Bookworm Room

Tweet Last year, when I wrote about my decision to keep my newfound conservatism under wraps in my bluest of blue communities, I got three types of responses.  The first came from people who could completely relate to my concern about verbal attacks and social isolation.  The second came from people, braver than I, who [...]

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Tweet I was also thinking of titling this post “when you’re in a hole, stop digging.” Either expression would apply to Kerry’s recent press conference. Given the chance to explain his musings about education and the military, he stated that he was, in fact, attacking Bush. Considering that Bush graduated from Kerry’s alma mater, doing [...]

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Tweet I think traditional marriage, which often includes children, is the glue that holds a stable society together. Married couples, especially those with or planning to have children, have an enormous incentive to hold jobs, save money, create safe communities, look to the future politically, and to crave non-revolutionary continuity when it comes to social [...]

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Tweet Read this story about child abuse only if you have a very, very strong tolerance for the worst kind of sadism visited on the most innocent of victims. I point it out only because the child’s abuser (his mother) was in her mid teens when she had him, has another child, and there is [...]

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Tweet If you’re planning on sitting this one out, please read Selwyn Duke’s article before you do: So many wrong things feel so right. “You know, I really told my brother-in-law off the other day and, boy, did it feel good.” Of course, what has changed? Your brother-in-law is still the pain he always was. [...]

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Tweet Maybe there’s a reason our troops voted overwhelmingly for Bush. Could it be because they knew that Kerry thinks of them as stupid, uneducated yokels? In any event, this is just more proof of my theory about the hierarchical morality that colors the Democratic/Leftist view of the conflict right now: that is, the Left [...]

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Tweet There’s nothing wrong with a newspaper being partisan.  There is something wrong, though, with a partisan newspaper pretending that it has no ideological bias.  Now that the New York Times has refused to endorse any Republicans in the upcoming election — a first in more than 30 years — do you think it might [...]

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Tweet By the way, if you doubt my hierarchical morality thesis, just read what Seymour Hersh has to say. I am not imagining things. To the hardcore Leftist, with a trickle down effect to the soft Leftists, victory belongs, not to those who are just and right, but to those who are in the one-down [...]

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Tweet As part of my random, brief blogging for the evening, let me commend to your attention VictorDavis Hanson’s article reminding us (a) that Extremist Islam is making modern the worst barbarisms of the past and (b) that the Enlightenment is a fragile concept that can easily be overwhelmed through apathy and fear. Also, a [...]

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Tweet Fortunately for those who don’t subscribe to Commentary Magazine, you can still read Amir Taheri’s article urging regime change in Iran. Taheri exposes decades of failed policies vis a vis Iran — not just American, UN and European policies, but also Russian and Turkish policies — and suggests that regime change is not only [...]

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Tweet I know I shouldn’t be this angry, but I am. My little dog last week developed a very nasty habit: if we leave the kitchen for a minute, she jumps on the table to get the food. I discovered today that a ten year old neighbor taught her to do this. Instead, of apologizing [...]

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Tweet We all know that the only thing more painful than ripping a bandaid off is taking it off ever so slowly. We all know that you treat cancers by swiftly removing the whole tumor (if possible), and not by gently nudging out one cancerous cell at a time. We all know (don’t we?) that [...]

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Tweet As you know, I wrote a post, that morphed into an article, both of which were about the Leftist concept of morality. I think this moral universe yields results based on analyzing (a) an actor’s personal feelings vis a vis a given situation and (b) the relative economic position of the parties to the [...]

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Tweet Brad Pitt, who hangs with the usual Hollywood crowd, and shares his life with anti-War expert Jolie, expressed surprise at the fruits of his peers’ efforts: BRAD PITT discovered how unpopular America is across the globe when a group of drunk Dutchmen threatened to kill him because of his nationality. Pitt ran into the [...]

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Tweet As you may recall, Michael Monsoor fell on a grenade to save his comrades. It turns out that Michael Fumento, during a previous visit to Iraq, spent time with Monsoor’s unit. He has pictures of Monsoor, and some video footage, which he shares here.

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Tweet Barack Obama, bright though he may be, strikes me as nothing more than a media creation.  Patrick thinks so too.

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Tweet Mark Steyn pithily reminds us why the anyone-but-Bush and the anyone-but-the-Republicans and the I-want-to-punish-the-Republicans crowds are all wrong: But if it really is, as Democrats say, ”all about the future of our children,” then our children will want to know why our generation saw what was happening and didn’t do anything about it. They [...]

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Tweet A week or so ago, I did a post about the movie Maria Full of Grace, and what I thought were that movie’s larger implications. I couldn’t get the subject out of my head, and expanded it into a longer article, which you can read here.

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Tweet I happily slept in this morning — until 8 a.m.  It was only after I woke up that it occurred to me that, in the old days, pre-kids, sleeping in used to mean noon.

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Tweet In a lengthy article about increasingly aggressive rioting in the Paris suburbs, the AP manages only reference to “Muslim” and that with an oblique reference to France’s failure to give Muslim’s economic opportunities. The article carefully refrains from identifying by religion the current crop of gun-wielding, bus-burning “youths.”  If you can read code, though, [...]

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Tweet When it comes to Hollywood, you have to assume someone is making the following stuff up. It’s so extreme that it must be a Rove-ian plot to discredit Hollywood in the eyes of average, decent Americans. I don’t see any other explanation for a post that purports to come from a major Hollywood producer, [...]

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Tweet Laer does a wonderful take down of the execrable views from Sheikh Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly (left), the Mufti of Australia’s biggest mosque in Sydney, including the latter’s BDS defense. Hilaly is the one who opined that women who are not fully veiled deserve to be raped (and, judging by the rise in Muslim [...]

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Tweet News reports facts (in theory).  Editorials expound upon opinions.  Tell me if this opening paragraph if from a news story or an editorial: The divisive debate over gay marriage, which played a prominent role in 2004 campaigns but this year largely faded from view, erupted anew on Thursday as President Bush and Republicans across [...]

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Tweet The same Mary Davenport who took on the scientific falsehoods in Michael J. Fox’s ad has co-authored an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle regarding the parental notification proposition (Prop. 85) on California’s ballot. The Proposition requires that, before a teenage girl can have an abortion, the clinic must notify her parents. As the [...]

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Tweet As I was writing the preceding post about Iran, it occurred to me that, as far as I know, Iran’s Mullahs actually live the personally austere life their extreme religion demands.  (We don’t hear about Uday-like pleasure palaces, for example.)  I wonder, though, if that’s really true.  It’s such a sealed society that we [...]

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