This issue: July 2 - July 9, 2012 (Vol. 17, No. 40)

The Obama Retreat

BY JAMIE FLY, LEE SMITH and WILLIAM KRISTOL

Last week, we wrote on this page that given the Obama administration’s lack of leadership on Iran in this “period of consequences,” Congress should step in to fill the void. As our editorial went to press, a bipartisan group of 44 senators began to do just that. In a letter organized by Senators Robert Menendez and Roy Blunt, the group outlined a series of steps Iran would have needed to take at the June 18-19 Moscow talks to justify further negotiations. These included shutting its previously covert enrichment facility near Qom, freezing enrichment above 5 percent, and shipping its stockpile of uranium enriched above that point out of the country.

The letter noted, “Absent these steps, we must conclude that Tehran is using the talks as a cover to buy time as it advances toward nuclear weapons capability.” And the senators called on the president to “reevaluate the utility of further talks at this time and ...

Democratic Heretics

Would FDR, Truman, JFK, or LBJ be nominated by their party today?

BY STEVEN F. HAYWARD

The never-ending Democratic attempt to resurrect the strategy that destroyed Barry Goldwater in 1964—he’s an extremist, don’t you know—rolls on, with liberals and the media trying to tar the Republican party as an “ideological outlier” in American politics. 

There are three legs to this rickety barstool of an argument. One is the pseudo-social science findings of Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann that congressional Republican voting records have lurched sharply to the right in recent years (though it is not obvious why this should be bad news). The second is the populism of the Tea Party, which, to be sure, is a disruptive force in the Republican party much as the anti-Vietnam war movement was a disruptive force in the Democratic party in the late 1960s and 1970s. The wobbliest leg of the triad is the argument, unfortunately abetted by Jeb Bush, that the GOP has become too extreme even for ...

Seven Bloody Days

Forgotten battlefields; monuments to vanity

BY GEOFFREY NORMAN

Richmond, Va.
It doesn’t take long to walk the Malvern Hill battlefield. Less than an hour. And there is not much to see. There are a few cannons at the top of the hill, where they were on July 1, 1862, firing remorselessly into the lines of assaulting Confederate infantry that never came close to reaching them and took appalling casualties in the effort. Alongside a trail that meanders through the mature hardwood trees at the base of the hill, there are some shallow depressions in the ground that a plaque describes as hasty graves where some of the Confederate dead had been buried. There is one structure at the top of the hill that looks, more or less, the way it did on the day of the battle. Some split rail fences for verisimilitude. And that is about it.

Measured against, say, the 4,000 acres of Shiloh or Gettysburg with its 1,300 monuments, Malvern Hill is decidedly minor league as Civil War battlefields ...

Austen’s Power

The novelist’s advice to ‘recovering Romantics.’

BY CLAUDIA ANDERSON

For decades now, media marketers and content producers have been milking the Jane Austen craze, first with fine dramatizations of the novels themselves for small and large screen, then with a vast bazaar of knockoffs—sequels by the score (Letters from Pemberley: The First Year, Captain Wentworth’s Diary), modern adaptations (Emma as Valley Girl in the movie Clueless), and even exotica introducing zombies and sea monsters into the Austen genre. What on earth is the appeal?

Elizabeth Kantor has taken the trouble to think through a serious answer—to wit, Jane Austen “is the cure” for our modern disillusionment about happiness in marriage. Specifically, what keeps us coming back for more is the dignity, elegance, and sheer competence of the Austen heroine’s pursuit of happy love. A literary scholar steeped in Jane Austen’s fiction and letters, but also a happily married wife and mother, ...

The Law of Dismality

Joseph Bottum, the dismal scientist

BY JOSEPH BOTTUM

Back in the dark ages of superstition and disease, before science brought suffering humanity into our present era of perpetual peace and economic stability, people were very unenlightened. As Harris (2010) and Hitchens (2007) note, it was a dark time. Very dark.

We shouldn’t assume, however, that everyone who lived before us was entirely foolish. Yes, they were all under five feet tall, died at age 39, and smoked unfiltered cigarettes while driving nonelectric cars without seat belts. To examine their bleak lives, however, is to discover that many of them had a kind of prescientific intuition that—when put on a proper scientific foundation—can prove useful, even today.

Take, for example, the curious manner in which bad events seem to clump together. The car gets sideswiped, the sink backs up, the stock market falls, the Yankees win. And somehow it all seems to merge ...

Risky Romney Business

Mitt Romney has a well-deserved reputation as risk-averse and cautious. His campaign team has made no secret of its strategy to have their man tiptoe to the presidency by focusing almost exclusively on President Obama’s stewardship of the economy. The execution of this strategy depends on Romney doing nothing to “distract” from the economy, meaning that Romney’s innate caution is being reinforced at every turn by those around him. 

To some extent, this approach is understandable. For months, voters have told pollsters that the economy is the most important issue in the election, and handling the economy is one of the few issue areas where Romney enjoys a real advantage over Obama. 

But there’s a downside, too. Voters may care most about the economy, but they don’t care only about the economy. And by seeking to avoid doing anything controversial, Romney has ...