Bookworm Room

Tweet Dr. Rusty Shackleford has been investigating the myriad smears that sprang into life instantly the moment Palin arrived on the political scene.  The smears appeared to be the result of grass roots efforts from concerned citizens.  Shackleford’s research shows that the opposite is true — that a PR firm has been orchestrating this effort [...]

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Tweet It’s Saturday and I’m posting at McCain-Palin 2008.  As always, since I think it’s a wonderful cooperative blog, I’d like to get more traffic headed its way and, therefore, I’m publishing the beginning of my post here in the hope that you finish reading the rest of it there: Biden is a never-ending source [...]

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Tweet Many years ago, courtesy of Turner Classic Movies (my favorite TV station), I watched The Farmer’s Daughter, a 1947 film starring Loretta Young and Joseph Cotten.  Over the years, I’ve carried a strong memory of liking the movie a great deal, and no memory at all of the plot.  So, when I saw that [...]

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Tweet The media is struggling with difficult decisions.  On the one hand, media members have to ask themselves if they should report about Sarah Palin’s tanning bed, the fact that she was interested in seeing her ex-brother-in-law lose his job after issuing death threats to her father and tasering her nephew, or her question about [...]

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Tweet Almost three years ago, Thomas Lifson wrote what I think is one of the most important political analyses I’ve ever read — and one that goes a long way to explaining the way in which American voters are slowly abandoning Obama and coalescing around the McCain ticket.  Thomas believes that their are two political [...]

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Tweet For many years, I’ve thought that people confuse fairly neutral conduct with bad motives, resulting in false syllogisms.  I first came to this conclusion after reading John McWhorter’s wonderful Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.  Although my memories are a bit hazy about the details of the book, I seem to recall reading [...]

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Tweet The McCain campaign is giving substantive responses to the attacks the Obama campaign is leveling against it: TO:                 Interested Parties RE:                Empty Words And Insults Cannot Cover A Weak Record DATE:            September 15, 2008 Over the last few days, the Obama campaign has watched their poll numbers falter and decided to lash out with [...]

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Tweet The very clever Lionel Libson (father of our own Joseph Libson, who sometimes comments here) came up with this great Photoshopped image (click on image for a larger version):

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Tweet It turns out that Charles Gibson has two different interview modes.  If you’re male, black and a Democrat, it’s very loving.  If you’re female, white and a Republican, it’s condescending, aggressive, and dishonest.  I know that from all the articles I’ve read about each interview.  Now, the Anchoress reprints a compendium of questions (generated [...]

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Tweet One of the things that’s been playing through my head lately is the distance between the liberal worldview and actual reality.  The media arguments directed at Palin, especially those that deal with women’s issues, really highlighted that divide for me. Let’s begin with the way in which liberals distinguish themselves from conservativeds, something David [...]

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Tweet Charles Krauthammer wrote a nice article tracking Obama’s swift rise and (probably inevitable) decline.  In the section dealing with Obama’s peak moments, Krauthammer compares him to Reagan — and explains why the two men and the public’s reaction to those two men are completely different.  If you substitute Palin’s name every time Krauthammer writes [...]

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Tweet We all know that the turning point in the public mind for John Kerry’s candidacy was his famous “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it” when speaking of his ultimate vote against military appropriations for Afghanistan and Vietnam.  Voters were left with the impression that this was a [...]

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Tweet James Taranto puts his finger on something that’s been bugging me about the malevolent attacks leveled against Sarah Palin for choosing to have, rather than to abort, Trig.  After citing to three such attacks, he has this to say: This is worse than tasteless or even unhinged. It is depraved. It represents an inversion [...]

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Tweet As you know, I’m willing to assume that Obama, rather than intentionally calling Palin or McCain a pig, used an infelicitous expression, which may or may not have had any subliminal resonance for him (although it clearly did for his audience).  Listening to the speech, I find much more upsetting how inarticulate Obama is.  [...]

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Tweet Full marks to Sandra Tsing Loh for honestly expressing her disapproval of the fact that both of her candidates (that would be Obama and Biden) abandoned the public school system when it came to their own children.  And she explains why their abandonment is more than merely symbolic: Let us not even touch the [...]

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Tweet 1st woman:  Oh, my God.  I’m so upset.  I made the most horrible Freudian slip. 2nd woman:  What happened? 1st woman:  I was having lunch with my mother.  I meant to say, “Please pass the toast,” and instead I said, “You horrible woman.  You’ve ruined my life.” *** “You can put lipstick on a [...]

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Tweet In the past couple of days, I’ve read more than a few articles in which liberal women express incendiary anger about Sarah Palin. I blogged yesterday about Michelle Cottle’s screed, and today read equally over-the-top material from Judith Warner (h/t The Anchoress) and Heather Malick (h/t Small Dead Animals).  In each of these articles, [...]

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Tweet I noted earlier that the “Country First” slogan that McCain uses is meaningful (and moving) only if you understand McCain’s life story. Otherwise, it sounds suspiciously jingoistic, especially to liberal ears.  Beldar, however, has come up with a brilliant slogan that would serve McCain and Palin very, very well.  What do you think? Hat [...]

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Tweet I don’t know how much difference this will make, but it’s a petition to show that the media is wrong — women will and do support Sarah Palin. Hat tip:  Bloggers for John McCain

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Tweet Explorations has a comprehensive list of the rumors circulating around Sarah Palin, and explains which are true and which are false.  It’s amazing how much dirt managed to flow down the media pipeline is a single week.

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Tweet Mataharley (great name), who posts at Flopping Aces, has pulled together the procedural details of the challenges Palin faces with regard to her ex-brother-in-law, the hard drinking, hard tasering, hard threatening, hard illegal hunting Wooten. It’s a remarkably interesting post in that it is less concerned with the substantive details of the whole Wooten [...]

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Tweet After pointing out how ignoble the attack on Palin is coming from the self-appointed coastal elites, Victor Davis Hanson sums up how Palin is the ultimate feminist triumph: Sarah Palin is the emblem of what feminism was supposed to be all about: an unafraid, independent, audacious woman, who soared on her own merits without [...]

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Tweet My sister forwarded the following email to me from someone who clearly is not a PUMA, which I sent back with my comments: For those of us who have been stunned by McCain’s VP pick, it seems to fit his cultivation of the idea of “maverick” over thoughtfulness, of political strategy over the good [...]

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Tweet I periodically check out Yahoo’s most popular news to see what AP articles are getting the most play according to the Yahoo picks (which, except for including Ann Coulter, skew liberal).  It’s fascinating to see the AP headlines, each of which is snarky, dismissive or critical of Palin in some way, even the “positive” [...]

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Tweet I missed the last 15 minutes of Sarah’s speech because TiVo had stopped recording it (and I was at a meeting when she was live), but I came away with some strong impressions nevertheless.  (I’ll watch the whole speech sometime today, because I know I missed the substantive stuff.) 1.  Sarah glows. 2.  Her [...]

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