Bookworm Room

I know nothing about US Admiral James Stavridis.  I don’t know whether he attained his high rank because he’s a brilliant military strategist or just another political hack.  I don’t know if he believes in a strong America, or believes America’s best defense is to role over and play dead.  Indeed, as of this minute, [...]

15 Comments »

I’m still developing the same theme I’ve been hammering at for a week, because I think it’s important.  The ideas in this post should be familiar to you, but I’m trying to express them with more factual data and lucidity: My mother, bless her heart, said something very important the other day. She said that [...]

23 Comments »

I wrote it a few days ago, but it just got published today: The other day, Mr. Horace Engdahl, a man who normally occupies a rather obscure outpost when it comes to public awareness, bought himself a few minutes of fame by engaging in everyone’s favorite pastime: America bashing. Mr. Engdahl’s statements in this regard [...]

11 Comments »

It’s short, so I’ll quote this post from Power Line in its entirety: America: Last Refuge for the Left? Mark Steyn makes a good point: If Obama is elected in November, at G7 meetings, for the first time since time they began, America will have a more left-wing leader than any other member of the [...]

3 Comments »

I like to read British publications, as well as the Spiegel, and whatever other English language versions of European papers strike my fancy.  It’s useful to see what’s going on in other parts of the world and, more than that, to see how the local press views its own events. One thing I’ve noticed in [...]

10 Comments »

In an amusing article that compiles examples of American and European media hysteria about Obama’s world tour (think Madonna and the Beatles, only bigger), Denis Boyles makes an interesting point about the European fixation with an Obama (read:  black) Presidency: Anyway, the gist: Europeans really really want Obama to be the next U.S. president, just [...]

3 Comments »

Terry Sater writes about the fact that, coddled by loving euphemisms, Americans are marching headlong into the same dreadful socialist experiment that failed all over Europe — a failure that took place within the lifetime of every single American voter.  This is not a case of a few centuries or even decades having dimmed the [...]

8 Comments »

Charles Johnson of LGF periodically gets into spats with the people at Gates of Vienna because of their (possible?) ties to organizations that have the whiff of neo-Nazism about them.  As for me, I don’t know where the truth lies in those arguments. I do know that Europe in the 20th (and, apparently, in the [...]

15 Comments »

J. R. Dunn has a wonderful antidote to political despair.  I have some optimistic predictions of my own: I think the current gas crisis, coupled with the holes being punctured into Global Warming, and China’s status as No. 1 C02 polluter, will create a popular ground swell that will force the Demos’ hands (1) on [...]

1 Comment »

(This is the first in what I hope will be a series of very civil essays examining marriage.  Suek got me started with this idea based on a comment she wrote saying that, well, we need to figure out what marriage is all about.  Planned future essays will involve separating the religious aspect of marriage [...]

31 Comments »

I am a huge Georgette Heyer fan. I consider her one of the most amusing, sophisticated novel writers ever, and think it’s a shame that she got labeled as a pure romance writer, a genre that puts her in the “I browse that section wearing sunglasses and a scarf” category of books at any Barnes [...]

3 Comments »

One of the Democratic selling points — and it was certainly one that Monsieur John Kerry tried to hit hard — is that American conservatism is out of step with Europe, and that Democrats, with their advanced European attitudes, will help us be friends again with the rest of the civilized world. This sales pitch [...]

No Comments »

In America, we think of historical Europe as a place were voiceless mastered were ruled by high-handed aristocrats. We assume that those days are over, wiped away by war, revolution, and the simple passage of time. The European Union, however, periodically provides timely reminders that Europe is still ruled by high-handed authoritarian figures who ignore [...]

16 Comments »

A political kerfuffle is never over until Mark Steyn has weighed in.  He’s now got a full column on Obama’s “bitterness” remarks and, of course, mixed in with the wonderful word play is a perfect analysis about America’s Guns and God “bitterness,” when compared to Europe’s no-guns, no-God “Eutopia.” In my book “America Alone,” I [...]

4 Comments »

As I’m sure you’ve heard, Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician has made a 15 minute long film that demonstrates how violent Islam is.  He describes it as a film made with a split screen that has, on one side, passages from the Koran and, on the other side, modern footage of Islamists putting those passages [...]

3 Comments »

I don’t need to remind any of you of the Cartoon jihad rampage that Islamists went on a couple of years ago when a Danish paper dared to print cartoons of Muhammad, most innocuous, but some a little edgy. Actually, they weren’t edgy enough because, as you may also recall, everyone ignored them until a [...]

12 Comments »

Reading this, you can’t tell if it happened in 1938 or 2008: An American tourist was kicked out of a cafe in Belgium for being Jewish. Marcel Kalmann, a 64-year-old professor, told the Antwerp Jewish magazine Joods Actueel that he was ejected from the renowned restaurant Le Panier d’Or in Bruges after a waiter saw [...]

7 Comments »