Bookworm Room

Tweet My father was a very angry man. At whichever job he had, he was pretty darn certain that management was out to get him. At stores, he knew he was being cheated. My mother always attributed this anger, not to the poverty and dislocation of his youth (placed in an orphanage at 5, refugee [...]

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Tweet The most un-rev Jeremiah Wright elaborated today on his various statements during an appearance at the National Press Club. What he had to say was most enlightening since, when he wasn’t prevaricating or deflecting a point with self-deprecating humor, he sounded pretty ugly. Here are a few things that caught my attention: MODERATOR: What [...]

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Tweet Marin is about as liberal a community as one can possibly find.  That means that the analyst for the local political newspaper is a liberal too.  Right now, he’s a very depressed liberal, since he’s absolutely certain that the Democrats are imploding, leading to the inevitability of a McCain victory: Arizona Sen. McCain will [...]

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Tweet You all know Aesop’s class tale of the race between the tortoise and the hare: At the starting gate, the hare picks up so much speed that it soon vanishes completely, while the tortoise plods on behind. Within sight of the finish line, however, when the hare looks backwards and realizes that the tortoise [...]

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Tweet On the liberal side of the American political world, one of the lingering horrors of the McCarthy era is “guilt by association.” Certainly that was the lesson I, a young liberal, took away from teachings about that era. As I learned it, it wasn’t that the HUAC hearings were aimed at discovering genuine Communist [...]

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Tweet Our local public radio station was replaying the most recent Hillbama debate, and so I listened to a piece of it that had slipped under my radar the first time. It’s actually quite funny, despite the scary implications of what Hillary is saying she’ll do regarding Iraq if she’s elected President. Here’s what she [...]

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Tweet In the old days — pre-internet — politicians were able to get away with a lot of lies.  This wasn’t because they lied better than they do now.  It was because it was more difficult to suss out the truth and, even if one was successful in doing so, it was very challenging, if [...]

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Tweet The MSM is going after McCain, but the fact is that, the more they dribble out details about the man, the more I admire what I learn.  Regardless of his sometimes flawed political instincts (that campaign financing thing, again), he is a very good human being, and an honorable one too.  We know the [...]

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Tweet At American Thinker, James Edmund Pennington definitively explodes the myth that Obama is a “post-racial” candidate. In other words, Geraldine Ferraro had it absolutely right when she said, without any of Pennington’s careful analysis, that Obama ascended as quickly as he did solely because of his race. And as Pennington points out, that ascension [...]

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Tweet Here’s one of John McCain’s most recent ads, one that claims its sole purpose is to honor his old high school teacher. Over at Hot Air, they damn it with very faint praise indeed: Not a terrible ad but also not the best use of money by a guy who’s staring down the barrel [...]

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Tweet No comment: Hillary Clinton’s boasts that she gained major foreign policy experience as First Lady have been undermined after 11,046 pages of her White House schedules provided scant evidence to back up her claims. The documents were made public by the US national archives after pressure from her rival Barack Obama and freedom-of-information groups. [...]

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Tweet Barack Obama, a political nobody in terms of experience, has been thrust to the highest echelons in a matter of months, with the White House realistically within his reach. This is every politician’s dream, it’s the Hollywood movie, but it may not be quite the perfect scenario that Obama and his followers envisioned. You [...]

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Tweet Something I never imagined would happen did, in fact, happen: For the first time in his adult life, I feel very sorry for Prince Harry. (I say “adult life” because I felt sorry for him back in 1997 when his mother died in the world’s most publicized car accident and he, a little boy, [...]

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Tweet What do you do when the person who matches you in the external identity calculus — say, she’s a woman and you’re a woman — proves not to be the women’s champion you hoped? Even worse, what do you do when the person who is the champion you hoped, doesn’t match you in external [...]

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Tweet I was still an oldlib, not a neocon, when the Clintons finished their White House tenure. I was also uninterested in politics so, like the vast majority of Americans, considered myself informed because I glanced at the headlines. I therefore managed to ignore complete the details and import of Bill Clinton’s sua sponte decision [...]

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