Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Wait - Watch Which Watcher, Wretch?”

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January 6, 2008

Wait - Watch Which Watcher, Wretch?

Hatched by Dafydd

Would you believe it? We're still not caught up. Once again, this is last week's Council decision; we still hope to get to this week's decision later tonight.

(Yeesh, this is like trying to pay off credit cards...)

Council

The only thing as good as winning a Watcher's Council contest -- is seeing your number one and two votes come in -- numbers one and two:

Judeo-Christian Doctrine and Moral Freedom, by Bookworm Room.

Bookworm makes the case that Islamism has a very important similarity to Leftism: "[N]either believes in free will or in man’s ability to make moral decisions independent of his immediate circumstances."

This was our first choice in the Council vote, as noted; here was our second -- which came in second:

Ron Paul, by Done With Mirrors.

See if you can guess what this post is about. I'll wait.

Figured it out, have you? Well, I thought it one of the most erudite takedowns I've ever seen of the pompous, morally preening, far-above-the-fray (in fact, far above the mortal plane) candidate for the Libertublican Party.

Nouncil

We didn't do quite as well in the Nouncil category: Our number two took number two, but our number one was down in the pack. The winner was a nice defense of fear itself as a motivator to fight (and it includes a rant against Paul Krugman, everybody's favorite economist... where "everybody" means the collection of all anybodies who see no connection between economics and the free market):

Fear, by Silver Bullet.

Ron Silver -- yes, the newly conservative (he would say "revolutionary liberal") actor guy from the West Wing -- writes that a certain level of fear about guys in caves declaring war on the United States is healthy... because it encourages us to take seriously guys in caves declaring war on the United States. (Had we a little more fear in the 1990s, we might have solved the al-Qaeda problem before it metastasized.)

I liked the Silver piece, but we voted for a couple others that were excellent as well:

Democrats' 2007 Report Card, by Human Events.

Laughter and Tears, by Eternity Road.

In the first, Jennifer Rubin runs down a list of the Democrats' accomplishments last year... and a more run-down lot you'll never find. And in "Laughter and Tears," Francis W. Porretto ("Fran") gives us his last column for a while. He's a fellow author (though I'll bet he's published more recently than I!), and he has to take a blogbreak to finish some book he has under contract. (Something about an irate publisher with a 55-gallon drum of white-out...)

Fran runs through some of what has been making him so angry and tired recently, a series of events that revolve around the issue of power: the power sought by a few to rule over the many. It's well worth reading... and it reminds me somewhat of another author, far better known than I -- and, I suspect, than Francis Porretto: Harlan Ellison.

I wonder if Fran has been noshing on some of Harlan's "angry candy?"