This issue: February 6, 2012 (Vol. 17, No. 20)

Yes, We Can...

BY PETER WEHNER

These days one can sense a palpable fear among Republicans that the 2012 presidential election is slipping through their fingers. Their constellation of concerns includes the (perceived) weaknesses of the two frontrunners, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich; the increasing ferocity of their clash; the public’s antipathy toward Congress (including the GOP-controlled House); and a slight uptick in the economy (including a drop in the unemployment rate), which is redounding to the benefit of the incumbent. Barack Obama may be a lousy president, the argument goes, but he’s a very good campaigner.

It’s certainly true that the president is in better shape now than he was ...

The Great Tuition Pander

Obama versus the bursars.

BY ANDREW FERGUSON

To the long list of constituencies at whom President Obama is righteously cheesed off​—​millionaires, billionaires, international terrorists, those sorts of people​—​we may now add the bursars of America’s colleges and universities. He devoted a passage of his State of the Union address last week to the problem of unaffordable college tuition. His face took on that no-nonsense, determined look when he spotted the subject rolling up his teleprompter.

“We can’t just keep subsidizing skyrocketing tuition,” he said. “We’ll run out of money. [Wait​—​haven’t we done that already?] .  .  . Colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs ...

Strategic Retreat

The war on terror is far from over. Why are we coming home?

BY BILL ROGGIO and THOMAS JOSCELYN

The killing of Osama bin Laden was a monumental tactical success in the war against al Qaeda. For millions, bin Laden had come to symbolize American weakness. His mere existence was a reminder that the United States, for all its military might and economic dominance, could not bring to justice a man responsible for the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans. And bin Laden was more than a symbol. Documents recovered from his safe house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011 reveal he was still an instrumental leader within the global terror network he established. For these reasons and more, the death of bin Laden at the hands of an elite band of Navy SEALs was a cathartic moment for the nation. But the Obama administration has used that moment to justify a strategic retreat from the global war against al Qaeda, its allies, and the ...

Modern as Yesterday

How the culture evolved from Old to New.

BY MARTHA BAYLES

What was modernism? Many well-educated people would be hard pressed to answer, even (especially?) if they were exposed to it in college. Of all the topics in the humanities, modernism may be the most ill taught, because it is both too close (having flourished between the 1880s and World War I) and too distant (having been eclipsed by postmodernism, whatever that means). At the same time, modernism has in recent years been extensively researched, and as noted by Michael Levenson, professor of literature at the University of Virginia, “we have reached a moment when many self-contained and specialized studies can be brought together.”

As for who will bring these studies together, the promotional materials accompanying this book say that Levenson is our man. A scholar who has written extensively about literary modernism, he is also conversant with the visual and performing arts, and recently edited the Cambridge Companion to Modernism. ...

The Plague

Jonathan V. Last, Twitter-immune

BY JONATHAN V. LAST

I read an essay by a senior editor at the Atlantic recently that began, “I finished up Middle-march two days ago, and had a good debate about it on Twitter.”

Twitter (for the five people in America still blissfully ignorant of it) is a publishing platform that allows one to fire off bursts of written thought from just about anywhere onto the Internet for all to read. You Twitter on your computer while you fritter away the workday. You Twitter on your iPad while watching American Idol at night. You Twitter on your cell phone while standing in line at the grocery store. Or eating dinner at a Wolfgang Puck’s. Or milling at a party ...

Pants on (three-alarm) Fire

In recent weeks, these pages have contained thousands of words on the laughable bias and general incompetence of the mainstream media’s cherished “fact checking” columns. We’ve gone back to the well so many times we risk becoming the Baby Jessica of media criticism. Alas, it’s hard to ignore these pompous gatekeepers.

In last week’s issue, Mark Hemingway noted that there is a special congressional election in -Oregon’s 1st District being held on January 31, thanks to the resignation of disgraced Democrat David Wu. It’s a surprisingly close race, and Democrat Suzanne Bonamici and Republican Rob Cornilles have been making rather pointed accusations against ...