The Watcher’s results are in, and they are good
I have to say that, this week, when I was casting my votes for the Watcher’s Council, I had a really hard time. The caliber of articles that the council members submitted this week — both their own and someone else’s — was incredibly high. I kept going back and forth between articles, practically parsing sentences in an effort to rank the top two in each category (Council and non-Council). For that reason, I am incredibly honored that, with the votes counted, my post called “The MSM’s Rush Limbaugh Horror Story,” ranked first. First is always nice, of course, but first in such an august field is something that really gets my day jump started.
(Let me say here that I know that two Weasel members couldn’t vote at all, and one only voted a little, so there was some serious vote discounting going on under the Council rules. Nevertheless, since I’m not a math person, and don’t fully understand the complexities behind the vote count, I’m going to bask in my victory however it comes my way.)
To make things even nicer for me, the non-council submission that I nominated won too, as it should have. That was Michael Yon’s Resistance is Futile, a truly important post about the difference between America’s Iraq coverage and the situation on the ground in Iraq — and the way in which the former has the potential to destroy everything good that’s happening regarding the latter. (As you can see, my Weasel theme for the week was media manipulation and malfeasance, something that clearly struck a chord with other Council members.)
The second place (and third and fourth and fifth, etc) winners in each category were equally good, I thought. On the Council side there was a tie for second. One of the second place positions went to Big Lizard, with whose writing I’m becoming ever more enamored, for An Inconvenient Demographic Truth. In this post, he took apart Obama’s idiotic cry of racism when it came to a DoJ official’s statistically accurate statement that, because minorities tend to die younger, systemic inequities that affect the elderly actually have less of an effect on minority elderly — because there are fewer of them. It was a garbled and inelegant statement, but as Dafydd explains, it does not reflect racism but, in fact, its opposite, which is an almost overly strong sensibility about the situation of minorities.
The other second place went to Soccer Dad for Walking Back the Cat x 2, a lucid and fascinating analysis of the Israeli strike into Syria. The title comes from the fact that intelligence analysts can check for internal dissension in another country by examining what was said in that country before an event and comparing it to revealed facts. Often, this type of analysis exposes who is disaffected, who is out of the loop, who is close to power, etc. Soccer Dad used this type of before and after comparison to expose a lot of interesting information about the Israel incursion.
On the non-council side, there was also a tie for second place. One second place went to Daled Amos for The Niggers of Palestine, a really strong entry that shows the fallacy of equating Palestinians to African-Americans during the slave era — a fallacy that Condi Rice, herself a victim of Jim Crow segregation, seems prone to make. The other second place went to The Pakistan Policy Blog for The Massacre at Karsaz Bridge: Analysis of the Bhutto Blast (Part 2), the title of which is self-explanatory.
The above are the top six winners, but let me say again that this was an unusually strong week of submissions. If you’re at all looking for something to read, this is definitely the place to start.
