This issue: December 31 - January 7, 2013 (Vol. 18, No. 16)

The Greatest Conservative Generation

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

"There were giants in the earth in those days.” The death on December 19 of Robert Bork—superb legal scholar, preeminent constitutional thinker, principled public servant—calls to mind the other giants of American conservatism who have left us in the last decade: Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol, Milton Friedman and James Q. Wilson, Richard John Neuhaus and Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. They were the greatest conservative generation. They rode into the valley of liberal orthodoxies and emerged sometimes triumphant, always unbowed. When can their glory fade? They left our nation stronger and better for their efforts. 

Those who knew them do their best to carry on the ...

The Indispensable Man

Arizona’s Jon Kyl retires from the Senate.

BY FRED BARNES

There’s a wise old saying that no one in politics or elected office is indispensable. But Republican senator Jon Kyl of Arizona comes pretty close.

Now that Kyl is retiring after 8 years in the House and 18 in the Senate, his absence will be felt instantly. He knows more about more issues than anyone else in Congress—ranging from missile defense to the estate tax. His influence was magnified less by his position as Senate minority whip since 2007 than by his ability to deal respectfully with both Republican and Democratic senators, even ...

Batman v. Spider-Man

Which is the greater hero?

BY TRAVIS D. SMITH

Jonathan V. Last penned a paean to the Batman earlier this year in The Weekly Standard, making the case for understanding the Caped Crusader as the hero of the modern liberal order against illiberal threats, including and especially those that emerge from within modernity itself (“A One-Man Department of Justice,” August 13, 2012). Last is right to argue that modernity needs restraining. He is mistaken in thinking that this is a job for Batman.

Batman seems ...

Sincerely, Young Possum

T. S. Eliot on the threshold of eminence.

BY WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD

'I don’t like reading other people’s private correspondence in print, and I do not want other people to read mine,” wrote T. S. Eliot to his mother in April 1927. 

Sounds definitive enough, yet six years later, he would confess in a lecture that there was an “ineradicable” desire to hope one’s correspondence might be preserved for complete strangers to read: “We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have written”—put with a ...

When Good Trees Go Bad

Andrew Ferguson, arbor assassin

BY ANDREW FERGUSON

We bought our house years ago in deepest autumn, when the towering oak in the backyard had scarcely lost a leaf, and the leaves it had yet to lose were daubed by the lengthening year to a shade of red I’d never seen. The sun passing through them gave the browning grass an unearthly shimmer, as light from a rose window will brighten the shadows in a sanctuary. The house was okay and the neighborhood was good but I think the reason we felt compelled to make an offer was this very thing, this overspreading tree with its power to impose moods on an otherwise unremarkable plot of ground in suburban Virginia. You sign a stack of papers and take possession of a house, and pay taxes and insurance premiums that prove, among other things, it’s yours. But the categories of ownership are too puny for a tree like this one. You don’t buy it or take possession of it, ...

Great Scott

The Scrapbook did not expect that the New York Times would express much joy at the appointment of Rep. Tim Scott of South Carolina to the Senate seat vacated by Jim DeMint. Mr. DeMint is a conservative Republican, Mr. Scott is a conservative Republican, and the governor who anointed Scott, Nikki Haley, is a conservative Republican, too. 

And the truth be told, The Scrapbook would prefer to underplay the “historic” nature of Scott’s ascent to the Senate. Yes, he is the first black Republican in the upper chamber since Edward Brooke (1979) and the only African American in the Senate at all; and he assumes the seat once held by Strom Thurmond, the 1948 Dixiecrat candidate for president. The times they are a-changin’ ...