Council Winners for November 10th

For the week of November 10th, Right Wing Nut House took first place for his essay, Irony so Thick You Can Bathe In It.

In high dudgeon, Rick Moran addresses the temerity and the hollowed out shell of the old Grey Doxy in her recent stance on the release of Saddam material. Here, let him tell you in his inimitable style:

The levels of irony on display with the “revelation” by the New York Times that some of the Saddam documents dealing with Hussein’s drive for nuclear weapons may constitute a dangerous release of classified info on how to build them is so perfect, so exquisitely delightful that it’s at times like these I wish I was a poet.

Only The Bard himself could do justice to the smorgasbord of delectable incongruities, tasty paradoxes, and bitterly sardonic idiocies that the New York Times, the left, our intelligence agencies, and yes - even those of us who pined for the release of this historic treasure trove of data have ultimately fallen into.

The New York Times, a news organ that has on many occasions revealed the existence of some of the most classified intelligence programs the government uses to protect American citizens, in violation of the law, of common sense, and (my own opinion) of their patriotic duty during a time of war, now implicitly criticizes the Bush Administration for (wait for it)...releasing classified information!

Not only can you not make this stuff up, you wouldn’t even want to - the reality of the NYT’s convenient and oh-so-relative morality re the press, classified information, and who has the right to know what is so convoluted and convenient in the moment that one grows annoyed with the tedium of having to watch their posturing.

Buncha moral morons.

On the non-Council side, the Watcher broke a tie for first place between Rants and Raves and The QandO Blog.

The former took first place for The Demand for Perfection. In his opening salvo, he quotes the great Joe Louis. I’d never heard this story before; it’s a good one:

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During the Second World War, boxer Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber” served in the US Army as a spokesman, or “propagandist” we’d say today.

Contrary to popular belief today, the 60s generation did not discover racial injustice. Watch old movies on TCM and you’ll see that plenty of people had been bothered by it for some time. Nor did the fact that America was fighting two viciously racist regimes while treating Black people as second class citizens escape everybody’s notice.

The story goes that at some point in Joe Louis’ army career, a journalist asked him how he felt about serving in a segregated army, fighting for a country that treated him as second class. He replied, “America ain’t got no problems Hitler can solve.”

Precisely. Now why isn’t the Pentagon using our patriot entertainers and athletes to tell the story of America in Iraq? How come they’ve left it to al Jazeera to pick up the ball and run with it? I swear, once you get past colonel, the pin so many stars on your brain that thinking becomes paralyzed, and original thinking is not in the job description. Especially for the desk commandos.

The other first place essay was Discussing the Developing Role of the Media During Times of War is an analysis of James Q. Wilson’s article today “The Press at War”. Here is the money quote from Wilson:

Th[e] change in the media is not a transitory one that will give way to a return to the support of our military when it fights. Journalism, like so much scholarship, now dwells in a postmodern age in which truth is hard to find and statements merely serve someone’s interests.

The mainstream media’s adversarial stance, both here and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines and television programs we enjoy.

No wonder these two posts tied for first place. Do you see how the first segues into the second? We all know the terrible toll the too-cool-to-tell-the-truth-press has taken on American lives. Wilson simply exposes them a bit further.

As I’ve been saying, until the military gets off its duff in the Information War, we will win nothing. It’s not the mendacious Dems, it’s the damned MSM. Mark my words, though: now that the Dems are running things, the spin on Iraq will switch polarities. We’ll have to wait and see what shows up at the Watcher’s Council in the next year, but my money is on a gradually more positive outlook about foreign policy as played by the new kids in town.

And should the Dems take the Executive Office in 2008, you may even see little American flag lapel pins appearing on the suits as they natter on about how things are changing in the Middle East.It’s almost worth bringing on Hillary and Obama just to watch it happen.

I said almost…

The Watcher’s Place has the rest of us, still hanging in there. Give him a visit. And if being filled with loathing makes you happy (to paraphrase Pogo), be sure to look at the Ed Wonk’s piece on the JROTC in San Francisco.