Bookworm Room

Tweet As I write this, Obama hasn’t spoken yet, but he has released excerpts from his speech.  These are my first thoughts on his words: “The 30,000 additional troops that I am announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 – the fastest pace possible – so that they can target the insurgency [...]

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Tweet One of the best things George Bush did during his presidency was to appoint the late, great Tony Snow as his press secretary.  Snow was a dream press secretary, straight out of central casting:  handsome, intelligent, erudite, informed, charming and witty.  Even the savagely anti-Bush press appeared to enjoy his statements and, once he [...]

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Tweet Here’s our Commander in Chief speaking of the situation in Afghanistan while he was running for office:  “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.” This post is not [...]

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Tweet Obama has known for more than 12 months that he was going to become CIC, with responsibility for Afghanistan.  This means 12 months of presidential advisers able to give this neophyte help in figuring out the best strategy for the war that he declared, during the campaign, was the essential, central battlefield in the [...]

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Tweet American Thinker is a site I check regularly, at least twice a day.  It’s not just that the editors are kind enough to publish my work occasionally.  It’s because the articles that appear there routinely range from really good to out-of-the-park stupendous. Today, there are two that fall in the latter category.  These are [...]

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Tweet On October 22, 2008, I wrote this: The MSM has been remarkably cavalier about Joe Biden’s bizarre statement regarding the “fact” that America will be attacked six months into a Barack Obama presidency and that people will be shocked and disappointed by Obama’s response (meaning that he’ll either collapse in a sobbing heap, thereby [...]

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Tweet I saw a headline at Drudge, to the effect that there is a photo of Afghan “insurgents” with U.S. ammo.  The story, although I’m sure it’s interesting, interested me less than that word “insurgent.”  We’ve all talked about the fact that “insurgent” a word that allows a politically correct, liberal media to avoid such [...]

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Tweet It’s like standing in line at the check out counter:  You find yourself peering into the cart in front of you to see what people are eating. The obviously overweight person in front of you has filled his cart with junk food, sugary cereals, ice cream, no vegetables, lots of frozen pizza, no fruit, [...]

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Tweet I don’t often do this, as you know, but I’m going to quote Jennifer Rubin’s post in its entirety here.  I think it’s important that people understand precisely what is going on in Washington and how it’s affecting men and women in Afghanistan.  Rubin, unsurprisingly, does as good a job as anyone summing up [...]

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Tweet Charles Krauthammer goes on full throttle attack against Barack Obama based on Obama’s endless, weasely whining that everything that’s gone wrong with the first nine months of his presidency is all Bush’s fault.  The central focus of this whining, of course, is Afghanistan, which candidate Obama claimed was the necessary war and which candidate [...]

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Tweet Jennifer Rubin has two posts this morning, both of which illustrate my point about the dangerous relationship between our CIC and the military he’s supposed to be leading.  In the first, she talks about the insane decision-making process in D.C., which seems to have little to do with either victory or troop safety: The [...]

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Tweet I’ve said it a million times and I’ll now say it for the million and first time:  You fight wars to win.  If you’re not committed to winning, leave.  If you don’t leave, and fight a half-assed war, you end with dead soldiers.  That’s what happened in Vietnam, and that’s what Obama and Biden [...]

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Tweet James Taranto nails what the President really meant to say when he spoke to troops about Afghanistan: “I will never rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm’s way,” FoxNews.com quotes the president as telling servicemen. As for the servicemen who are already in harm’s way: Jeez, guys, be patient! He’ll figure out [...]

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Tweet There’ve been accusations and counter-accusations flying about Obama fiddling while Afghanistan burns.  Cheney accuses him of being a do-nothing.  Gibb claims Bush did nothing.  Jake Tapper looked into the matter and discovered that, while Iraq was a priority, Bush indeed did little with troop requests, struggling to fill them, but only getting bout 1/5 [...]

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Tweet In Best of the Web Today, James Taranto politely savages Barack Obama’s absentee leadership as American troops live and die in the line of Taliban fire: “The United States cannot wait for problems surrounding the legitimacy of the Afghan government to be resolved before making a decision on troops, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert [...]

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Tweet I blogged last week about Bravo Troop 361 Cavalry, the unit that was overrun by a horde of Taliban, and whose members stayed to fight despite their wounds.  As with all these stories, there’s a back story too, and the back story is that the guys in that fight didn’t lose just their friends, [...]

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Tweet As usual, the gal’s nailed it: One almost gets the sense that the Obama team may have not learned anything from our recent experiences in two war theaters. It is not as if Donald Rumsfeld and a slew of generals didn’t try in Iraq to use the fewest possible troops, spend the least possible amount [...]

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Tweet It was like a battle scene in an old Hollywood movie, when Americans still knew in their arts that American soldiers are ordinary Americans — good people — only braver and more honorable: Fighting raged at two remote U.S. outpostsnear the Pakistan border this weekend, that left eight U.S. soldiers dead and 24 wounded. [...]

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Tweet If only I could draw, I try to draw this type of political cartoon.

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Tweet When Bush was in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan was the good war and Iraq was Vietnam.  Now that Bush is gone, and Iraq is holding stable (for the time being at least), the liberals can give over their pretense about the possibility of a good war and, instead, given in to their default [...]

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Tweet My belief, getting stronger by the minute, is that Obama’s sole Afghanistan policy was to be the un-Bush.  Bush’s critics claimed Iraq was the bad war and Afghanistan the good war.  So Obama immediately stated that he’d focus on Afghanistan.  Obama, though, true Leftist that he is, and with his deep affinity for totalitarian [...]

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Tweet The American and world media go into a screaming frenzy whenever American or Israeli troops injure or kill a child.  They do this despite the fact that such incidents are rare and, more significantly, they are aberrant:  both the American and the Israeli military go out of their way to avoid injuring civilians, even [...]

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Tweet Bruce Kesler sent around an email asking whether we thought victory was possible in Afghanistan.  My reply was that I don’t think the Democrats can conceive of victory as a possible outcome.  As I wrote to him, I’m the child of parents who fought in WWII and the Israeli War of Independence.  Although they [...]

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Tweet Before their cultural implosion, the English had a reputation for bravery and sangfroid.  Although they are taking a beating in Afghanistan (in large part because the morally bankrupt Labour government refuses to give them necessary support), the troops on the ground are still fighting, dying and showing extraordinary bravery under terrible circumstances: An heroic [...]

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Tweet During the November 2008 election, Black Panthers appeared on video standing in front of polling places with billy clubs: Eric Holder, however, was unconcerned, and dropped the voter intimidation case against the Black Panthers.  Having learned that they get a free pass for egregious behavior antithetical to democratic government gets a free pass, I [...]

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