Bob's Place

"It is hard to imagine a moment when it would be more appropriate for senators to fight for a principle," the newspaper pleaded. "Even a losing battle would draw the public's attention to the import of this nomination."
The plaintive spinster tone of the plea suggests more sorrow at the passing of the old order, when the peasants were expected to salute and tug at a forelock when the ol' massa passed by, than any expectation of achieving more than a melancholy salute to days gone by, when everyone knew his place and knew better than to step out of it.

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 8:05 AM |

It doesn't take a genius to see that things are going very badly for bin Laden and al Qaeda. Where does he turn for hope? To American opinion polls--which, of course, he reads very selectively. Still, think how encouraging it must be to him to read about calls for withdrawal from Iraq by Congressmen like Jack Murtha. It's hard to see much daylight between Murtha's position and bin Laden's: we're losing in Iraq; the American people are tired of the conflict; Iraq is a breeding ground for terrorists; and al Qaeda is less likely to attack us if we just give up and go home. Given his isolation, bin Laden could be excused for believing that he's just one Congressional election away from salvation.

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 10:37 PM |

So much for the table of brotherhood. So much for the content of their character. Thirty-eight years after King was shot, and we still have politicians who put skin color first. Keep dreaming, Reverend King. Keep dreaming.

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 8:15 AM |

It's not every day in America that a newsmaker gets a colorful nickname associated with him or her. It's even harder for newsmakers to get two catchy monikers.

But New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, heretofore known as "School-bus Nagin" for failing to use his own buses to save people in advance of Hurricane Katrina, has beaten the odds with his tasty yet distasteful description of New Orleans as a "chocolate" city.

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 10:20 AM |

To believe Allen is to choose blindness. Why not declare a moratorium on the death penalty so a commission can explore it? There already is a moratorium -- it's called the appeals process. When it takes more than two decades to carry out a sentence, a moratorium is redundant.
Besides, if executing after "the lapse of many years after imposition of a death judgment renders an execution cruel and unusual" -- as Allen's lawyers argue -- then a moratorium is cruel punishment. Hence, good people should oppose it.

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 10:15 AM |

Our universities today have become our most intellectually corrupt institutions. University administrators must lie and deny that they use racial quotas and preferences in admissions, when they devote much of their energy to doing just that. They must pledge allegiance to diversity, when their campuses are among the least politically diverse parts of our society, with speech codes that penalize dissent and sometimes violent suppression of conservative opinion. You can go door-to-door in Hamilton Township and find people feeling free to voice every opinion across the political spectrum. At Princeton, you will not find many feeling free to dissent from the Bush-equals-Hitler orthodoxy.

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 8:35 AM |

Can’t you just imagine the blood-letting that would occur if President Bush dared nominate a judge who, like Senator Biden, had seen his presidential hopes dashed when it was discovered that he had plagiarized another man’s speech. Or imagine if the president had the gall to nominate somebody like Robert Byrd, the moral conscience of the Democratic party, and a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 8:30 AM |

.......Half a century later, history has repeated itself, this time not with words, but with the moving sight of a wife reduced to tears by her husband’s time on the witness table cross.

Senator Kennedy is, if anything, an even less sympathetic figure than Joseph McCarthy. While Kennedy’s brother may have been a martyr struck down by an assassin, McCarthy never left a young woman to die in a submerged car. The way in which Senator Kennedy has lived his life disgraces whatever nobility might have adhered to him from his brother’s end..........

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 2:02 PM |

Leave aside the part of this precious constitutional right that involves (1) not allowing Americans to vote on the matter, and (2) suctioning brains out of half-born babies. The right to have sex with men you don't want to have children with is not exactly "Give me liberty, or give me death."

In the history of the nation, there has never been a political party so ridiculous as today's Democrats. It's as if all the brain-damaged people in America got together and formed a voting bloc.

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 10:38 AM |

Setting aside the left's disturbing tendency to sympathize with everything Al Qaeda these days, don't be fooled by all this noise about runaway presidential powers. They only object to executive largesse when they don't control the presidency, which, with any luck, will remain the case for years to come.

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 7:15 AM |

It's been obvious for some time that troop levels would soon be reduced; the question has been whether the withdrawal would be consequent upon success, as the Bush administration insists, or upon defeat, as most Democrats say. Zawahiri's latest propaganda effort is consistent with the views of Jack Murtha, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and other antiwar Democrats.

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 11:06 PM |

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west..................

# posted by Bob Taylor @ 6:48 PM |