Bookworm Room

Tweet Not militant Islam, not a resurgent Russia or China, not North Korea, not Iran….us! Conservatives, independents, and anyone else that disagrees with his agenda. Or, so says President Barack Hussein Obama. Why is it that Barack Hussein Obama and other Lefty presidents and presidential wannabees (Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Carter) feel compelled to rouse their [...]

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Tweet Kim Priestap, who blogs at Up North Mommy, got an impassioned email from the Democratic Party, raving about Elena Kagan.  Does it rave about her brains?  No (although it mentions as an aside that she’s “among the best legal minds this country has to offer,” which is a depressing comment about legal minds in [...]

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Tweet Today, I told my children, who are 11 and 12, about pyramid schemes.  Since it’s always easiest for me to focus on people, I started my story with the first famous American pyramid schemer:  Charles Ponzi, who gave his name to the whole racket. I explained the Ponzi scheme to the kids in the [...]

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Tweet In the early television era, one of the most innovative and imaginative shows around was Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.  Certain episodes were so compelling that they entered the popular imagination, and are familiar to anyone over 30.  One of the most brilliant episodes, shown in 1961, was It’s a Good Life, based upon [...]

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Tweet I wrote yesterday about the softball players who were accused of being “not gay enough.”  I appreciate that the league in question has its rules — you must be gay — but the story still got me thinking about what constitutes being gay.  From there, of course, I started thinking about identity politics.  Let [...]

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Tweet In my previous post, I talked about the way in which the Left desperately tries to cubby-hole people, events and ideas, without any real understanding of what lies beneath those labels.  Seconds after I finished writing that post, I read this newspaper article, which sounds like a parody, but isn’t: All Steven Apilado, LaRon [...]

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Tweet I remain absolutely convinced that Obama, the boy genius of the left, is a product of affirmative action who is hiding his academic record because it is dismal.  If it weren’t dismal, he’d be showing it off.  Frankly, though, after thirty years of affirmative action, we expected nothing more from our academic institutions.  That’s [...]

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Tweet Here’s a bad, almost cruel, joke, but nevertheless a pointed and important one: Two men met on the street.  One looked very angry. “What’s the problem?” asked the first man of his friend. “I’m r-r-really a-a-ngry,” he stuttered.  “I app-ap-applied for a j-j-job as an an-an-announcer at the-the-the r-r-r-radio s-s-station and they t-t-turned me-me-me [...]

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Tweet Willie Brown is one of the smartest politicians out there.  He’s been in the business since the 1960s and, not coincidentally, has broken a whole lot of color barriers.  While he is a die-hard Democrat, he’s also nobody’s fool.  Here’s his take on the Gates kerfuffle. America got a good look at the Chicago [...]

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Tweet You can’t read a blog, attend a press conference, read a paper, or even think about Sotomayor without those 32 words popping into your head: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t [...]

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Tweet I keep seeing headlines all over the place to the effect that Republican Senators will be afraid to vote against the first proposed Hispanic justice.  This may certainly be true for Senators, who are a weaselly, unprincipled bunch, I suspect, though, that for many voters Obama himself is causing the bloom to depart the [...]

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Tweet Identity politics turns people into one dimensional characters, who must act out a set script.  If you’re black or Hispanic, you must be a Democrat, even if you oppose abortion, take a jaundiced view of gay marriage, and want school choice.  If you’re a woman, you must support equal pay for comparable work, even [...]

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Tweet Is it only me, or is there a wonderful lunatic charm to Blago?  I adored the way in which he appointed a megalomaniac black man to the Senate, forcing Reid either to seat someone he normally wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, or risk opprobrium as a racist.  Likewise, I really enjoyed Blago’s [...]

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Tweet I hate identity politics. I hate the fact that currently powerful identity groups are lining up to tap into the goods flowing from the Obama administration. I hate the fact that Jews fail to recognize that there is a delightful secular element to American Christmas and that their little dears are not going to [...]

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Tweet I’ve said before that I am not a racist — I’m a classist or values-ist.  Always have been.  I don’t care about your external color or sexuality or whatever; I do care about the beliefs you bring to the table. What this means is that I’m pretty hostile to identity politics.  I never felt [...]

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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 In the world of presidential elections, we’re watching the fascinating spectacle of clashing identity politics.  Neither Hillary nor Obama has a strong resume (or even a medium resume).  Each is distinguished from the other, and from others in the field (remember Silky Pony?) solely because of gender or race.  He’s black (sort of); she’s [...]

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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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