Watcher’s results
The results are in at the Watcher’s Council and I have to admit to being pleased, since my post Cosmic Ironies came in first. This was the post in which I looked at my Dad’s family history in pre-WWII Germany and thought about the little twists of fate that saw some live, and some die. It is a personal reminiscence, but I thought it was a useful antidote to the Holocaust baiting Ahmadinejad periodically brings to center stage.
Second place went to Big Lizard’s for The Human Touch, which urged the State Department to stop trying to find a one size fits all philosophy for deciding whether people from terrorist sponsoring nations can immigrate to America. BL points out that many of these immigrants are trying to escape tyranny, and they can be useful agents in the fight against terror. He acknowledges that enemy governments could certainly use a more open immigration policy to plant spies and agents but says that, instead of blanket ban because of this risk, State should to actually look at the people involved and use its human resources to make the more difficult immigration decisions, a la the Israeli approach.
A third place that came in so close to tying for second that it deserves mention here in the “winner’s circle” is Cheat Seeking Missiles’ Gates’ Iraq Agenda Short On Democracy, which notes that, while we are making military strikes in Iraq, we need to start focusing — really hard — on building a Democratic friend in that nation, so that we can secure our gains there for the long term.
The other Council written articles are, of course, excellent even though the votes were too spread out to give any one of them a commanding lead. I urge you to read them, and you’ll find the links here.
Things were also good on the non-Council side. The winner was Rafael Medoff: Columbia “Invites Hitler to Campus” — As it Did in 1933, which spells out in detail the premise of the title, which is that Columbia, with the recent Ahmadinejad idiocy, was just playing to type. Second place was a very scary Dr. Sanity post, Islam and Marxism — A Marriage Made In Allah’s Socialist Paradise. Again, the title says it all, and the post just does an excellent job of filling in the blanks. It’s a horrifying confluence, and it’s already happening, as each of those two totalitarian ideologies uses the other to make advances against old fashioned Western Democracy and freedom.
