Bookworm Room

Tweet A child’s death is always a tragedy, but this SF Chron report about Qana sounds like a Hezbollah PR office press release: The tiny, lifeless bodies were laid out in a row on a black straw sheet in the concrete courtyard of the Tyre Government Hospital. Twenty-one of them, all still in the pajamas [...]

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Tweet Jay Nordlinger reminds us of Golda Meir’s prescient words: “When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons. But it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.”

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Tweet It’s beginning to look as if those children’s deaths in Qana are a replay of the family death in Palestine. You know the latter — it was the one where the Palestinians, swiftly joined by the world media, blamed Israel when a family died while on the beach (complete with posed photographs of mourners). [...]

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Tweet You can’t say that the French lack style. When they pander, they do so with panache. Take their homage, as Reuters reports it, to one of the world’s major terrorist states: French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy says Tehran is a significant, respected player in the Middle East – ‘a great country, a great people [...]

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Tweet Since Israel is at the epicenter of events right now, I wanted to share with you two emails that I’ve received.  The first one is from an Israeli — an old Leftist — writing about the battle in Lebanon.  I’ve redacted it for privacy, and edited it for spelling (no criticism is intended here, [...]

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Tweet I just learned that my cholesterol is slightly elevated.  It’s still in the normal zone, but on the high end of normal.  I’ve already cut a lot of fat out of my diet, so I was casting around for another way to control my numbers.  I know that people take Niacin to help lower [...]

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Tweet Drudge linked this morning to an article in Australia’s Herald Sun that displays a series of damning photographs showing Hezbollah terrorists, and their weapons of course, comfortably ensconced in a dense residential neighborhood.  The terrorists are dressed in comfy casuals, so that they can easily blend into the crowd. Hezbollah didn’t end up in [...]

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Tweet The press is all over Israel’s missile strike that killed children. Fortunately, LGF is all over the fact that Israel, unlike any aggressor in the history of the world, warned civilians days in advance that the strike was coming and begged them to leave. The reason Israel was striking that area was not to [...]

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Tweet Most people harbor bad thoughts. It’s the civilizing instincts we learn over a lifetime that help us tamp down those thoughts. Thus, while we may hate, really hate, the boss who destroyed our career, we don’t kill that boss — or at least most of us don’t. “Going postal,” for all the press it [...]

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Tweet Since I have a sometimes embarrassing fondness for romance novels (Mr. Bookworm teases me a lot), I’ve written about romance novels before (once about British chick-lit, which I think is demeaning to women; and once about the conservative morals underpinning American romances). I was therefore intrigued when AP did a little story about the [...]

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Tweet Isn’t it judo where you use your enemy’s own power and momentum to destroy him? I know it’s one of the martial arts. I was thinking of that principle when I read Mark Steyn’s accurate diagnosis of the problems with the mighty American military: We live in an age of inversely proportional deterrence: The [...]

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Tweet If you’re doing Yoga, be sure to bring the disinfectant: In the last two years, Dr. Cohen said, he has seen a 50 percent spike in patients with athlete’s foot and plantar warts. The likely culprit? Unclean exercise mats, he said. Gyms have long been hothouses for unwanted viruses, fungi and bacteria, a result [...]

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Tweet For several of my posts, there’s been a very vigorous exchange about American foreign policy. Just recently, one of my readers, who espouses what I would call a conservative viewpoint, commented about “fundamental truths” common to all people.  Another reader who, on foreign policy, is I think hostile to current Bush initiatives wrote this [...]

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Tweet Today, in my mail, I found our local free paper, the Pacific Sun. This week’s cover story is on the cover as “A Farewell to Arms : Iraq war veterans reject their mission– and now may have to fight for their own freedom.” In the body of the magazine, it gets the title “Why [...]

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Tweet Sometimes, you stumble across an expert who has such manifest expertise, it might be a grave mistake to ignore him. And sometimes, if you’re not the stumbling kind, you’re lucky enough to have someone tell you how to find information from that expert. Thanks to Kevin, I can tell you what a reformed terrorist [...]

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Tweet When two people leave me messages saying I must, absolutely must, read a movie review, I take that seriously.  I therefore headed over to the Washington Post and read the review for Ant Bully.  I can now tell you that you must, absolutely must, read the Ant Bully review.  Even if, after the first [...]

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Tweet Do you wear logo-wear?  By that I mean anything from a t-shirt that says “Drink Coca Cola” to a Mickey Mouse shirt or hat?  I don’t.  I’ve never figured out why I should pay to advertise someone else’s product.  It seems to be that, if the Coca Cola company wants me to walk around [...]

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Tweet Since I can’t say it better, I won’t try. Here’s just the opening of Charles Krauthammer’s most recent column about the world pile-up against Israel and what Israel should do it about it: What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock [...]

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Tweet Whether you’re Hammurabi or W. S. Gilbert, you know that the punishment must fit the crime.  Check out this post to find out how to make a suitable punishment when you’re neighbor piggy-backs on your wireless. Hat tip:  Done With Mirrors

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Tweet I’ve rather slacked off on blogging about the war.  I’ve made my position very clear, and am only dragging in stories that particularly catch my eye.  At Seraphic Secret, however, Robert Avrech is blogging up a storm about the war itself, and about coverage of the war.  Since he’s an extraordinarily elegant writer, and [...]

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Tweet I love NY Times bashing, in part because I think it’s a dreadfully misguided paper that has way too much reach, and in part because it’s a cheap and easy target, and I don’t always have the time or energy to make subtle arguments against more challenging targets. What I did not know, though, [...]

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Tweet I’ve heard a lot in the past week or so about the underground tunnels Hezbollah has built all along Lebanon’s southern (and Israel’s northern) border. These reports led me to wonder why Israel, which has a very well equipped army, didn’t have bunker busters, of the type we heard about during the first Iraq [...]

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Tweet What’s the big deal, many ask? Hezbollah and Hamas kidnapped some Israeli soldiers, turning them into prisoners, and they’ll readily release these prisoners if Israel, in turn, will release some prisoners it holds. It all sounds so beautifully symmetrical. Except it’s not. The kidnapped Israeli soldiers had done absolutely nothing beyond being soldiers, which [...]

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Tweet It took me three glances to get the message in this picture, and then I thought it was brilliant: Hat tip: Michelle Malkin UPDATE:  If you can’t see the image on my blog, just go on over to Michelle Malkin.  There’s prescient Oliphant cartoon, but that’s not what I was actually linking to.  Instead, [...]

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Tweet After crowing about the cheese-eating surrender monkeys losing against to an American in the Tour de France, I find very depressing the report that Floyd Landis flunked a drug test.  If a repeat drug test — with both samples drawn on the day of his extraordinary come-back — also test positive, he’s out.  All [...]

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