Watchers' Winners

The Council winner this week was What's the Real Question in America? by the Sundries Shack.

Fisking Mr.Hiatt at the Washington Post, SS concludes:

We are not a perfect nation. We never will be. But it’s an enduring testament that we have the luxury of engaging in the sort of navel-gazing we’ve seen for the last couple years. It’s high praise, I think, to know that the worst sort of “abuse” on wihch our critical media can focus is a kicked book. Hiatt asks us if we’re as good as we could be and the answer if “of course not". But he also asks if we’re as good as we expect other nations to be and the answer to that is “No. We’re far better".

"...a kicked book...?" Amen.

A close second in the voting was e-claire's What the Hell's the Matter with the US.

The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary “gateway” to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on “a journey through the history of freedom"--... a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man’s inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich’s Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond.

To which she responds, in amazement, "Do what, now?"

In her inimitable style, Miz Biscuit asks "Why do we let creeps do this to us?" Why, indeed. She has the addresses and information you can use to make your voice heard in this travesty, this one-more-attempt-to-make-the US-into-a-creature-resembling-Europe. And we know how ugly that sucker would be.

Read the whole thing and then...ACT.

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Non-council winner is --surprise!-- Joe Katzman at Winds of Change. It isn't often that you get to read about a conversion experience. This one concerns Mr. Katzman's metanoia re guns. As he says, the crux of the argument is this:

The Right to Bear Arms is the only reliable way to prevent genocide in the modern world.

En passant, he mentions Jacques Ellul's Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective. I hadn't read Ellul in years but what I remembered wasn't fond. Probably the epitome of the propensity for French surrender, only this time tricked out in Christian clothing. You can find him here; it's worth looking at if only to remind oneself of how far French Christianity wandered from the more robust idea of the just war. In some ways, Ellul isn't far from jihadist thinking, though he is more passive: it's not about killing but about dying.

Anyway, Mr. Katzman's arguments are well-crafted. As usual. The normal admonition, to "read the whole thing" applies here. However, I warn you it will take awhile and when you're done you will see genocide differently. But that's the least of it.

Second place went to La Shawn Barber's Corner for Anti-Lynching Legislation, which is so good it's hard to know what to highlight. Here's the money quote, though:

Freedom is more important than all the apologies, handouts, and excuses Congress could ever come up with. I’m living in the best country in the world, and I’d never be freer anywhere else. To blacks who grew up believing America was the most racist place on earth, if you no longer believe that and realize freedom, the right to be left alone, is the only apology you need, demand that from your senators.

Gates of Vienna is definitely in the Amen Corner on this one.