Bookworm Room

Tweet Rick, at Brutally Honest, struggles with an agonizing question that always faces moral nations when they embark on a war:  What about the enemy’s civilian population?  Is there ever a justification for targeting women and children, as was done at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  He links to an equally thoughtful Joe Carter post on the [...]

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Tweet A new movie is out, documenting the horrific Rape of Nanking, when Japanese troops slaughtered about 200,000 Chinese people in a matter of weeks (and probably raped at least 20,000 women). The New York Times review discusses those few Westerners who stayed to help out, and saved thousands of people, but I wonder if [...]

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Tweet Ann Coulter can be too mean sometimes, and I think she undermines her points when she is. Sometimes, though, she’s right on the money, as she is in this article, some of which I quote here: The “bipartisan” Iraq panel has recommended that Iran and Syria can help stabilize Iraq. You know, the way [...]

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Tweet Patrick O’Hannigan, my friend the Paragraph Farmer, used as the jumping off point for a wonderful article in The American Spectator a post of mine that had, in turn, commented favorably on a Dennis Prager article. Dennis Prager’s point, which was one I applauded, was that no one could have foreseen that the war [...]

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Tweet Mr. Bookworm still finds troubling my political transformation, which is actually something I understand.  After all, when we stood under the chuppah so many years ago, he knew what he was getting — a stalwart Democratic life partner.  It was bad enough when his siblings, after 9/11, betrayed him by going conservative, but his [...]

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Tweet Mark Steyn just got back from a Gitmo visit.  In his most recent column, he describes what he saw there (better living than my “neighbors” in San Quentin, that’s for sure), and contrasts it with Leahy’s unhinged rant over trials for military terrorists: [I]t surely requires a perverse genius to have made the first [...]

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Tweet I’ve often opined that the Left is stuck in Gandhi mode. This is the believe that the only possible form of resistance is the non-violent type. To that, I always point out that this worked for Gandhi because the other side was England which, in those days, didn’t have the stomach for bloody massacres [...]

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Tweet We have had sitting around for months a DVD called The Long Way Home. It’s a documentary about the Jewish survivor’s plight in the three years after World War II. I really didn’t want to watch it, because I knew it would upset me — hence, it’s long sojourn on our coffee table. As [...]

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Tweet I’ve been depressed lately by the sheer volume of scary and bad news: the Israeli/Hezbollah war and its pathetic outcome, with Israel actually believing that signing on to the defeatist UN ceasefire will improve her standing in world opinion; the planned London airplane bombings, which included mothers intentionally using their babies as bomb shields; [...]

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Tweet Before the Nazis killed the Jews, they executed those they deemed unfit because of physical or mental handicaps. My goyish uncle, who was institutionalized because he was “crazy” (we now think he might have been homosexual), was one of the first the Nazis executed in their drive to purify the Aryan nation. In yet [...]

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Tweet Hezbollah claimed some more Arab lives, this time killing three Bedouin women from one family: Residents of Arab al-Aramshe find it difficult to comprehend disaster in which mother, her two daughters were killed as Katyusha rocket hit their house yard. One of daughter recently got engaged. ‘We can’t believe we will not be seeing [...]

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Tweet Here are just a few videos that the Israeli military has released showing Hezbollah terrorists firing missiles at Israel. In each case, the videos show that Hezbollah was using civilian buildings as launching pads. It’s entirely possible that when Israel took out these military targets, civilians unlucky enough to have been trapped there by [...]

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Tweet The press is all over Israel’s missile strike that killed children. Fortunately, LGF is all over the fact that Israel, unlike any aggressor in the history of the world, warned civilians days in advance that the strike was coming and begged them to leave. The reason Israel was striking that area was not to [...]

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Tweet I know that many of you are like me in that you’re disgusted with the Republican’s profligacy, as well as with other careless, pandering form’s of government in which Republicans engage. Be assured, though, that “punishing” them at election time, both in 2006 and 2008, will be worse. Why? Because the Dems will control [...]

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Tweet If we were to repeat the past, I bet you’d find this story in the New York Times, circa July 1944 A secret code breaking group that both Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt authorized has broken a German code and has been using that information to gather intelligence about planned German military assaults, [...]

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Tweet Better thinkers and writers than I have tackled Bill Keller’s letter to the public justifying his blithe release of security secrets. One thing he wrote, though, stuck in my mind, and I haven’t read anyone yet who has commented on this point: It’s not our job to pass judgment on whether this program is [...]

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Tweet By the way, I'm very aware of the New York Times' and the LA Times' most recent articles exposing intelligence information being used to track down terrorists. I don't have any great insights to add: In my mind, it's not news to report intelligence information during a time of war, it's treason. (This is [...]

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Tweet For those on the Left atwitter about the fact that George Bush doesn't feel obligated to extend to Islamofascist terrorists (a) any rights under our Constitution; (b) any rights according to our own military men/women under a court martial; or (c) even the full panoply of rights accorded signatories to the Geneva convention, Andrew [...]

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Tweet Well, it's official and it's dreadful: The bodies of two U.S. soldiers reported captured last week have been recovered, and an Iraqi defense ministry official said Tuesday the men were "killed in a barbaric way." The U.S. military said the remains were believed to be those of Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, and [...]

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Tweet Many, many years ago, I read a wry, sarcastic book called I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional : The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help. As the book's title indicates, Wendy Kaminer, the author, was tackling the competitive dysfunctionality that the whole therapeutic culture promoted. The chapter in her book that struck me as most significant was [...]

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Tweet I've been rather conspicuously silent about the whole Haditha thing. Until facts come out, rather than rumor, I don't really have anything to say. During times of war, even in the best regulated military, soldiers have been known to do some pretty awful things. You can't take young men, arm them, and drop them [...]

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Tweet Little Green Footballs has made available the audio of a beautiful speech Ayaan Hirsi made to the American Jewish Committee when accepting their award for moral courage. Like the lady herself, it was brave and graceful, and I urge you to listen to it. I was especially struck by her point at the end: [...]

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Tweet Nine out of twelve jurors were all for giving Moussaoui leniency because he had a bad childhood which, as Mark Steyn points out, is the problem with putting war crimes in the hands of jurors (especially, I might add, jurors who probably spend way too much time watching Oprah). I mention this as a [...]

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Tweet My son is hypercompetitive, to the point where he'll sometimes bow out of an activity, rather than run the risk of failing. In the same vein, if an activity is not going well, he'll often do what all children do: quit. To combat this tendency, I recite a little epigram for him that is [...]

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Tweet Here's the story, brought to you of jurors who still don't get it: A federal jury rejected the death penalty for al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui on Wednesday and decided he must spend life in prison for his role in the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history. After seven days of deliberation, the nine men [...]

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