Bookworm Room

Here’s the story: Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. The three anti-war Democrats made the trip in October 2002, while the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. While traveling, [...]

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Anti-war people love to point out that most Iraqis are peace-loving, or that most Muslims are peace-loving. I’m sure they’re right. Walter Williams, however, points to the fallacy in this line of argument when you are a country under attack from the non-peace loving elements in a given community: Horrible acts can be committed in [...]

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As is the rest of the media, the Times is making much of the fact that 4,000 American troops have died during more than five years of war in Iraq. I won’t repeat here (or, at least, I won’t repeat at length) my oft-stated belief that, while each death is a personal tragedy, this is [...]

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As the SF Chron noted, the anti-War protests yesterday were pathetic shadows of their former selves: In the morning, a crowd of about 500 people snaked its way through the Financial District, periodically prompting police to shut down intersections and city blocks and Muni officials to reroute buses. Yet, despite the often creative costumes and [...]

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Perhaps because he’s not anchored to a presidential campaign he rightly describes as “insane,” Newt Gringrich speaks honestly and frighteningly about the problems that face the Western world today and the ostrich-like behavior that characterizes our leaders.  It’s only five minutes and I think it is a must-watch. Hat tip:  W”B”S

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Our local paper, the Marin Independent Journal, has a surprisingly nice, fact-filled article about the uphill work of being an Army recruiter in Marin County.  There’s a small amount of harassment, but mostly there’s just a huge lack of interest — which is sad, since Marin, as one of America’s most affluent areas, is at [...]

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In the wake of past wars (pre-Vietnam), noncombatant men used to lie about having served as a way to increase their status: even though one of these confabulators might have spent the war as a sidings salesmen in Paducah, he could increase his standing amongst the credulous by claiming to have fought his way out [...]

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Rob Riggle, at the Daily Show, demonstrates that people who support the military may find that their best weapon is simply to let Code Pink talk, and talk, and talk. Man, those gals are stupid.

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A friend sent me an email that I found fascinating on two levels. The first level was the email’s content, which describes all the huge positive strides occurring in Iraq that somehow never manage to get into the mainstream media: Did you know that 47 countries have reestablished their Embassies in Iraq? Did you know [...]

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Here’s the Wall Street Journal on yesterday’s overwhelming bipartisan vote to protect from lawsuits telecommunications companies that, in good faith, cooperated with the government to help apprehend terrorists: Now and then sanity prevails, even in Washington. So it did yesterday as the Senate passed a warrantless wiretap bill for overseas terrorists while killing most of [...]

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Yesterday morning, in Berkeley, they were saying this: “Murder, rape, torture, war. That’s what the Marines are for.” and this: “These are very dangerous people. They’re lying to their children, talking them into becoming killers.” I noted that the mask had slipped, revealing that the “we support the troops, but not the war” line was [...]

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If you’re interested in up close pictures and eye-witness reporting from the goings-on in Berkeley, check out ProtestShooter. The pictures are from early in the day, so I can’t wait to see the next installment. My favorite photo was one that really didn’t have to do too much with the protest at all, but that [...]

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Since the Iraq War began, the Left has attempted to disassociate itself from the ugliness of 1960s anti-War protests by repeating, over and over, “We love the troops. It’s just the War we hate.” That line always had a stilted quality, especial since we have a volunteer army, and our troops are willing to serve [...]

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I’m about to show my youth and ignorance here with regard to the Vietnam War (’cause even though I lived through it, I was truly a child then). But first, let me back up a bit. Mr. Bookworm rented Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a film with an [...]

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My expectations of Berkeley have always been low.  Already when I was a student there many, many moons ago, I figured out that few people there actually engaged in independent thinking.  They were simply radical liberal lemmings.  I was also pretty disgusted by the professors who lived in their multi-million dollar homes in the hills; [...]

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The kids are back in school and I thought the house would fall silent and I would blog again. However, it turns out — and this is very flattering — that there were a lot of people who wanted to talk to me but felt they couldn’t while the kids were around. I’ve spent the [...]

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I wrote generally about the gap between critics and the rest of us.  Patrick has taken one critic, deconstructed his criticism, and explained precisely why that gap looms so large.

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When I say “the war at home,” I’m not taking of the home front, a la WWII. I’m taking about Americans at war with the War. One young American, fighting (and, ultimately, dying) in Iraq, had his fill of that war: Published: Oct 19, 2007 A Soldier’s Last Words: Listen Up CBS, CNN, Cindy Sheehan, [...]

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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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Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregator that assembles movie reviews and then, depending on the number of positive or negative reviews, assigns any given film a “freshness rating. ” The higher the rating, the more favorable the majority of reviews are. For example, as of today (11/25 at 18:06 PST), Enchanted gets a 93% freshness rating [...]

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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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Next time someone tells you about the intractable Civil War in Iraq, you might take a moment to show them this photo. It’s by no means the factual clincher to an anti-War argument, but it is a wonderful insight in a society that hopes to mend itself, even as the anti-War crowd in America, by [...]

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A few days ago (although I only just got to it now), I read over at Confederate Yankee that troops are not fragging (i.e., killing) their officers, something popular during the Vietnam War. CY comments that the report’s author sounds almost, I don’t know, disappointed that the troops aren’t slaking their blood lust against their [...]

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Michelle Malkin has a good photo essay about the gathering in front of the Marine Recruiting Station in Berkeley the other day. The San Francisco Chronicle also ran a story about the protest, which I found interesting only because of this quotation from one of the anti-War protesters: “They represent the social base that’s giving [...]

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During any other war, the following list that Vasko Kohlmayer complied would show treasonous conduct. In this War, it’s politics as usual: • They have repeatedly conceded defeat in Iraq with Harry Reid claiming ‘this war is lost;’ • They purposefully downplay any and all American military successes; • They have sought to portray our [...]

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