This issue: October 21 - October 28, 2013 (Vol. 19, No. 07)

The Park Police

Advance Editorial From Our Forthcoming 10/21-10/28 Issue

BY JONATHAN V. LAST

“We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around.”
—Ronald Reagan

The conduct of the National Park Service over the last week might be the biggest scandal of the Obama administration. This is an expansive claim, of course. Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the IRS, the NSA, the HHS mandate​—​this is an administration that has not lacked for appalling abuses of power. And we still have three years to go.

Even so, consider the actions of the National Park Service since the government shutdown began. People first noticed what the NPS was up to when the World War II Memorial on the National Mall was “closed.” Just to be clear, the memorial is an open plaza. There is nothing to operate. Sometimes there might be a ranger standing around. But he’s not collecting tickets or opening gates. Putting up barricades and posting guards to “close” ...

An Inauspicious Debut

The health exchange meltdowns are not just ‘glitches.’

BY MICHAEL ASTRUE

For over a year it has been common knowledge within the Obama administration that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) could not launch its network of health exchanges for the Affordable Care Act in a minimally acceptable way. That knowledge did not stop the HHS publicity machine from constantly assuring the American public that its computer systems would be ready for the first enrollment period. That knowledge did not stop carefully scripted HHS employees and contractors from making similar false assurances to two House committees just weeks before the botched October 1 launch.

As the HHS day of reckoning approached, the publicity machine shifted gears and began acknowledging the likelihood of “glitches,” a brilliant rhetorical technique designed to dismiss all HHS failures as minor and fixable. President Obama echoed this “glitches” theme, and it worked. A mesmerized USA Today, for one, characterized the ...

Health Reform Breaks Bad

The deceptions and disasters of Obamacare

BY CHRISTOPHER J. CONOVER

Breaking Bad is the story of a seemingly well-intended but very misguided man who turned to cooking meth in order to amass enough wealth to provide for his family once he dies of cancer. The consequences of that unfortunate decision—not to mention the lies and deceptions to keep it on track—pyramid alarmingly over the course of five seasons, culminating in mayhem and a head-spinning body count.

Obamacare isn’t a TV drama. But it will unleash its own tsunami of unintended consequences: more than a million jobs lost, an economy increasingly made up of part-time workers, higher health spending (at least a half-trillion dollars just over the next decade), a decline in medical innovation (and attendant loss of life).

While Obamacare undoubtedly will do a modest amount of good, the urgent question is whether the law’s supporters will come to see that the good pales in comparison to the ...

Teller of Tales

The definitive Updike, in two volumes.

BY WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD

There have always been readers of John Updike’s work who find his most impressive achievement to be his short fiction rather than his novels. 

Excepting the four Rabbit Angstrom novels, this is a plausible judgment. About 10 years ago, Updike collected the stories he had written between 1953 and 1975; his death in 2009 left the remainder of them uncollected. So it is an event of some moment to see 186 stories (the ones about the Maple family and about Henry Bech have been saved for later publication) chronologically arranged and splendidly edited by Christopher Carduff for the Library of America. 

Carduff has already brought out posthumous volumes of Updike’s prose and the uncollected essays and reviews of his art criticism. The editorial contribution here, a very large one, consists of pertinent notes to the stories, along with the date that they were submitted for ...

Nostalgia Organized

Joseph Epstein, reunion dropout.

BY JOSEPH EPSTEIN

A reunion marking the hundredth anniversary of the founding of my high school—Nicholas Senn, on the northside of Chicago—is to be held this month, and I shall not be attending it. I am one of those people who had a good run in high school. A minor athlete, a member of most of the school’s better clubs, a boy who went out with pretty and pleasant girls, I had mastered the arts of conformity, and in high school they brought me much happiness. So much so that I sometimes think I may have peaked around the age of 17, and it’s been slowly but relentlessly downhill since. 

I went to my high school class’s fiftieth reunion, which did not do much for me. I did, though, make one notable discovery: that some of the people who as kids were on the periphery of high school social life went on to have interesting lives as painters, drama teachers, entrepreneurs, while the most popular kids in the ...

Fast and Furious—Still Infuriating

With the economy still cratered, a slew of foreign policy debacles, and a government shutdown, most Americans probably haven’t thought much about the Fast and Furious scandal in recent months. The Scrapbook doesn’t know what it says about the times we live in that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives’ homicidal negligence is all but forgotten a few years later, but we’re pretty sure it isn’t good.

The ATF is certainly doing everything it can to make sure that Americans don’t revisit its inexplicable decision to give thousands of guns to Mexican gangs, resulting in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and dozens of Mexican nationals. Two years ago, ATF whistleblower John Dodson revealed the incompetence of the Fast and Furious operation, which led to the resignation of a number of top-ranking ATF officials. It also led to Eric Holder becoming the first attorney general in U.S. history to be held in contempt ...