Bookworm on Apr 25 2008 | Filed under: Barack Obama, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Media matters
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 [...]
Bookworm on Apr 16 2008 | Filed under: Bush Derangement Syndrome, Education
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 [...]
Bookworm on Apr 11 2008 | Filed under: Anti-war, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Congress, Democrats
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 [...]
Bookworm on Apr 06 2008 | Filed under: Barack Obama, Bush Derangement Syndrome, John McCain
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 [...]
Bookworm on Apr 03 2008 | Filed under: Anti-war, Barack Obama, Bush Derangement Syndrome, John McCain, Vietnam
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. [...]
Bookworm on Apr 01 2008 | Filed under: Bush Derangement Syndrome
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 [...]
Bookworm on Mar 18 2008 | Filed under: BBC, Britain, Bush Derangement Syndrome, England
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.
Okay, [...]
Bookworm on Feb 09 2008 | Filed under: Barack Obama, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Climate change, Identity politics
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 [...]
Bookworm on Jan 29 2008 | Filed under: Barack Obama, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Conservative ideology, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Identity politics, John Edwards, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Republicans, Rudy Giuliani
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. [...]
Bookworm on Jan 24 2008 | Filed under: Bush Derangement Syndrome, Iraq
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 [...]
Bookworm on Jan 01 2008 | Filed under: Anti-Americanism, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Europe, Leftist morality
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 [...]
Bookworm on Nov 26 2007 | Filed under: Anti-war, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Congress, Democrats
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 control [...]
Bookworm on Nov 25 2007 | Filed under: Anti-war, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Iraq, Islam, Jihad, Saudi Arabia
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 [...]
Bookworm on Nov 18 2007 | Filed under: Bush Derangement Syndrome
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) [...]
Bookworm on Aug 26 2007 | Filed under: Anti-war, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Media matters
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 Iraq [...]
Bookworm on Jul 18 2007 | Filed under: Anti-war, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Iraq
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 over [...]
Bookworm on Mar 22 2007 | Filed under: Bush Derangement Syndrome, Congress, Democrats
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 [...]
Bookworm on Jan 20 2007 | Filed under: Anti-war, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Media matters
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 [...]
Bookworm on Jan 17 2007 | Filed under: Bush Derangement Syndrome, Christians, Religion
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, [...]
Bookworm on Jan 15 2007 | Filed under: Bush Derangement Syndrome, Media matters
George Bush is such an easy target for the media that it often seems like just a waste of time to go for factual accuracy. Take the Kyto Protocol. A recent AP article makes the casual assertion that “The United States is no longer bound by Kyoto, which the Bush administration rejected after [...]
Bookworm on Dec 12 2006 | Filed under: Bush Derangement Syndrome, Media matters
Here are the facts — undisputed facts — as the Defense Department reports them:
All active-duty components made their recruiting goals in November, Defense Department officials said today. The Army made 105 percent of goal, the Navy 100 percent, the Marine Corps 104 percent, and the Air Force 100 percent.
In raw numbers, the Army goal [...]
Bookworm on Dec 03 2006 | Filed under: Anti-war, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Iraq, Media matters
Jules Crittenden, writing at the Boston Herald, has this to say. I’ve added some less than sanguine comments at the end:
When a company defrauds its customers, or delivers shoddy goods, the customers sooner or later are going to take their business elsewhere. But if that company has a virtual monopoly, and offers something its [...]
Bookworm on Nov 09 2006 | Filed under: Bush Derangement Syndrome, Elections, Media matters
The movement is afoot — despite Pelosi’s claim that impeachment is not on the agenda, the rank and file is beginning to call for Bush’s impeachment (posts about this trend are here and here). It’s easy enough to lay the blame on Bush Derangement Syndrome, but I think the problem goes much deeper than [...]
Bookworm on Oct 29 2006 | Filed under: Bush Derangement Syndrome
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 will despise [...]
Bookworm on Oct 08 2006 | Filed under: Bush Derangement Syndrome, Iraq, Media matters
A bomb went off in Tel Afar yesterday, but that’s not the news. From the SF Chronicle, which is reprinting a short article from the Washington Post, the lede and the first paragraph make sure we understand the real story:
2nd bombing in city Bush had touted as safe
A suicide car bomb slammed into an [...]
|
