This issue: December 24, 2012 (Vol. 18, No. 15)

The Hagel Thesis

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

As we go to press on Friday, December 14, former Republican senator Chuck Hagel appears to be the leading candidate to become the next secretary of defense. Anti-Israel propagandists are thrilled. Stephen Walt, junior partner of the better-known Israel-hater John Mearsheimer, writes that if President Obama nominates Hagel, it will be “a smart move.” Why? Because, “unlike almost all of his former colleagues on Capitol Hill, he hasn’t been a complete doormat for the Israel lobby.” Indeed, a Hagel pick would “pay back Benjamin Netanyahu for all the ‘cooperation’ Obama received from him during the first term.” Furthermore, Walt writes approvingly, Hagel is “generally thought to be skeptical about the use of military force against Iran.”

The States Should Say No

. . . to ‘free money’ for Medicaid expansion.

BY ANDREW B. WILSON

If someone who is sinking deeper and deeper into debt comes to you with an offer of “free money,” you would be best advised to:

(a) take the money and run,

(b) say thanks, but no thanks, or

(c) call the police?

The Real Cliff

The staggering debt from decades of continuous government borrowing is about to come due

BY CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH

It is important to understand that the fiscal cliff is a charade. There are, to be sure, many conscientious debt reformers working to avert our proclaimed year-end epic fall​—​along with many cynics who are using the occasion to advance pet projects that will make the debt problem worse. But all concerned are working within a fiscal system that has become seriously pathological. The cliff is the latest expression of that pathology.

The German Question

Where did they come from, where are they going?

BY THOMAS A. KOHUT

The Third Reich hovers over German history.   

Despite the careful, intelligent research conducted by countless scholars in numerous disciplines, those 12 years remain in some essential way incomprehensible. How, we ask—without ever being able to provide a truly satisfying answer—could more or less ordinary human beings have done what they did to other human beings in an attempt to create a racial utopia?  

Because its unprecedented horror continues to escape our understanding, the Third Reich has colored how historians have looked at the entire history of modern Germany. The centuries before 1933 are seen—on some, often hidden, level—as paving the way to the Third Reich. The events of the decades since 1945 are seen, usually more explicitly, as somehow in reaction to the Third Reich. Indeed, after the mid-1960s, Germans ...

Christmas, Inflated

Joseph Bottum, (not simply) having a wonderful Christmastime

BY JOSEPH BOTTUM

I saw an inflatable reindeer this December, out on the snow of a suburban lawn. And, of course, beside it were a candy cane, a Santa, and a sleigh: eight-foot-high vinyl blowups of the secularized action figures of the winter holiday that dare not speak its name. Brightly colored, their heads tilting in ironic self-comment as they slowly deflated in the December cold, they were silly, showy, and weirdly over-sized​—​cheesy almost beyond belief, framed by the hundreds of Christmas lights tacked to the house. And I loved them, smiling as I drove past.

They made me happy, in fact, for the rest of the afternoon. I don’t know, maybe there’s some way to derive satisfaction from ...

Look for the Union Violence

If there are two things The Scrapbook has learned during the past two years, it’s that when the privileges of labor unions are addressed by democratically elected legislatures—usually during harsh economic times—you can be sure that the unions will descend on state capitals with marches, epithets, threats of violence, violence, illegal occupations, and vandalism. Call it antidemocracy in response to democracy.

This was last seen in Wisconsin in 2011, when Governor Scott Walker did the citizens of his state a huge favor by reforming collective bargaining statutes that had tied the hands of local governments when dealing with public-employee unions. This demanded no small measure of courage on Walker’s part—and not just because Wisconsin is a ...