Bookworm Room

This weekend, I was at a block party, and the talk got around to the fact that, thanks to the internet, our children leave a trail a mile long.  They’ve got posts and pictures up at Facebook or MySpace, and videos all over YouTube.  Whether they’re applying for a job or college, a quick check [...]

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On the right side of the blogosphere, we have often discussed the fact that, during the Bush years, the Left indulged in gory fantasies of George Bush being shot or beheaded.  In the interest of fairness, it behooves me to point out that some on the Left indulge in similar fantasies when it comes to [...]

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Presidents get photographed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of time.  Each photograph captures a mere moment.  Some are flattering; some less so.  Many, however, go on to become iconic. My generation, the 1970s generation, is deeply imprinted with this photo of Richard Nixon flashing the victory sign: Then there is this 1932 photograph of FDR, [...]

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I was out this morning getting my oil changed — and learning that it will cost almost $2,000 to fix my car from its recent run-in with a low post.  When I got home, I found an interesting message on my answering machine. It’s the recorded voice of Dennis Kucinich begging me to “Press 1 [...]

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I’ve noticed an interesting trend in the comments to my Barack Obama posts lately whenever liberals wander by.  I’ll put up a post pointing out something very specific we’ve learned about Obama, despite his rather thin resume.  I might blog about his relationship with Rezko and the peculiar coincidences of his real estate purchase; or [...]

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After seeing the insanity unfold before his eyes, a visiting law professor felt compelled to say this: “I am really astonished at the mood in this room,” commented one witness, George Mason University School of Law professor Jeremy Rabkin. “The tone of these deliberations is slightly demented,” Rabkin said. “You should all remind yourselves that [...]

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You all know Aesop’s class tale of the race between the tortoise and the hare: At the starting gate, the hare picks up so much speed that it soon vanishes completely, while the tortoise plods on behind. Within sight of the finish line, however, when the hare looks backwards and realizes that the tortoise isn’t [...]

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Yesterday, Drudge had a headline that said something along the lines of:  “98% of historians judge Bush’s presidency a failure.”  I didn’t bother to check out the article.  It didn’t matter to me whether someone polled 10 historians or 1000.  I still knew with pretty good certainty a few underlying facts:  if they’re historians for [...]

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Michael Yon, who appropriately boasts that he is probably the most experienced reporter in Iraq, reminds us that Congress must stop obsessing about the past in Iraq and must approach Iraq as a winnable situation. He begins by detailing the enormous strides — both practical and “hearts and mind” stuff — that Americans have accomplished [...]

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It’s becoming increasingly clear that John McCain is going to have to cope with something I call PT-BDS — or Post Traumatic Bush Derangement Syndrome. Let me explain and, as is so often the case with my explanations, let me start with a personal anecdote. I’m visiting with the in-laws right now (hence the sporadic [...]

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While I worked on an appellate brief last night, Mr. Bookworm watched Frontline’s Bush’s War. I was not surprised to learn that it characterized the Bush administration as not only profoundly stupid, but also deviously Machiavellian, with Bush in charge, except that he’s so stupid that he is actually manipulated by the evil Cheney.  At [...]

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Over at the Paragraph Farmer, you can read an almost lyrical article examining the way in which Progressives desperately needed George Bush to give meaning and shape to their lives, and get a sense of the problems they’ll have when, as will inevitably happen in 2009, he leaves the political scene.  Here’s just a sample [...]

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I watched a pretty good movie last night, that was very pro-military; that showed the Iraqi military as being inefficient; and that showed Iraqis as being unbelievably brutal, both in terms of mob violence and in terms of the military’s and the secret police’s capacity for sadistic torture.  Surprisingly, it was made by the BBC. [...]

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I’ve never been able to read Philip Roth’s novels because I cannot stand his navel gazing (or should I say penis-gazing?) characters. They are, for me, profoundly uninteresting — I find them infantile and narcissistic in their concerns. Perhaps my the problem with his writing is his thinking. Why do I say this? Because Roth [...]

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I caught a minute of Mike Gallagher today, and he was talking about the fact that Republicans are more critical of Republican candidates than Democrats are critical of Democratic candidates. It occurred to me that, at least in this election cycle, that may be because there are real, substantive differences between the Republican candidates. We’ve [...]

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I’ve never believed Bush lied and, to the extent his information was incorrect (as was information in the hands of all other Western agencies and governments), I assumed that our spywork was to blame. Now we get confirmation of what’s been rumored forever — it was Saddam who lied, never suspecting that his bluff would [...]

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While idly browsing the shelves at our local public library, I stumbled across a fascinating book — one that is fascinating on a couple of different levels. It’s called Uncouth Nation : Why Europe Dislikes America, and was written by Andrei S. Markovits, a Jewish man who was born in Romania, and raised during the [...]

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I’m not giving away anything by quoting here the concluding paragraph from Noemie Emery’s long and fascinating article about the Democrats’ desperate and, at the moment, unsuccessful anti-Surge efforts in the last year.  If you read only this paragraph, good as it is, you’ll have missed all of the really interesting stuff: As they took [...]

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Dennis Prager likes to say (and I’m paraphrasing here) that liberals and conservatives have entirely incompatible world views. They understand facts in such a different way that there are few points of intersection. I had a reminder of that truism the other day when I watched Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center with a liberal friend. [...]

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Mark Morford, who writes a periodic column for the San Francisco Chronicle that is highly consistent with San Francisco’s political ethos, recently gloated about George Bush’s imminent downfall. In the paragraph imagining Bush’s departure from the White House, he manages to cram in every anti-Bush stereotype and nasty attack, short of (for reasons unknown) that [...]

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The Confederate Yankee rightly points out that all dishonest war reporting, whether it paints Iraq as a grim hellhole populated by evil US soldiers, or a glorious victory for American-style peace and democracy, is a very bad thing and must be nipped in the bud: If we’re to make any sort of sense of the [...]

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Drudge gives appropriate prominence to a report that the military caught one of the top guys of Al Qaeda (“which doesn’t exist”) in Iraq: The U.S. command said Wednesday the highest-ranking Iraqi in the leadership of al-Qaida in Iraq has been arrested, adding that information from him indicates the group’s foreign-based leadership wields considerable influence [...]

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As you’ve probably guessed, I’m incredibly pressed for time today, so can only blog in minute snippets.  To that end, let me just direct you to the WSJ editorial regarding the fake scandal over the 8 U.S. attorneys the administration fired.  I agree in every particular, whether it’s about executive powers, fake scandals, the right [...]

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During a stimulating lunch time conversation, DQ expressed genuine mystification at my post asking whether the media was right all along. In that post, I said I wasn’t going to quarrel with whether the media was right or not about getting into the war (and some post commentors correctly noted that some in the media [...]

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Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra — raised Catholic, but not currently practicing her religion — is selling her new movie, which focuses on Evangelical Christians. Her San Francisco Chronicle interview is worth reading, to my mind, for a couple of things. To begin with, it’s interesting to see Pelosi’s embarrassed, guilt-stricken defense of George Bush, whose [...]

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