This issue: March 11, 2013 (Vol. 18, No. 25)

John Brennan and the Bin Laden Files

BY THOMAS JOSCELYN

During a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center on April 30, 2012, John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, discussed “The Ethics and Efficacy of the U.S. President’s Counterterrorism Strategy.” Brennan explained that President Obama has “pledged to share as much information with the American people ‘so that they can make informed judgments and hold us accountable.’ ” Obama, he continued, “has consistently encouraged those of us on his national security team to be as open and candid as possible.” After all, “our democracy depends” upon “transparency.”

But nearly two years after the May 1, 2011, assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound, the Obama administration has made public just 17 documents out of the huge cache of information captured during that raid. U.S. intelligence officials tell The Weekly Standard that the vast collection includes “hundreds of thousands of documents and files.” Obama administration ...

Second-Term Blues

Is Obama’s free ride over?

BY FRED BARNES

Why do presidents get in trouble in their second terms? They think they have a mandate when they don’t. They believe they’re stronger politically than they really are. They’re convinced they can get away with things other presidents couldn’t. They think too highly of themselves personally and act accordingly.

President Obama hasn’t hit the second-term skids—yet. And he insists he knows the perils of four more years in the White House and how to avoid them. But there are signs of trouble ahead, signs that Obama and his advisers appear not to have recognized.

Sign number one is the sequester. It’s given Obama numerous opportunities to overreach, and he seems determined to seize all of them. The first: blaming Republicans for the automatic spending cuts that went into effect last week. The idea for the sequester, as everyone now knows, originated in the White House. And contrary to ...

Paradise Lost

California is not too big to fail.

BY K.E. GRUBBS JR. and SHAWN STEEL

One early December morning, Las Vegas police moved in on the Silverton Hotel and Casino, just off the Strip and known for its 117,000-gallon aquarium. There, having located a getaway black Audi with no license plates, they arrested 31-year-old Ka Pasasouk​—​a Laotian immigrant with a violent history who had eluded deportation as well as imprisonment. The Dragnet-style work came less than 24 hours after police back in Northridge, a Los Angeles suburb known for a state university campus, discovered what they called a “very grisly tableau.”

Outside an overcrowded boarding house, described in press accounts as unlicensed, lay the bodies of two men and two women, whom Pasasouk has now been charged with murdering. The story captured attention up and down the already tense state, where the phrase “grisly tableau” could easily have found wide use in the ubiquitous conversations about California’s economic, political, ...

Man With a Line

The gimlet eye of Saul Steinberg.

BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN

At a celebration at UCLA of the career of Eugen Weber, the Romanian-born historian of France, I made the mistake of describing Eugen as an exile. In his response to the tributes paid him, Eugen corrected me, remarking that he had never considered himself an exile. “From the moment I attained consciousness,” he said, “I wanted to leave Romania. The place is a dump.” 

Tristan Tzara (né Samuel Rosenstock), one of the founders of Dada, was a Romanian. Eugène Ionesco, perhaps the most famous Romanian artist of the last half of the 20th century, was a surrealist playwright prominently associated with the Theater of the Absurd. E. M. Cioran, the Romanian aphorist, wrote: “An acute sense of absurdity makes the merest action unlikely, indeed impossible. Lucky those who lack such a thing! Providence has indeed looked out for them.” Dada, surrealism, absurdity—Romania seems to have encouraged such responses on the part of its writers and artists. 

The Age of Anxiety

Jonathan V. Last remembers John Paul II.

BY JONATHAN V. LAST

I was in second grade when I first became convinced that things fall apart.

The year began with the attempted assassination of an American president, followed a few weeks later by the attempted assassination of a Polish pope, followed a few months after that by the successful assassination of an Egyptian president. The attempted murder of leaders, it seemed, was a fact of life. 

My day-to-day doings were tinged with low-grade, existential fear stemming from the Cold War. At my Quaker elementary school in South Jersey, we talked about Hiroshima and Nagasaki enough that my small circle of friends and I used to discuss how much worse the coming nuclear conflagration with the Soviets would be.

Not that the American way of life seemed particularly deserving of preservation. My mother taught in a public elementary school, and on at least three occasions she was ...

Humanitarianism, Hollywood Style

The Scrapbook doesn’t pay too close attention to the Academy Awards—we’re still recovering from the Indian maiden, Sacheen Littlefeather, who accepted Marlon Brando’s Oscar for the Godfather in 1973 and tried to read his 15-page mani-festo on national television—but we do have a weakness for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, which the motion picture academy bestows separately. Ceremonies such as the Oscars are basically expensive, well-dressed exercises in self-infatuation, and the Jean Hersholt Award is given for “outstanding contributions to humanitarian causes.” Recent recipients include the studio mogul Sherry Lansing, gabfest legend Oprah Winfrey, and the latest winner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who received his statuette last November.

Katzenberg, of course, is the CEO of DreamWorks Animation, the highly successful studio, and it is perhaps emblematic of the Hersholt Award that he was recognized for his ...