Hot Air brings us word that Newsweek is declaring war on Sarah Palin. The magazine that has given up all pretense of objective news coverage and now caters to an ever shrinking Upper West Side Elite is making Palin the cover of Newsweek (PDF) with the title “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Sarah?” with the subheading “she’s bad news for the GOP — and everyone else too.”

There’s just one problem.

The title comes from “The Sound of Music” and the song “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”

Maria, you see, was the hero and protagonist of the musical and, later, the movie.

And Maria was pursued by the Nazis.

Hmmmm . . . so if Palin is Maria and Newsweek is out to get her, perhaps Newsweeks’s red, black, and white masthead is appropriate.

*Sure, it was the nuns who sang the song, but the Nazis who were out to destroy her. And besides, we can’t really see Jon “God Supports Gay Marriage” Meacham as a nun.

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, in the process of telling the Democrats that they need to da*n the torpedoes and go full speed ahead, drops this gem:

Charles Kraut-hammer doesn’t represent any swing voters.

Not having the print edition of Newsweek handy - like pretty much the rest of America - I don’t know if this is reproduced there. But I’m curious: is the ethnic sneer there Alter’s, or his editor’s? I suspect it’s the latter, actually; but you never know.

Moe Lane

PS: What? No, actually, the Democrats should totally listen to Alter. Really. Please.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Newsweek’s Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas are tired of all this talk of socialism. We need to stop talking about yesterday’s news, they say, and embrace the great new fact that America is already a socialist country. They chortle that
America is just like France. Meacham and Thomas chide Sean Hannity for using socialism as a dirty word because it “seems strangely beside the point.” The pair is enthusiastic about our new American socialist society!

We are a European country and we like it, claim the Newsweek duo. Unfortunately, they seem to misunderstand so very much about what they speak.

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Michael Hirsh has a typically asinine column in today’s Newsweek, in which he berates Republicans for being unwilling to “compromise” (read: abandon conservative principles and flock to President Obama’s pork-filled big-spending “stimulus” proposal) and follow Obama’s lead in putting “childish things” (like core beliefs) behind them and focusing on making America more socialist.

For the purpose of this post, I’ll just quote the final portion of the column:

In his Inaugural Address, Obama proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.” He said he wanted to move beyond “stale political arguments … The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.”

That sounded about right to me, at least in terms of dealing with the crisis nature of the times. It is also smart, at this dire moment, to be trying to learn a few lessons from the past.

Obviously we don’t want to go back to the excesses of the long era of Democratic dominance and overspending—the New Deal-Great Society/Vietnam continuum—but neither can we simply return to the Republican era of Reaganite deregulation (especially of financial markets). It’s clear we need to do some serious rethinking of the best ways to make capitalism work, moving beyond both FDR and Reagan.

Get that? “Obviously we don’t want to go back to the excesses of the long era of Democratic dominance and overspending—the New Deal-Great Society/Vietnam continuum,” says Hirsh. Hm — if $800 billion in pork barrel giveaways isn’t “overspending,” what, in his opinion, would be?

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