editorial

Spring isn’t what it used to be. Here, for example, is Robert Browning in 1841:

The year’s at the spring,

In response to Bill Kristol's editorial in the latest issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, former ambassador, deputy secretary of Defense and World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz sends in the following note:

Now begins the great business for which the voters recalled the Republican party to power in Washington: reestablishing the habits of limited government. Starting with the debate on the 2011 continuing resolution—last year’s Democratic majorities having failed to fund the government for the full year—and the building of the 2012 budget, conservatives will commit to the Sisyphean task of putting America’s fiscal house in order.

After watching the State of the Union address, we’ve finally figured out which position President Obama could play for the Steelers on Super Bowl Sunday. He’d make a great punter.

So the much-anticipated pivot to the center in the State of the Union speech has happened. As pivots go, President Obama’s wasn’t the most elegant—there were no triple lutzes or extended camel spins—but he didn’t fall on his face either. It seems clear that, for the next two years at least, President Obama is going to give us a break from claims of transforming America, à la FDR, and will work on triangulating to stay in office, à la Bill Clinton.

After a depressing week—a horrible shooting that killed 6 people and wounded 14 others, followed by days of demagoguery and idiocy surpassing even the normal standards of our power-without-responsibility punditocracy—recent days have brought encouraging news. The medical prognosis for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords seems more hopeful than had been thought likely. And the American people have once again demonstrated their good sense in the face of efforts by the media to stampede them toward foolishness.

In 1991, at the end of the Cold War, there were 710,821 active-duty soldiers in the U.S. Army. By 2001, that figure was down to 478,918. That 32 percent decline in active-duty strength severely limited our options for a military response to 9/11, practically dictating that the forces sent to Afghanistan and Iraq would be too small to pacify two countries with a combined population of nearly 60 million. The result was years of protracted conflict that put a severe strain on an undersized force.

Whether House Republicans will succeed in limiting the national government is a question raised by a simple rule adopted on their first day in the majority. Under the rule, every bill when introduced must be accompanied by a statement citing the specific authority granted to Congress by the Constitution under which it may pass the proposed law. Lacking such a statement, the bill will be returned to its sponsor.

Just before noon on Sunday, July 18, 2010, Sarah Palin enriched the English language. Referring to the planned Islamic center near the 9/11 site in New York, she tweeted: “Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.”