Watcher of Weasels » The Council Has Spoken! http://www.watcherofweasels.org Keeping an eye on the weasels of the world Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:00:11 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 The Council has spoken 073010 http://www.watcherofweasels.org/the-council-has-spoken-073010/ http://www.watcherofweasels.org/the-council-has-spoken-073010/#comments Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:00:11 +0000 The Watcher http://www.watcherofweasels.org/?p=2555


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They point their crooked little fingers ar everybody else
Spend all their time feelin’ sorry for themselves
Victim of this, victim of that
Your momma’s too thin; your daddy’s too fat
Get over it – The Eagles

This week’s winning Council entry, The Razor’s True Bigots takes a shot at our nation’s professional victims.

To the NAACP I’m just a descendant of klansmen. They don’t see me. They see a hooded figure stuffed with straw from the field of hate they have tended. They don’t hear me. All they hear is the words they imagine me saying. I’m not a person: I’m their puppet but they don’t realize they are holding the strings.

It doesn’t matter to them that half of my family were Slavs who arrived destitute at Ellis Island (after having paid all their money to the Austro-Hungarian empire to be allowed to emigrate) decades after the Civil War, or the fact that a quarter of my family were Germans who supported abolition, and that the last sliver were Irish who themselves were discriminated against. INNA isn’t just a meaningless acronym to those of us of Irish descent. They don’t consider that I grew up in a household where both parents worked, and that as a teen I was shocked to see their income tax return and learn that we were just barely above the poverty line.

No, my skin’s the wrong color and because of that everything I say or do is suspect. It doesn’t matter what the reasons are that I oppose the president: I’m a racist.

I might add that now things are so skewed the the NAACP now apparently considers separate but equal its new goal.

This week’s winning non-council post, Noisy Room’s Socialist “JournoListas” is mostly a list. But the list shows:

It was a network of high level opinion makers, united by a “progressive” vision for America. They believed that their superior judgment and insight obligated them to present Americans with a view of reality that they would be too stupid and reactionary to grasp unaided.

To the degree that the “Journolist” folks shaped our news narrative, it shows that our media, that seemingly accepted most of their spin, is not merely liberal, but a strong socialist bent too.

Council Winners

Non – Council Winners

Congratulations to all the winners!

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Every whisper
Of every waking hour I’m
Choosing my confessions
Losing my Religion – R.E.M.

Though the lyrics seem to confirm what lead singer Michael Sipe said that the song is about unrequited love, Wikipedia says that the expression “losing my religion is an expression from the southern region of the United States that means losing one’s temper or civility, or ‘being at the end of one’s rope.’” Certainly then it applies to this week’s winning entries.

In this week’s winning Council entry, When is a burqa not a burqa?  When it’s a weapon. Bookworm Room writes:

If this religious devotion was the sole reason behind Muslim clothing and building imperatives, I too would be up in arms about the strictures in France and Switzerland.  However, the sad fact is that, because the burqas and buildings are not only symbols of faith, but are also actively, and predominantly, used as weapons of war, any society that wishes to remain free of the totalitariansim that is Islam must, sadly, trample on some religious expression.

Freedom of religion should not be the same thing as being subjugated by religion.

In his non-Council winning post,  Jews and Israel: Death by Relativism, The Other McCain writes about the deleterious effects of a different religion – liberalism.

Even the most intelligent young people are apt to be impressed with the enormous prestige of those numerous academic experts who present the Middle East conflict in the context of Arab victimhood. And if those young people have been raised within a liberal Democrat environment — remember that John Kerry got 74% of the Jewish vote in 2004 — their partisan and ideological allegiances will naturally make them sympathetic to the “Blame Israel First” crowd, who were among the most outspoken voices in the anti-Bush chorus during the past decade.

Now, I present you with the full list of winners:

Council Winners

Non-Council Winners

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This week’s winning entries illustrate different ways that the government is out of touch, kind of like the congressman in “Summertime Blues.

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Well I called my congressman and he said Quote:
“I’d like to help you son but you’re too young to vote”

Summertime Blues – Eddie Cochran, The Who, Alan Jackson

In the Razor’s council winning Life in a vise, he observed of the workers he’s hired to fix up his home:

These men are in a vise – between the failure of the American dream and its expectations of a brighter future for their children on one side, and a government that seems hell bent on reducing them to penury on the other. They aren’t angry; they are enraged. These great- grandsons of confederate soldiers speak rebellion not in whispers but in loud, firm voices that would sound all-too familiar to their forebears. They aren’t traitors; they see their government as betraying them and their country, not the other way around. Seeing what has happened here in North Carolina, it’s difficult to disagree with them.

In a different instance of government cluelessness, Sultan Knish in his satiric non-council winning post (by virtue of tie casting vote by The Watcher),  - NASA Unveils New Plan for Muslims in Outer Space, mocks NASA’s administrator, Charles S. Griffith, for saying that reaching out to Muslims was a primary goal of the American space agency.

After carefully reviewing your new priority for NASA, to reach out to Muslims and make them feel good about “their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering“, which consisted mainly of ripping off Greek and Indian science, and passing it off as their own, we have developed a comprehensive plan for utilizing the talents and abilities of Muslims to further the goals of this nation’s goals space program, which you so articulately described as “That Outer Spacey Thing”.

Council Winners

Non Council Submissions

 

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But I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood
Don’t let me be misunderstood – The Animals

In his winning council post this week, Obama’s Lawsuit Against Arizona (Updated) Wolf Howling writes:

Invoking preemption in the present context is a dangerous game indeed. It is critically important to note that the Arizona law is nothing more than a codification of federal law as regards illegal aliens, with the only addition being instructions on when the police can pursue suspicions that a person may be an illegal alien. Thus the DOJ’s argument must be that any state laws predicated on the status of an individual as a citizen or an illegal alien are preempted by federal law.

Think about that for a moment. If the DOJ wins this lawsuit, only the federal government will be able to enforce laws based on illegal aliens.

Of course, as Wolf Howling observes, given that the federal government hasn’t and, likely, won’t do anything about illegal immigration, the lawsuit is an effort to maintain a sizable contingent of illegal aliens in this country.

In her winning non-council post this week about various attempts to hijack the international legal system in order to attack Israel,  Standing down the hanging jury, Caroline Glick writes:

For generations Jews have clung to the belief that law is intrinsically good and if we follow the law the law will protect us. But this has never been more than a fool’s belief.

As we see today in the wholesale perversion of law in the service of Israel’s destruction in countries around the Western world, law is but a tool. Depending on who wields it, it can be a force for injustice just as easily as it can be a tool for pursuing justice.

In both cases we see a measure of vindictiveness against a state and a nation that is spurred by willfully misunderstanding each.

Council Winners

Non-Council Winners

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How was I to know
She was with the
Russians, too?
Lawyers, Guns and Money – Warren Zevon

This week’s winning posts were both about recent Supreme Court decisions concerning the second amendment and the funding of religious organizations. Hey, we’ve got lawyers, guns and money this week!

Wolf Howling, in his triumphant return to the council, won this week’s Council vote with The Supremes – Guns & The War On Christianity, in which he discusses the Hastings and McDonald decisions.

The McDonald decision, authored by Justice Alito, was notable for several reasons beyond just the holding of the case. One, the decision was again 5 to 4, with Justice Stevens writing the dissent in which he argued for applying tests that would allow the activist wing to make of the Second Amendment a nullity. Justice Scalia responded to Justice Stevens in a separate concurrence. The arguments by Stevens and Scalia frame the battle ongoing between originalists and liberal activists. The McDonald decision was one largely based on the original intent of the drafters of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments. The Stevens dissent proposes alternative theories to undermine the Second Amendment that, as Scalia points out, are wholly subjective and, in reality, are nothing more than legal cover for the personal opinions of the activist judges.

On the non-council side, the winning post by Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy examinesConstitutional Rights that Put Lives at Risk in relation to the McDonald decision:

Whether we are talking about guns, speech, or other rights, there are going to be cases where, as a practical matter, it is impossible to prevent death by measures short of restricting the right itself. For example, allowing Nazi speech in the Weimar Republic may have greatly increased the risk that the Nazis would come to power, by which point it was too late too prevent them from killing large numbers of people. Similarly, once free speech by Redeemers and ex-Confederates allowed them to seize control of southern states, it was politically impossible for the federal government to protect black rights against them — at least not without much greater violence than might have sufficed to prevent the Redeemers from organizing in the first place.

Council Winners

Non Council Winners

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Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad

The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad

Neighborhood Bully – Bob Dylan

Getting away from my musings about pop music, this week’s video is apropos of both Bookworm Worm’s winning post as well as her non-council winning submission, the latter of which was decided by my tie breaking vote. To excerpt from Bookworm Room’s Israel hasn’t changed; the world has:

What I find so interesting is that Israel has not changed in the last 60 years.  She is still a small, representative democracy surrounded by dozens of nations that are highly repressive theocratic dictatorships.  Unlike the surrounding nations, she gives equal rights to people of different faiths, colors, creeds, and sexual orientation. (The surrounding nations, in stark contrast, kill and expel people of different faiths, colors, creeds, and sexual orientation, all the while maintaining a brutal war for dominance against the women in the midst.) Israel’s values, in other words, are completely synchronous with those ostensibly espoused by the Western nations that now,  not only despise Israel, but that ally themselves with Islamic dictatorships that practice values completely antithetical to what were, until a few years ago, normative in the West.

. . .

What’s changed, obviously, is the West.  Even though we ostensibly won the Cold War, insofar as we witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, it’s manifest that we also lost the Cold War, in that we lost our self-identity and internalized the values of the Soviet Bloc itself.  As I pointed out above, there is absolutely nothing to distinguish the speech made by the Soviet’s UN ambassador in 1967 from the standard political talk against Israel that routinely emanates today in Europe and (sadly) in America’s Democratic party.

I don’t know if this is better or worse, but there is evidence that the world hasn’t changed much either.

A manifestation of this change was demonstrated last week in Oakland as labor unions joined forces with those attempting to boycott Israel as reported by Zombie, Radicals, Islamists and Longshoremen blockade Israeli ship in Oakland. There was, however, a happy ending here:

The protesters’ plan all along was to protest at the port prior to the arrival of the Zim Lines ship, to ensure that the shift of longshoremen who would be on duty when it did arrive would have already agreed not to do their jobs. But as reported in Israel National News and Gateway Pundit, the Israeli ship arrived several hours later than scheduled, and as things turned out, it was so late that it would not have been unloaded until Monday morning anyway. So the protesters ended up most likely having little or no effect on its actual timetable. Instead, an unrelated Chinese ship at the same berth had its unloading delayed, because the same longshoremen who didn’t cross the “picket line” could not work on it either.

It’s not known if the Zim ship’s late arrival was accidental or if it purposely idled a few hours off the coast to avoid a confrontation at the docks.

Which perhaps says something about the rationality of those who hate Israel.

Council Winners

Non-Council Winners

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Now you’re walking ’round like you’re front page news.
(I’m not your) Stepping Stone – The Monkees

Mike Nesmith of the Monkees wrote “Different Drum,” that was made famous by Linda Ronstadt (and the Stone Poneys.) He is widely credited with developing the music video. Nesmith inherited a fortune from his mother who invented liquid paper.

Anyway, they pay the big bucks as Watcher to make these life and death decisions and pick winners in the case of ties. This week I had to do that twice. Picking between such fine entries is really tough work. I expect a raise from the council. In the future I deserve at least twice what I’ve been making until now.

This week’s winning entries have to do with the way the media makes Palestinian terrorists and their sympathizers into front page news.

On the council side I voted for Mere Rhetoric’s NYT: “Angry Israeli Commandos” Turned “Ship Of Protesters Into Bloodbath” to break the tie. Mere Rhetoric exposes the dishonesty of the New York Times’ report like this:

I’m honestly not sure what’s going on here. They’re obviously trying to misleadingly imply – without actually lying – that Israel opted to raid the ship instead of delivering inspected cargo to Gaza. That’s not the confusing part. The idea is to maintain plausible deniability by writing only things that are not strictly false, all the while still leaving the reader with an inaccurate impression. It’s similar to putting the word “angry” in front of “Israeli commandos opening fire.” The fact that the commandos were angry is true and the fact that they opened fire is true, but the implied cause-and-effect is false insofar as the Israelis were highly disciplined and didn’t open fire until the mob was set to successfully kidnap and kill soldiers.

On the non-council side Elder of Ziyon’s Gaza: The “staggering quality of the very ordinary” won the vote. The Elder writes:

Instead of putting Gaza in context, the media and NGOs have grotesquely twisted the story of Gaza into a parody of objectivity. Gaza is presented as being one of the worst places to live in the planet, and this is simply a lie. Egyptians a few miles away are poorer than Gazans but do not get pledges of hundreds of millions of dollars to make their lives easier. People in sub-Saharan Africa can only dream about the daily caloric intake of the average Gazan, and they are not spending their days emailing letters to the editor about their lack of Arabic World Cup coverage. The idea of a new dress shop opening at a high-end mall, as shown  in the second photo above, does not jibe with the the narrative of extreme poverty or of “slow genocide.”

The media’s constant efforts to portray the Palestinians and Israel as aggressors is not reportage but advocacy. This week’s winners expose the methods by which the media plays these tricks.

Council Winners

Non Council Submissions

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The council has spoken! In honor of the delusions discussed by this week’s winners, I present you with …

I’ll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats
They’re coming to take me away – XIV Napolean

This week’s winning council submission Helen Thomas,Jew Hatred And Its Polite Acceptance by JoshuaPundit argued that no one took action against Helen Thomas before now, because her views about Jews going to Europe were not that controversial among the press corps.

Helen Thomas is valuable because she provides a picture perfect example of the double standard most Left- leaning journos ( and believe me, the majority are Left- leaning) have when it comes to Jew hatred. While they might not personally endorse it, they’re prepared to accept it, just like Joe Lockhart, as a legitimate point of view that is subject to debate. That’s something virtually none of them would do if that hatred was directed anywhere else but at Jews.

On the non-council side, the winning entry was Goo-Goo Genocidaires: The Blood Is Dripping From Their Hands by Walter Russell Mead, which illustrated a different kind of rationalization or, if you will, self-delusion.

Understand and sympathize with their legitimate aspirations: that, the professors and preachers constantly told everyone else, was the sophisticated, modern and enlightened way to deal with these problems. Before the war it was the poor Germans, so shabbily treated by the Treaty of Versailles that Hitler represented a necessary phase of Germany’s search for self-respect. Before and after World War Two they said it about Stalin: communism was simply payback for the excesses and crimes of capitalist greed. Yes, they sometimes went too far: but surely that was ‘our’ fault for having permitted these terrible conditions to occur in the first place.

Council Winners

Non Council Winners

For a complete list of this week’s submissions see here.

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Coz the billion bucks in aid won’t buy their basic needs
Like some cheese and missiles for the kids

We con the world – The Flotilla Singers 

I know that you were probably expecting another oldie, but given the many submissions this week dealing with the flotilla, today’s main video is this hilarious spoof. I especially liked how well they captured the mannerisms of the originals. (h/t Jack)

Click here to view the embedded video.

But if you just believe
There’s no way we can fall

We are the World – USA for Africa

Like our video above, this week’s winning entry Israel Publishes Gaza Travel Guidebook For Pro-Hamas Freedom Flotilla by Mere Rhetoric is satire.

So we’ve put together this Gaza Tourism Guide, complete with picture galleries, which we believe to be the most comprehensive ever assembled on the web.

We know that after looking over everything, you’ll be as excited to stay in Gaza as we are to have you there. Feel free to pass this on at your ISM tabling sessions at Evergreen or whatever you people do on college campuses in between advocating genocide. And in the future, if you really want to repeatedly create Gaza media spectacles so you can damage Israel’s reputation, do what everyone else does. Join the UN.

Our winning non-council submission winner is one of the best analsyses I’ve read of the aftermath of Israel’s situation, Sympathy for the Devil and the Gaza Sea Confrontation: How Can Helping a Repressive Fascist, Genocide-Intending Hamas Regime be Innocent?  at Rubin Reports. Prof. Barry Rubin writes:

There is also emerging evidence that interrogation of those captured on the ship shows that 40 to 60 men were organized in military-style units. They have no papers of identification, had a lot of money and some were equipped with night vision equipment and bullet-proof vests.

In other words, numerous Western institution are cheering–or at least being fooled–by an allegedly humanitarian action of “peace activists” run by an organization that supported the September 11 attacks on the United States. Contemplate that irony for a few minutes.

Unfortunately, not many reporters, editorial writers or diplomats understand the irony.

And since it’s already been posted you must read Charles Krauthammer’s Those Troublesome Jews, in which he concludes.

What’s left? Nothing. The whole point of this relentless international campaign is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense. Why, just last week, the Obama administration joined the jackals, and reversed four decades of U.S. practice, by signing onto a consensus document that singles out Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons — thus de-legitimizing Israel’s very last line of defense: deterrence.

The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.

But it’s also important to read the whole article and see how reached his conclusion.

Council Winners

Non Council Winners

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I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face
Dancing in the Dark – Bruce Springsteen

Who’s that young lady whom Bruce pulls onto the stage to dance with him? She’s a cougar now!

What would happen if your not allowed to change your clothes and that restriction is due to someone else’s sensibilities? That’s what Bookworm Room addresses in her winning council post this week Everybody draw Mohamed Day — or, you’re not the boss of me.

 Their rage over these images isn’t about the images themselves.  It is, instead, about incrementally drawing all of us into the Muslim faith.  The reality is that, once you’ve stopped creating images offensive to Muslims, and stopped making movies offensive to Muslims, and stopped writing books offensive to Muslims, and stopped saying things offensive to Muslims, and stopped your stores from selling the pork and alcohol offensive to Muslims, and attired your women in burqas to protect them from rampaging Muslims, well — you’re pretty much a practicing Muslim.  You’ve been converted, and you didn’t even realize it was happening.

In this week’s non-council winner, Ann Althouse calls attention to journalism that leaves readers in the dark, If you’re going to criticize the new social studies curriculum adopted by the Texas Board of Education, you’d better quote it.:

I have not been defending the Texas standards, only attacking the quality of the journalism that fails to quote or link to a text that is referred to. Birnbaum’s Friday article contains some useful quotes (though still not a link to the whole text). The Saturday article was unanchored to text and forced me to look for what I could find on line. I’m also criticizing inaccurate paraphrasing, like the use of the words “vindicating” and “equivalency.” Birnbaum’s take on the standards might be true, but in an article that refers to a text, I do need to see the text. Paraphrasing, without the text, raises suspicions, and I don’t apologize for having those suspicions.

With no further ado, on to this week’s results.

Council Submissions

Non Council Submissions

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