Right Wing Nut House

The votes are in from this week’s Watcher’s Council and once again, it was a tough choice. I was lucky enough to walk away with top honors for my post on the possible Bird Flu pandemic entitled “A Killer in the Shadows” but there were several other worthy posts in the Council category I’d like to highlight.

Dr. Sanity has become the poet laureate of the Council lately with this gem about the beheader Zarqawi and the hope that he’s close to death as a result of wounds he recently received in “A Prayer for Zarqawi:”

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord your soul to keep;
And if He keeps it very well,
It’s sure to find its way to hell.

But if you don’t, it’s no surprise–
A coward never lives his lies.
You’ve sent so many to the Lord,
It’s only fair you face His sword.

E-Claire has some advice for the President regarding the schmucks at Amnesty International in “Hey Dubya: Don’t Feed the Moonbats:”

I heard a rep. of “Human Rights Watch” on the raadio yesterday. He out and out said that they hold the US to a “higher standard” than they do “people with less developed armies.” Talk about Racist…. He might as well have come out with it: “Those little brown people just aren’t as capable as you taller, whiter, more technologically advanced people. We expect so little of them and so much of you.”

The blind credulity of these infantile dopes is beyond comprehension. Whyinhell would the White House even deign to respond to them?!?

Good question, although Gregory Djerejian believes the Prez should have taken the opportunity to come clean about prisoner mistreatment worldwide.

I agree with Greg up to a point. He wants a blue ribbon independent panel to look into the allegations of torture. I think a panel like that could easily morph into a 9/11 Committee - a partisan tug of war that wouldn’t do anyone much good in the long run. For the moment, all the critics of the Pentagon’s handling of torture allegations have on its investigations is that they’re moving too slowly. Given the nature of the charges and the conflicting testimony of the participants, I don’t see how they could go much faster. That being said, I think the President should get out front of the various torture investigations. Right now it’s like Chinese water torture. The information is coming out in dribs and drabs which only allows his enemies to take each allegation out of context and dwell on it lovingly, massaging it and milking it for all that it’s worth.

The problem is exactly the opposite of what his critics charge; the incidents are isolated and disconnected. If torture was administration policy - like the Nazis “Final Solution” or even Stalin’s “gulag” - it would be easier to trace. Holocaust historians have Heydrich’s train schedules and accountings from the death camps themselves to go by. In the administration’s case, critics like to point to the Justice Department memos that explored a myriad of interrogation options, all of which were eventually rejected. The fact that they were even discussed causes these critic’s imaginations to take flight and not set down until they end up in the same place as Amnesty International - La-La Land.

Finally, in the Council category The Smarter Cop blogs the recent arrest of terror suspects here in America in “Terrorists in your Backyard:”

Next time you’re in a mall’s food court with your daughter and you see a kindly old man smiling at her, try not to overreact, but at least consider this:

Shah saw a girl nearby looking at him and he smiled back.
The Bronx man, the son of a Malcolm X lieutenant, then turned to the agent and said, “I could be joking and smiling and then cutting their throats in the next second,” the complaint said.

This is Exhibit A for the point many have been trying to put across both to the general population and to our ignorant bureaucrats who seem to be caving to CAIR and other organizations sympathetic to Islamicists - it’s their intended goal to blend into our society and appear as we do, even as every moment they wish to shed our blood. They’re just waiting for the right time.

Chilling, that.

In the non-Council category, the winner was Bloggledygook’s “Taking Islam Seriously” in which Daniel Berczik fisks this column by Frank Rich right smartly:

In today’s Dubai, home to cutting-edge resort design and prestigious golf and tennis tournaments (in which, we presume, women sometimes wear shorts or tennis skirts) it is still unlawful to be allowed entry into the country if one’s passport is stamped by Israeli Customs. Will keeping the pages of an odd Koran or two dry really change the rancid philosophy that holds 1.5 billion people in a death grip of shame, perversion and hatred?

Yet Mr. Rich can’t let himself go that far, because that would actually serve to put him to the right of this administration even as it would install him directly in the center of American public opinion. Those complaining about Koran abuse see the latest yawning episode as either a shameful display of America’s arrogance and disrespect for the world’s second largest religion or one more foul-up by a government and its military that only serves to make the fight harder.

Great writing. Great thinking.

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