Friday, September 16, 2011

The Council Has Spoken!! This Week's Watcher's Council Results


The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week, carved eternally in the akashhic records of cyberspace.

Last Sunday was the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and this weeks winner, Bookworm Room's Honoring 9/11 By Remembering We Are Warriors focused like a lazer on an important and often overlooked aspect. Here's a slice:

The murderous frenzy unleashed on 9/11 is an awkward size. Had it been smaller — a handful of people, or even a hundred people, killed at a mall or a hotel — we would have noted it as a tragedy powered by a crazy person (or two) in thrall to bad ideas. We would have criminalized the crazy person and moved on with our lives. Had it been monumentally bigger — say, the size of Hitler’s Poland invasion — we all would have easily recognized it as “a war,” and would have treated it accordingly, both strategically and emotionally.

What do you do, though, when nineteen men hijack four planes and kill 2,996 people? Actual events proved that, in the post-modern world, our nation had no template to define our emotional response following 9/11. We had a vacuum.

The one thing you can say with certainty about America today is that, when there is a vacuum, politics will fill it. Following a short frenzy of national mourning, the nation divided itself into two oppositional viewpoints with regard to what 9/11 means. The Left (of course) took refuge in a Walt Kelly worldview: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Leftists in the media, Hollywood, and academia swiftly absolved al Qaeda and Islam from any seriously responsibility for what happened. While only the Truthers could deny that Islamist al Qaeda members flew those planes, people on the Left knew what really mattered: the nineteen al Qaeda hijackers were as much victims as we were, if not more so. It was our overbearing, racist, arrogant, resource-hogging, Israel-loving, capitalist country that drove them to commit their foul deeds. God damn the U.S. of KKK! Those chickens roosted but good!

This template has served the Left for ten years now. The details may vary, but the tone is unchanging. Americans are bullies. We’ve bullied the Muslims so much over the past few decades, it was inevitable that they, prodded beyond bearing, turned on us. And while it’s sad that 2,996 non-combatants (mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters) had to die, that’s what happens when you give your allegiance to — and, worse, make your money from — a system that is inherently parasitical.

It is this paradigm that led the current occupant of our White House to tell us that 9/11 wasn’t just our tragedy, so that our current efforts to mourn prove that we’re not only bullies, we’re also self-centered bullies. The White House assures us, though, that we can atone for our sins by approaching 9/11, not as a national day of mourning, but as a “National Day of Service.” The message is clear: We Americans don’t deserve to mourn. Not only was it not about us, it was our fault!


In our non-Council category, the hands down winner was John Bolton's The Innocents Abroad a piece written for The American Enterprise Institute and submitted by Joshuapundit. It's detailed and highly critical look at the major foreign policy challenges we face because of the policies of the Obama Administration, written by a man who is a nuclear weapons proliferation expert and one of our most effective UN Ambassadors, a man who knows what goes on behind the headlines and the spiels of the talking heads on the TV news. Highly recommended.

Here are this week’s full results:

Council Winners



Non-Council Winners



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