Council Posts for September 8th, 2006

Some days you eat the bear, some days you’re his lunch. Last week I won the Council vote, this week, I fell off the bottom of the page. Zero votes. Zilch. Which is not surprising, when you consider the competition.

First off, there was a three-way tie for first place. Most unusual. When that happens, the Watcher votes to break the tie, and for this week he chose The Sundries Shack’s essay, It’s Not a War. It’s a Trendy Buzzword!. First, Jimmie gives a detailed definition of “fascism” before going on to defend the President’s use of the word -

In every single where Islam controls the government, all of the conditions required by Merriam and Webster’s definition of fascism is present. Every single country.

There is a problem with the definition, though. What the Islamists have been doing is indeed fascism, but it’s a sort of fascism we’ve not really seen on this scale. It’s fascism of religion, where Islam replaces nation and race. Islamists owe their allegiance solely to Islam, not to any notion of country or origin. That is as much fascism as was Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or Mussolini’s Italy.

But CNN apparently doesn’t think so. It believes, and reports as fact, that our President’s insistence that we are fighting a specific and dangerous form of fascism is just some technical term he whips out to dazzle the rubes. They tell us, as impartial reporters of news, that the word “fascism”, as the administration uses it, has little meaning at all.

That, folks, is a huge truckload of bollocks.

However, I’ve only skimmed the surface - Sundries Shack stops at all the bases on this one.

The next two in this trio were Joshuapundit and Right Wing Nut House.

The former touches on a theme that I’ve written about before: It Is Time for Jews to Think About Leaving Western Europe. Some Swedish Jews have gone to Israel to join the IDF because they feel safer than they do in Malmo. But wait, this is about Joshuapundit’s post and he says:

If I were a Jew living in Western Europe or Scandinavia today, with the possible exceptions of Switzerland, Denmark, Germany(!) and the Netherlands, I would seriously think about relocating to Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Canada or America.

It’s that bad, and the danger signals are that clear.

JP put up a nice copy of Chagall’s “The Wandering Jew” to illustrate his post.

Rick Moran has a riff on the crazies and 9/11 — 9/11 Tin Foil Hats Are Melting:

Not content with letting the moonbats, the freaks, the paranoids, and the ignoramuses who spout 9/11 conspiracy theories get away with their nonsensical idiocies any longer, the government released two separate reports debunking several major claims of the 9/11 fantasists in an effort to keep the record of that horrible day from being hijacked by crazies.

And as a bonus, in the process of answering the reports, two major 9/11 conspiracists have revealed themselves to be laughable, hopelessly moronic nutcases.

Not having followed the rhetoric of the nutters, all this was new to me. Some idjit actually believes there was a third airplane at the Twin Towers, and a whole crowd of them believe the Towers came down because they were deliberately demolished with explosives. You know, an inside job… can you imagine what it must be like to be that removed from reality?

Do read the whole essay. Rick barbecues the moonbats.

In the Non-Council posts, things were not quite as close, though the top three shared most of the votes, with first place going to Mere Rhetoric for Hezbollah Probably Lost the War, But They May Never Have Been In It To Win. A chilling hypothesis:

It seems increasingly clear that Hezbollah took a military drubbing in Lebanon II...

[...]

It’s obvious that Hezbollah never intended this kidnapping to have military consequences and it’s at least tenable that Nasrallah is more or less indifferent to rising levels of anti-Hezbollah Lebanese sentiment. His strategy was, if not more subtle, then at least more careful. It was the same strategy that Nasser used when he closed the Straits in 1967, and it’s quite similar to the strategy that drives Ahmadinejad’s seemingly clownish Holocaust denials. The goal is to change the kind of terms of the relationship that either Israel’s enemies or the rest of the world have with Israel. At least according to Abba Eban, Nasser’s goal was the humiliation and slow economic strangulation of Israel without conflict. Ahmadinejad’s strategy is to undermine Israeli legitimacy by changing what is OK to say out loud and what isn’t. In the same vein, Nasrallah’s hope was to make kidnapping of Israeli soldiers just one more thing that Israel’s Arab enemies more or less routinely do — to make it a routine part of the conflict.

Read the whole thing to get his full meaning. The cynicism he creditably observes is beyond my ken. It’s truly evil.

Gideon’s Blog and Going To The Mat tied for second place.

Friday, September 01, 2006, Gideon’s offering, could well be titled “Fascinated with Naming Fascism.” He says:

If I recall correctly, the key components to fascism are:

• state leadership of all sectors of society and economy, but no elimination of private property;
  
• wartime-like mobilization of the population as a whole even in conditions of relative peace;
  
• a social vision of an “organic” society in which classes exist but cooperate to move society forward;
  
• a cult of youth and feeling, and especially of violence, and a consequent denigration of tradition, rationality and bourgeois order;
  
• a hypertrophied adolescent masculinism and denigration of the feminine;
  
• hyper-patriotism, ultra-nationalism and the glorification of the military, even tending to develop a cult of martyrdom; and
  
• the fuhrerprinzip.

I’ve probably left one or two items off of that list, but it’s a good start, I think.

[…]

So: are our current enemies properly described as “fascist” or “Islamo-fascist”?

Follow the link to see his answer.

Going To The Mat wants to Repeal McCain Feingold. Sounds like a wonderful idea to me.

Not since the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 18th Century, has American government shut down such a vital aspect of speech, that of political speech aimed at our own representatives.

I hope this law is repealed ASAP. McCain is going to find that having his name attached to this piece of legislative trash will hurt his presidential chances. And we all know he harbors those hopes, so this was a dumb move.

The variety of posts on the non-Council side ranges from a moving film, “Friday in Jerusalem,” to a rant about having a tea-party to get rid of the McCain Feingold bill. Which reminds me: Shhh. No more conversation about you-know-what. It’s less than sixty days before the election so we can’t talk about our fine representatives at the Forum. Can’t talk about their opponents, either - which is the whole point of this bill: to save the asses of the incumbents. I suppose I could simply say “to save the asses” and be done with it.

There were also essays on the smell of death and two entries re the fact that the UN thinks self-defense is wrong. Heh. Everything the UN thinks is wrong. Dinocrat was in there somewhere, too.

Go to The Watcher’s Place to see everything. It’s well worth the trip.