom wreck popular culture? “D’oh,” to borrow from the subject in question. On the other hand, consider the source. A generation ago was there anything with as much brains, sly cunning, human comedy, and broad public appeal as The Simpsons?

There was Nixon, with his landslide reelection and hilarious one-liners. But that’s politics. Politics is easier to measure qualitatively than popular culture. Failures of quality control are more evident in politics. The president of the United States surprised by Pearl Harbor versus your mother surprised by the Village People.

Unfree to Be .  .  .

Religious liberty and human rights.

BY CHARLOTTE ALLEN

This book is yet another riposte to the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s incendiary and much-discussed The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). Huntington’s book had been itself a response to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Fukuyama had argued that, what with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet empire, the era of political and ideological conflicts (“history”) was over, and the whole world was now lumbering, in an immense metaphorical wagon train, toward ...

Render Unto Caesars

Victorino Matus, sybarite

BY VICTORINO MATUS

Las Vegas

"This is, like, your third eye,” my massage therapist told me as she dripped a mango-based oil onto my forehead, letting it trickle back through my hair, before she worked her fingers firmly over my scalp. The lights were dimmed and a sensual native beat was emanating softly from the speakers. My hands and feet, meanwhile, were lathered in warm coconut milk and wrapped in towels bearing hot stones.

It was a relaxing feeling, don’t get me wrong. But it seemed a bit unmanly. ...

Damned Lies and ‘Fact Checking’ (cont.)

It was just two issues ago that The Weekly Standard published Mark Hemingway’s devastating brief against media “fact checkers” and their systematic bias against the right (“Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking,’ ” December 19, 2011). But Fortuna is a capricious sprite, and The Scrapbook awoke last week to find the left spitting nails about PolitiFact, the influential column produced by the St. Petersburg Times. For its “Lie of the Year,” PolitiFact selected Democrats’ claim that Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget​—​passed by the House GOP earlier this year​—​would “end Medicare.” 

Practically the entire liberal wonkery cried foul, ...