Bookworm Room

Tweet In my latest newsletter (which you can view here and subscribe to here) I asked whether Republicans will be the only unhappy people over the next four years.  My starting point is that Republicans are deeply depressed right now, while Progressives are gloatingly triumphant.  Their man won.  Their agenda is the one he’ll enact. [...]

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Tweet The Malians are thrilled, as they should be, and the French should be pretty darn proud themselves: Residents of Mali’s northern town of Gao, captured from sharia-observing Islamist rebels by French and Malian troops, danced in the streets to drums and music on Sunday as the French-led offensive also drove the rebels from Timbuktu. [...]

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Tweet I went out to run one errand and came back to discover that Egyptian President Morsi had fled his palace after protesters breached police barricades.  I have no idea whether this means Morsi’s brief sharia reign is over, or whether he’ll be be, redoubling the oppression. What do you think?

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Tweet Food prices in America are going up and up.  We’re not starving, thank goodness, but we are seeing more and more of our money go to groceries.  Many see a direct connection with ethanol (i.e., using food to power cars) and rising food prices.  Thus, despite the challenging drought, the administration is pursuing ethanol-based [...]

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Tweet When it comes to the Middle East, I’m hard-put to think of a more astute, knowledgeable observer than Barry Rubin.  In light of the Egyptian court ruling striking down large parts of the recent elections, and the military’s subsequent power move, he’s not sanguine about Egypt’s future: The Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court has just [...]

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Tweet Max Boot reminds conservatives that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, at least not when it comes to crowing about the Leftist habit of embracing dictators.  Over the decades, conservatives have done more than their fair share of dancing with bad guys: It occurred to me, re-reading the item I penned [...]

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Tweet A few days ago, the New York Times ran an article assuring everyone that Barack Obama isn’t a wuss, he’s a warrior.  I have only a couple of points. First, considering that Obama has been and is such an aggressive President, one who has seen more troops die on his watch in Afghanistan than [...]

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Tweet Today at lunch, Don Quixote and I ended up talking about predestination and free will.  Along the way we touched upon whether prayers are necessary (if God is omniscient, doesn’t he already know what we want?) and funerals (definitely for the living, although one doesn’t want to disrespect the dead).  We also talked about [...]

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Tweet I didn’t bother to read the entirety of an endless article about a bad thing happening in Mexico.  No, I’m not talking about drug cartels or about Mexican citizens being slaughtered by guns sent over courtesy of a Democrat Department of Justice attempting to prove that guns hurt people.  I’m talking about plants that [...]

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Tweet Was it a surprise to you that Egypt went Islamist?  It wasn’t to me. Was it a surprise to you that Libya went Islamist?  It wasn’t to me. Was it a surprise to you that Tunisia went Islamist?  It wasn’t to me. Has it been a surprise to you over the last decade that [...]

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Tweet I’m with Sadie, that there’s something deeply off-putting about Obama casually applying the ancient Passover story to the uprisings in the Middle East: Passover recalls the bondage and suffering of Jews in Egypt and the miracle of the Exodus, but U.S. President Barack Obama says its message is reflected in Muslim uprisings. In his [...]

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Tweet In honor of Mubarak’s strategic retreat to Sharm El Sheikh, here is the anthem of the 1967 War, which saw Sharm El Sheikh end in Israel’s hands, a situation that lasted up until Egypt got it back in 1982, as part of the peace treaty:

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Tweet Has the U.S. ever been so clueless as  it is today with respect to events going on in Egypt? CIA Director Panetta just admitted that he gets his information on Egyptian events from the media, rather than from his own agency. National Intelligence Director Jim Clapper, meanwhile, pontificates about how the Muslim Brotherhood is [...]

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Tweet When I read that the Obama administration is good with having the Muslim Brotherhood on board in Egypt, because it’s really not such a bad organization, I keep thinking of 1930′s rationalizations about Mussolini:  He made the trains run on time.  Surely our standards of decency are higher than that? Uh, no.  I guess [...]

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Tweet When I read news reports saying that Mohammed El-Baradei had shown up in Egypt as a potential “democratic” leader, I was confused.  Surely this couldn’t be the same El-Baradei who served for so long as the head of the IAEA?  I couldn’t find specifics within my own brain, and was too lazy to look [...]

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Tweet You can read what I wrote about the speech here.  Others have been writing too. The Anchoress, in addition to her must-read Ich bin ein Muslimer takedown of the speech, has a list of blogs thinking about what he said, which I’ll just copy wholesale: Andy McCarthy: Koranic text Obama left out Andrew Bolt: [...]

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