This issue: January 23, 2012 (Vol. 17, No. 18)

Men at War

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

We’ll stipulate that of course the Marines who urinated on the bodies of dead Taliban in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, last year should be appropriately disciplined, assuming things are as they appear in the video.

But it’s also worth noting that pissing has a distinguished place in American military history. Most famously, General George S. Patton relieved himself in the Rhine on March 24, 1945—and made sure he was photographed doing so. Patton later recalled: “I drove to the Rhine River and went across on the pontoon bridge. I stopped in the middle to take a piss and then picked up some dirt on the far side in emulation of William the Conqueror.” (At the ...

AWW Shucks

The siren song of Washington, D.C.

BY ANDREW FERGUSON

After he almost won the Iowa caucuses earlier this month, Rick Santorum was instantly dubbed a “Washington outsider,” even an “antiestablishment candidate.” It was a convenient tag that made it easier for reporters to keep all these strange Republicans straight: Newt Gingrich, Washington insider; Michele Bachmann, mad housewife; Mitt Romney, establishment prom king; Jon Huntsman, moderate hair guy; Rick Santorum, antiestablishment Washington outsider. Like that.

But Santorum’s titles were rescinded as quickly as they were bestowed, for the press discovered certain details that undercut any claim he might have to be a Washington outsider, such as the fact that ...

Past Their Sell-By Date

A dwindling group of Occupiers take on the New Hampshire primary.

BY MATT LABASH

Manchester, N.H.

The New Hampshire primary, more than most stops on the campaign trail, is no place for human dignity. It sits at the crossroads of abasement and overhype. It is populated by rubberneckers, drunks, moral pygmies, and publicity tapeworms—and that’s before you ever leave media HQ at the Radisson Hotel on Elm Street. 

But to make a reporter truly question his career choice, one need only cross the street to Veterans Memorial Park. While the election circus is ...

Poet and Pioneer

The Keats brothers’ saga.

BY SARA LODGE

John Keats was to Romantic poetry as James Dean was to cinema: young, gifted, and doomed. His charisma lies in the astonishing energy, humor, and inspiration that he packed into a small physical frame and an appallingly brief time frame: He died of tuberculosis aged barely 25. His eyes were always on the skies. He is the poet of the moon, of new planets and bright stars, of clouds, gold, grey, and dun, of mist, of snow, and Blue!—’Tis the life of heaven. His writing has the intensity and sensuality that belongs to us all in our twenties, when we first feel the power of our capacity to see, think, love, regret. But in Keats that luscious intimacy, that pleasurable ache of joy in beauty is made unbearably poignant by the lacerating knowledge of impending loss.

Denise Gigante takes a new approach to the familiar and tragic tale of John’s brief life, by pairing his biography with that of his younger brother ...

In the Bleak Midwinter

Philip Terzian, cold man

BY PHILIP TERZIAN

People are entitled to complain about bias in the media, but I’m largely indifferent to the problem. This is not because “liberal bias” doesn’t exist—I’ve been a journalist for 40 years and lifelong witness—but because it is so pervasive, and so impervious to challenge, that it is hardly worth mentioning. One might just as usefully complain about the weather. 

Or, as I prefer, about weathermen/women. I am speaking here of the meteorologists on the local news, the smiling, pivoting, late-evening forecasters who point at places on transparent maps, and keep us in a high-pressure state of anxiety about low-pressure systems coming in from the Great Lakes. I mean, I enjoy the geography lessons—Mobile is on the Gulf, Long Island is the storm-system gateway to New England—but I frankly resent their warm-weather bias. Moreover, it is just as widespread, and nearly as infuriating to me, as the other kind of bias.

...

In Tebow We Trust

Few athletes in recent years have made football as compelling to watch as Tim Tebow. The guy throws wounded-duck passes for three quarters, and still finds a way to win with overtime heroics, even though his player stats suggest that a victory is impossible. 

Of course, proclaiming his Christian faith on and off the field has made Tebow controversial to say the least. Sandra Fish, who teaches journalism at the University of Colorado, asks this supposedly provocative question at the Washington Post website: “Tim Tebow: Would we love him if he were Muslim?”