Watcher results are in

The Weasel Watchers have cast their votes and the results, as always, are good. On the Council side, first place went to Soccer Dad for The Freddys Seven, which looks at Al Sharpton’s utterly reprehensible career, and castigates the Democratic candidates for genuflecting to him. The post exposes one of seamier side of American politics, but it also saddened me because it showed that Keith Richburg, an African American writer for the WaPo is willing to allow race to dictate how he writes about Sharpton. Keith Richburg emerged on my radar more than a decade ago when I read Out of America : A Black Man Confronts Africa, his really clear-eyed books about Africa’s myriad failures. The book was especially notable because Richburg hammered America’s black leaders for blindly pandering to the worst of Africa’s dictators because of some benighted idea of solidarity with Africa — as if there is anything honorable in American blacks aligning themselves with people who keep their people mired in abysmal poverty.

Second place went to — me! Yup, my fellow council members were kind enough to give their second place votes to American Derangement Syndrome — or, yes, you can call them unpatriotic, the post in which I looked at Andrei Markovits’ Uncouth Nation : Why Europe Dislikes America, and what it says about the American Left.

On the non-Council side, first place went to Treppenwitz’s Exploding Myths, which examined and destroyed four of the major myths that circulate through the political ether, and that cast Israel as the Nazi of the modern world, and the Palestinians as the beleaguered victims of Israel’s vile machinations.  Second place went to Patterico’s Pontifications for Patterico’s Los Angeles Dog Trainer Year in Review 2007, which examined multiple media moments of bias and misrepresentation.

One other thing:  I noted the other day that milblogger Andrew Olmsted died in action.  What I didn’t realize was that he was a former member of the Watcher’s Council.  The Watcher has a nice tribute to him, including a thoughtful comment about the courage it took for Olmsted to confront his own mortality and write his beautiful final post.