Bookworm Room

Some months ago, I read and enjoyed Michael Sragow’s fine Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master. It’s clear from the book that, as a director, Fleming was the last of a dying breed — a gentleman in Hollywood and, of course, a truly great director, responsible for such classics as Red Dust, Gone With [...]

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Finally, Israel lashes back . . . at the misrepresentations in the European media.
Anyone who speaks Hebrew, French or Spanish, will have a huge advantage over me when it comes to appreciating the videos at that site.
To learn more about the ad campaign if you don’t speak those languages, here’s a little [...]

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Despite the fact that my tax dollars fund it, I pretty much ignore NPR, even when it pulls stupid stunts such as running an extremely crude little video cartoon that lambastes the Tea Party movement by promising to teach “How to Speak Teabag.“  Speaking “teabag,” of course, involves mouthing things that are either inane, or [...]

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I’m reading a very enjoyable novel right now that is completely tuned in to the way in which the Left operates, especially when it comes to the media and academia.
The writer is completely tuned into the name calling that substitutes for informed debate. For example, when the book’s protagonist, Paul, learns that Leftists starting [...]

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Since the beginning, climate change skeptics have said that the hysteria of the man-made global warming movement, aside from being based on manifestly shoddy and often dishonest science, was in fact a Leftist political gambit.  The Communists, having failed to win the world over with a Cold War had regrouped and were seeking to win [...]

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For reasons that make no sense to me, I don’t go to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government site as often as I should.  Wait, I take that back.  I know precisely why I don’t go:  it’s an incredible repository of closely researched and factually supported articles detailing the way in which the Obami conduct themselves.  What [...]

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There’s yet another movie coming out about the way in which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq destroy lives and turn young men into pathetic losers:
There is a grim timeliness to the release of “Brothers,” Jim Sheridan’s movie about the effects of war on the family of a Marine serving in Afghanistan. Whatever the other [...]

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I want to be a journalist.  I mean, heck, who would want a job where you don’t have to think and you don’t have to research — all you have to do is emote.  That’s what emotive New York Times “journalist” Nick Kristof did when he wrote a sob story about a young man with [...]

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From The Weekly Standard:
With the release of hundreds of emails by scientists advocates of global warming showing obvious and entirely inappropriate collusion by the authors — including attempts to suppress dissent, to punish journals that publish peer-reviewed studies casting doubt on global warming, and to manipulate data to bolster their own arguments — even the [...]

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I just had to laugh.  The New York Times report on the hacked climate change documents starts off pretty honestly:
Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case [...]

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This, from James Taranto, at Best of the Web:
Accountability Journalism
An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We’d like to compare this dispatch to the AP’s dispatch earlier this week “fact checking” Sarah Palin’s new book. Here goes:
Number of AP reporters assigned to story:
• [...]

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Liberals assured us back in 2008 that, after the horrible Cowboy Bush years, we needed someone charming to bring rogue governments back into the American fold.  So far, these same rogue governments have been resistant to Obama’s charm, whether in Russia or the Palestinian territories* or Iran, just to to name a few instances of [...]

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Obama has known for more than 12 months that he was going to become CIC, with responsibility for Afghanistan.  This means 12 months of presidential advisers able to give this neophyte help in figuring out the best strategy for the war that he declared, during the campaign, was the essential, central battlefield in the war [...]

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I saw a headline at Drudge, to the effect that there is a photo of Afghan “insurgents” with U.S. ammo.  The story, although I’m sure it’s interesting, interested me less than that word “insurgent.”  We’ve all talked about the fact that “insurgent” a word that allows a politically correct, liberal media to avoid such words [...]

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I don’t think the media has ever before been so blatant in its desire to divorce an evil act from its ideological origins, but this isn’t the first time we’ve seen that game played out.  More than two years ago, a short lived comedy show on Fox used the occasion of an abortive bombing in [...]

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My liberal friend is a headline reader.  That’s why we had a ridiculous conversation in which he wondered about the Fort Hood shooter’s motives.  To the reader who scans, headlines that say “motives a mystery” trump even those articles that add, under the headline, little facts such as Muslim death cries (”Allahu Akbar!”), radical mosques, [...]

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We live in different universes:
Liberal:  They still don’t know why he shot all those soldiers.
Me:  Of course they do.
Liberal:  What are you talking  about?
Me:  Come on.  They know it has to do with his . . . .
Liberal (interrupting):  Are you saying that he’s a sleeper cell?
Me:  No.  I’m saying that he’s a one man jihadist.  [...]

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I’m rather enjoying Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, who is proving himself to be an idiot without any savant attached.  When questioned about the tea party protests, Gibbs logically focused on the handful of signs that liked the current administration to a Nazi regime (logical because he is trying to discredit tea partiers).  He then voiced [...]

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Last week, I commented on Thomas Frank’s weird defense of Obama’s attack on the media.  Basically, Frank’s whole defense was that Nixon was worse. I don’t know about you, but to say “my guy isn’t as bad as the guy I, a liberal, consider the worst, most paranoid president ever,” doesn’t strike me as a [...]

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As far as I can tell, Frank’s primary defense of Obama’s attack on Fox News is that Obama isn’t as bad as Nixon’s attacks on the press were.  Given the low esteem in which liberals hold Nixon, I think we can safely call that damning with faint praise.  (Or, perhaps, praising with faint damns would [...]

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It’s no wonder CNN felt compelled to take the SNL “Obama does nothing” skit seriously.  Wolf Blitzer, who deconstructed all the “lies” in the comedy sketch, inadvertently created a little comedy sketch of his own, when he made an utterly pathetic showing on Jeopardy:
There are no defenses adequate to explain that performance from a public [...]

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Gateway Pundit explains just how badly the blog “Jumping in Pools” can burn you.  It’s all of a piece with the fake Chamber of Commerce press conference.  Once Leftists and puckish anarchists make truth impossible to find, people will give up on looking.

Sphere: Related Content

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Twenty-four hours after the fact, the AP finally figured out that, maybe, just maybe, it’s worth reporting that the White House tried to freeze out a news organization that challenges it, and was stopped only because other news organizations realized that, if they let this one pass, they would forever be barred from voicing any [...]

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Charles Krauthammer identifies the enormous damage the Obami risk doing as they attack and try to destroy national entities associated with conservatives (the Chamber of Commerce, talk radio, Fox news):
There’s nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian [...]

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Kudos to the major news networks for refusing to allow the Obama administration to blackball Fox:
Here’s how Pastor Martin Niemöller would have seen it, if he was alive today:
First they came for Fox News, and we did not speak out—because we did not have openly conservative commentators as part of our news program;
Then they came [...]

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