Bookworm Room

Would anyone care to explain to Mr. Bookworm the difference between an extremist sect breaking its country’s laws by discriminating against women, and a country that has as an integral part of its law and culture murderous attacks on women, “witches,” children and gays? He professes to be bewildered.

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Here’s a Robert Samuelson article, “bye bye Keynes” that should give us all pause: the arguments he uses to write Keynes’ obituary are arguments that we all posited in our own excoriation of Keynes in years past, in response to a string of commentators, ranging from A to Z. I’ve been reviewing our last few [...]

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My friend Navy One made the statement that is my post title.  The statement appears in a post he wrote about Anwar al-Awlaki, a subject I probably should have covered, but didn’t.  Now, of course, having read Navy One’s post, which is better than anything I could have written on the subject, I feel that [...]

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Five years after Gilad Shalit was kidnapped, a period during which he has been completely invisible and denied any access to humanitarian agencies, a small handful of American Muslims has finally decided to say something: The Aug. 26 letter’s 11 signatories include the two Muslim members of Congress — Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Andre [...]

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Yid With Lid reminds us that July 4th marks more than just America’s independence day.  (H/t:  Sadie)  It’s also the anniversary of Israel’s spectacular rescue at Entebbe in 1976.  That was another place and time, when most in the world actually cared about Jewish lives.  I wrote about the rescue back in 2007 and reprint [...]

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I wonder which “non-Western” men they’re talking about?  (But seriously, folks….) Hat tip:  Front Page Magazine

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I’m deeply impressed by the integrity of those peace activists who are willing to challenge Obama, just as they did Bush.  They are free from the hypocrisy of those who took to the streets for one president while giving the next a pass. Having said that, war is a useful device when a culture is [...]

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My husband and I discussed the concept of stereotypes with the kids.  What we were trying to get through to them is that it’s wrong to take ideas about a group, even if those ideas are complimentary or accurate, and to assume that they apply to an individual.  The mere fact that Jews tend to [...]

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Both the SEALS and Charlie Sheen have been in the news lately, the SEALS for an extraordinarily well-planned, brave and effective operation, and Charlie Sheen because he’s a drugged-out piece of human detritus.  Did you know, though, that the two — that is, the SEALS and Sheen — have something in common?  Yup, they do:  [...]

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Does any of this surprise you?  It doesn’t surprise me.  Given bin Laden’s fanaticism, his sadism, his isolation, his personal and religious misogyny, all of this comes across across as totally believable.  It also puts me strongly in mind of this story, from several years ago, tell about the way in which Taliban warlords used [...]

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In the preceding post, I gave you Geert Wilders’ entire speech about the threat Islam poses to the West.  I now offer you living evidence of the threat he describes.

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Everyone should read this speech. Everyone. While the media swooned about Obama’s Cairo speech (in which he lauded veiling women and ignored thousands of years of Jewish ties to Israel), and Obama’s race speech (in which he insulted white people), and Obama’s recent immigration speech (in which he demonized people who fear the risks to [...]

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This morning, my friend Kim Priestap sent a group of us an email telling about the Yemeni man arrested for trying to yank open the cockpit door while hollering the standard “Allahu Akbar!”  Lee DeCovnik thinks we might have been seeing a dry run.  The man apparently raced from one end of the plane (the [...]

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I can’t play chess.  I never learned how, nor have I ever wanted to learn how.  I’m more of an analyst, than either a strategist or a tactician.  But I do know one thing about chess:  The word “checkmate” comes from the Persian phrase “shah mat,” which translates as “the king is dead.”  Kill the [...]

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Since my some of my last posts were about principles and morality, and the way in which they advance and support civilized, wealthy cultures, it seemed appropriate to wrap up that series with Andrew Klavan’s video explaining how to abandon those principles when necessary (or when elected to Congress, whichever comes first): Also, one more [...]

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I have been reading and enjoying Leslie Carroll’s Royal Pains: A Rogues’ Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds.  Focusing on Eastern and Western Europe from the 12th century onwards, it’s a brisk walk through royal excesses. Having read about half the book now, I think that “bad seeds” is the operative phrase in the [...]

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I agree completely with Michael, who blogs at Political Commentator and is a Watcher’s Council member: He’s a very solid speaker, sounding more controlled and stable than the gal interviewing him.

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If you’re old enough to have lived through the 1970s, you recognize my post title:  Gilda Radner’s famous character Roseanne Roseannadanna would let loose with a foolish tirade, and then wrap it up by saying “It’s always something — if it ain’t one thing, it’s another.”  Someone needs to resurrect that character, or at least [...]

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Last week, a story broke that received surprisingly little attention from the MSM:  a 14 year old Bangladeshi girl, after first being raped, was then accused of adultery and beaten to death.  I say “surprisingly” because, since the women’s lib era, the dominant trope on the Left when it comes to rape is “never blame [...]

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Actually, it’s not a new face at all — it goes back to Mohammed himself, and his paranoid, resentful rants when the Jews refused to accept him as a prophet.  What makes it new is that, thanks to the modern age and the Leftist media, these messages, which used to be confined to backward desert [...]

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If there is one defining characteristic of liberals, it is their sense that they are better than everyone else.  Nowhere was that more explicitly illustrated than in Ron Schiller’s comments: In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives. Schiller wasn’t unique, just unguarded.  The whole point of liberalism, [...]

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Today is the day for videos showing Progressives humiliating themselves in front of the American people.  Ron Schiller didn’t know he was on television, but Cenk Uygur, an MSNBC talking head, did — although he didn’t let that national audience stop him from making a bigoted fool of himself. The subject was Rep. Pete King’s [...]

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My condolences to the family and friends of the two airmen killed in Germany.  And my best wishes for a safe and speedy recovery for the two airmen who are seriously wounded.  And a plague and a pox on the media which tries so desperately to hide that this was not a random crazy man, [...]

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If you read only one thing today, read this Caroline Glick article about the media’s Middle East coverage.

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I’m reading a thriller written in 1987.  The bad guys are Soviet spies.  They’re really bad.  That was par for the course with Cold War thrillers. H0w many thrillers can you name now that have radical Islamists as the bad guys? I know there are a handful, but usually the bad guys are either (a) [...]

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