Bookworm Room

Over the years, I’ve written more than 10,000 posts.  (Yeah, that’s a scary thought, isn’t it.)  They do tend to run together in my mind, but there are a few standouts.  These are the posts in which I felt that I offered an insight or analysis that is genuinely helpful to considering a serious issue [...]

4 Comments »

The choice before the Cambridge Debating Society was whether one should choose war to stop Iran from going nuclear, or simply accept a nuclear Iran.  Douglas Murray offers a devastating rebuttal to those who say, “Who cares if Iran goes nuclear?”  The 11 minute video starts out good and, halfway through, gets great: Hat tip:  [...]

2 Comments »

According to Barry Rubin, who has forgotten more about the Middle East than most people (including State Department employees) will know in a lifetime, Ron Paul is Wrong Paul when it comes to Iran.  First, what’s happened in the last decade is irrelevant, since Iran hatred long preceded that.  The real issue is whether the [...]

2 Comments »

Yes, that’s a wildly mixed, virtually unintelligible metaphor in my post title, but I can actually explain it.  Iran is pranking the U.S.  Considering the way in which we were assured that an Obama in the White House would inaugurate a new era of foreign policy, what the Iranians are doing is funny, but it’s [...]

2 Comments »

Would anyone care to explain to Mr. Bookworm the difference between an extremist sect breaking its country’s laws by discriminating against women, and a country that has as an integral part of its law and culture murderous attacks on women, “witches,” children and gays? He professes to be bewildered.

4 Comments »

One of the things we frequently bemoan here is the fact that American foreign policy tends to be naive.  Perhaps because our culture is a fluid melting pot in which citizens, until quite recently, willingly changed themselves to assimilate into the broader culture, we’re very poor at understanding that other cultures not only have different [...]

12 Comments »

Yesterday, I asked what Valerie Jarrett would tell Obama to do now that the administration, in an effort to save Holder’s delicate derriere from the Fast & Furious fallout, has gone public with a nefarious Iranian plot, one that is tantamount to a declaration of war, that Obama already knew about in June.  (Wag the [...]

30 Comments »

North Korea assumes presidency of U.N. arms control conference http://dailycaller.com/2011/06/29/north-korea-assumes-presidency-of-u-n-arms-control-conference/#ixzz1Ql1gXN44 “Bare months after the U.N. finally suspended Libya’s Col. Muammar Qaddafi from its Human Rights Council, North Korea wins the propaganda coup of heading the world’s disarmament agency,” the executive director of UN Watch Hillel Neuer said in a statement protesting the move. “It’s asking [...]

6 Comments »

Following Book’s trendy new tradition of “spot the lie”, I had to include this article from that renown bastion of conservatism (you know, those people wedded to their confirmation biases), the U.K. Guardian, reports on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard gleefully anticipating the explosion of Iran’s first nuclear bomb: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/julian-borger-global-security-blog/2011/jun/08/iran-blogging   Ok, here’s where we play [...]

3 Comments »

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 annual [...]

9 Comments »

Poor Cassandra was cursed by the Gods with the gift of making accurate prophecies that no one would believe.  The disasters she foresaw always came true, but she was helpless to stop people (and nations) from racing towards their doom.  The endings were always so terrible — and Cassandra was herself swept up in them [...]

9 Comments »

In 1989, when it became clear that the former Soviet Union could no longer stop the spread of Democracy in the Eastern Bloc countries, many of us naively assumed that a new dawn of peace and harmony was about to arrive.  We envisioned lions and lambs frolicking together, all bedecked in dewy flowers.  What actually [...]

3 Comments »

“Logic! Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” — C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Neither Data nor Mr. Spock, two relentlessly logical creations, could ever be liberals or Democrats or Progressives, or whatever the Hell else they’re calling themselves nowadays.  (For convenience, I’ll just lump them all together under the [...]

7 Comments »

From James Lewis’ must-read article today about the effect of Iran’s ICBM’s (which it has spread throughout the Middle East) and its future nuclear arsenal: Mahmoud Ahmadijenad is the aggressive chess player behind all these missiles surrounding Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Iranian strategy has been to move its missile assets closer and closer to its [...]

1 Comment »

In his excellent post about the myriad flaws in the administration’s probable (and inchoate) containment plan for Iran, Max Boot makes a very important point, one I’ve somehow missed when reading others on the same subject.  He argues that Leftist nostalgic for the realpolitik of the Cold War, which saw us learning to live uneasily [...]

9 Comments »

An antisemitic Jew I know, rather than seeing the Passover ceremony as the celebration of freedom (the world’s first and for a long time only successful slave revolt), and of justice and morality (the Ten Commandments), derides the whole ceremony as the unconscionable and immoral celebration of the genocide of the Egyptian people.  What troubles [...]

19 Comments »

Several years ago, when Bush Derangement Syndrome was at its peak, I tackled the “he’s got his finger on the button and he’s going to blow up the world” meme that anti-war activists were so shrilly screaming.  I pointed out that there was no evidence whatsoever to indicate that George Bush was an apocalyptic person.  [...]

13 Comments »

I have predicted several times that, in a choice between Iran and Israel, Middle Eastern nations will back Israel, not because they have developed any fondness for her, but because they recognize that, while Israel makes a great rhetorical scapegoat, Iran is the real threat.  I’ve also said that America’s weakness regarding Iran will hasten [...]

2 Comments »

Through the Bush years, those in the grips of BDS likened him to Hitler based upon their contention that he was running the most oppressive administration ever in American history.  They made this claim despite the fact that, insofar as I know, no protestor was ever imprisoned merely for having protested.  (This is separate from [...]

20 Comments »

I’m not sure why Canada, except for maybe the large Muslim population, the porous border, and the country’s politically correct inertia: Iran is attempting to acquire clandestine shipments via Canada for its nuclear program, a senior customs official said Thursday. Canadian customs officers have seized everything from centrifuge parts to programmable logic controllers being shipped [...]

7 Comments »

Yes, they have guns, and yes, they come from an apocalyptic culture that believes it would be a good thing to see the world enveloped in flames.  But otherwise, these Iranian soldiers look pretty damn silly: Of course, it’s probably good camo if you’re trying to infiltrate this: Otherwise, it’s hard to see the disguise’s [...]

13 Comments »

Movie review one: The movie is a viscerally exciting, adrenaline-soaked tour de force of suspense and surprise, full of explosions and hectic scenes of combat, but it blows a hole in the condescending assumption that such effects are just empty spectacle or mindless noise. [snip] Ms. Bigelow, practicing a kind of hyperbolic realism, distills the [...]

8 Comments »

I got this email from Steve Schippert: It’s graphic. There is no nuance. And it’s why I am done debating otherwise intelligent friends on the aptness, nay brilliance, of our president’s near silence in condemnation of the Iranian regime which today executed its own Tienanmen Square in central Tehran. http://threatswatch.org/rapidrecon/2009/06/unimaginable-horror-in-tehran/ [Be warned:  graphic photo at [...]

7 Comments »

Rob Miller, who blogs at JoshuaPundit, thought that, because I support the protesters in the Iranian streets, I would disagree with his American Thinker article pointing out that much of what’s going on in Iran at the higher echelons is a sham: Are Mousavi and his followers in Iran an actual reform movement and a [...]

3 Comments »

Obama was so sure that his magisterial silence alone would bring peace to the streets of Tehran.  He’s right, in that the mullah’s are summarily ending the protests, but it’s a peace that only Tacitus would recognize.

1 Comment »