Bookworm Room

Tweet I’m back with more. Did you know that Afghanistan was declared a gun-free zone?  Well, if you didn’t, you’re right.  But this is a great satire anyway. Have you heard of a site called Patriotic Voices?  (I do seem to be full of questions, don’t I?)  It’s a forum for conservatives.  It’s got very [...]

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Tweet The rule of war used to be that you hated your enemy. That made it easy to fight your enemy. Then, starting with the first Gulf War, the new rule was that you felt sorry for your enemy. By the Iraq War, the rule had become, you’ve got to like and respect your enemy. [...]

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Tweet In the last two weeks, Afghan forces under American mentorship have killed ten NATO troops.  Now, you and I might think this is because we are at war with Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and these enemy forces have had their agents infiltrate the ostensibly American-friendly Afghan forces.  In other words, our [...]

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Tweet Somewhere between yesterday and today, my brain went AWOL.  I had a wonderful idea for a short and sweet post yesterday but never got the chance to write it down.  Today, I have the chance, but absolutely no ideas, neither short and sweet ideas, nor long and boring ones.  I’ve been reading the news, [...]

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Tweet BUDS trainees during Hell Week Special troops are, by definition, small in number.  If everyone could do what they do, they would be special.  They are made up of men with unusual mental and physical strength.  Again, by definition this is a subset of all men.  (No disrespect meant to the majority of men [...]

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Tweet Ever since Obama became president, the war dead have vanished.  During the Bush presidency, enemy deaths filled that papers as we were accused of mass slaughter; during the Obama presidency, I think our troops are just out there having nice cups of tea with the bad guys, because none of the latter seem to [...]

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Tweet My post caption is not a joke:  According to USA Today, the newest NATO tactic in Afghanistan is, in essence, to pretend there is no enemy: Military commanders in Afghanistan have stopped making public the number of allied troops killed by Afghan soldiers and police, a measure of the trustworthiness of a force that [...]

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Tweet A friend sent me a link to an editorial bemoaning the fact that, by abruptly pulling out from Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan, the Obama administration is ensuring that we’re leaving a job undone — something that invariably means one has to do it again.  If history is going to keep repeating itself, why can’t [...]

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Tweet Sadie played connect the dots for me: Dots begin here . . . . After 10 months of secret dialogue with Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, senior U.S. officials say the talks have reached a critical juncture and they will soon know whether a breakthrough is possible, leading to peace talks whose ultimate goal is to [...]

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Tweet Years ago, in another life, I dated a man who had worked for Rolling Stone and personally knew Jann Wenner.  (My ex-boyfriend claimed that a well-known Rolling Stone photographer was the one who introduced him to and got him hooked on cocaine.  I have no idea if he was telling the truth or not, [...]

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Tweet Will Democrats once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Here’s a very encouraging report about the latest NATO (mostly American forces) offensive in Helmand province, one of the last redoubts of the Taliban. I don’t know how much play this will get in the Mass Media, as they generally don’t like to [...]

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Tweet I feel I should say something, so I will.  Being me, of course, what I say will be discursive. Re McChrystal:  An excellent general who didn’t hit it off with Obama from the git-go (blame lies, I believe, with Obama), and who failed utterly in the diplomatic discretion category — something that’s true whether [...]

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Tweet [I'll keep this at the top through Memorial Day.  Scroll down for lots of new posts.] Several years ago, as part of a 9/11 commemoration, I wrote the following words as part of a post I did about Lt. Brian Ahearn, one of the New York fire fighters who perished on that day: My [...]

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Tweet As I’ve mentioned just a few times, I just read, and was very moved by, Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10.  A liberal I know flipped through the book’s first few pages and had a very different reaction.  The following passages bugged [...]

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Tweet I meant to post this yesterday, but time got away from me:  many, many, many congratulations to the Marines and their Afghan allies for the Marjah victory.  I never doubted that they would win, but I certainly understood that each Marine and Afghan soldier faced the risk that he would make the ultimate sacrifice [...]

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Tweet I don’t have a comment here.  I just think this story is interesting: An unclassified study from a military research unit in southern Afghanistan details how homosexual behavior is unusually common among men in the large ethnic group known as Pashtuns — though they seem to be in complete denial about it. [snip] In [...]

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Tweet Despite giving the generals almost 75% fewer troops than the 80,000 they really wanted (and even significantly less than the 40,000 they sort of wanted), and despite telling the Taliban and Al Qaeda exactly when the field is theirs, and despite dwelling morbidly on death in front of the men and women at West [...]

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Tweet As I write this, Obama hasn’t spoken yet, but he has released excerpts from his speech.  These are my first thoughts on his words: “The 30,000 additional troops that I am announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 – the fastest pace possible – so that they can target the insurgency [...]

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Tweet One of the best things George Bush did during his presidency was to appoint the late, great Tony Snow as his press secretary.  Snow was a dream press secretary, straight out of central casting:  handsome, intelligent, erudite, informed, charming and witty.  Even the savagely anti-Bush press appeared to enjoy his statements and, once he [...]

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Tweet Here’s our Commander in Chief speaking of the situation in Afghanistan while he was running for office:  “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.” This post is not [...]

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Tweet Obama has known for more than 12 months that he was going to become CIC, with responsibility for Afghanistan.  This means 12 months of presidential advisers able to give this neophyte help in figuring out the best strategy for the war that he declared, during the campaign, was the essential, central battlefield in the [...]

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Tweet American Thinker is a site I check regularly, at least twice a day.  It’s not just that the editors are kind enough to publish my work occasionally.  It’s because the articles that appear there routinely range from really good to out-of-the-park stupendous. Today, there are two that fall in the latter category.  These are [...]

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Tweet On October 22, 2008, I wrote this: The MSM has been remarkably cavalier about Joe Biden’s bizarre statement regarding the “fact” that America will be attacked six months into a Barack Obama presidency and that people will be shocked and disappointed by Obama’s response (meaning that he’ll either collapse in a sobbing heap, thereby [...]

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Tweet I saw a headline at Drudge, to the effect that there is a photo of Afghan “insurgents” with U.S. ammo.  The story, although I’m sure it’s interesting, interested me less than that word “insurgent.”  We’ve all talked about the fact that “insurgent” a word that allows a politically correct, liberal media to avoid such [...]

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Tweet It’s like standing in line at the check out counter:  You find yourself peering into the cart in front of you to see what people are eating. The obviously overweight person in front of you has filled his cart with junk food, sugary cereals, ice cream, no vegetables, lots of frozen pizza, no fruit, [...]

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