THE COUNCIL HAS SPOKEN
The vote is in for this week’s Watcher’s Council and coming out on top was The Sundries Shack with a post entitled “What’s the Real Question in America.” Jimmie takes a column by WAPO’s Fred Hiatt on the reason that editorials in that august publication fixate on American sins apart piece by piece. Here’s Mr. Hiatt on why there aren’t more editorials on Zarqawi’s inhumanity:
But it’s also true that The Post has published more editorials criticizing Donald Rumsfeld than Abu Musab Zarqawi. That’s partly because, to the extent that editorials are meant to educate or explain, there isn’t all that much to say about Zarqawi’s evil that isn’t evident to most Post readers; and to the extent that editorials are meant to influence, there’s no point in addressing messages to the beheaders of the world.
And Jimmie’s response:
Did you catch that? You don’t see editorials about Zarqawi because, 1) we already know everything we need to know about him, and 2) he wouldn’t listen to us anyway.
This conclusion assumes two things. First, it assumes that we really do know everything we need to know about people like Zarqawi. That’s a heck of a stretch. I wonder how many people know just who the man is, how long he’s been an active terrorist in Iraq, how long he’d been supported directly by Saddam Hussein, how long he’s been actively working with and for al-Qaeda, or who his terrorist attacks have been targeting. I suspect that if our mass media had reported more widely the documented ties we know existed between Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein, we wouldn’t hear much rubbish about how Hussein had no ties to terrorism. You’ll remember that one of the major reasons the President gave for toppling Hussein were his ties to and active support of terrorists just like Zarqawi.
But that jumps over a more important point. Newspaper editorials really aren’t about delivering facts. That’s what the news articles are suppoed to do. Editorials exist to deliver opinion - their job is to persuade, not to inform. Perhaps Hiatt’s confusion about the role of a newspaper editorial might also explain the problem with so many news articles. If he, a veteran reporter, believes that editorials are supposed to deliver facts, might he also believe that news articles are supposed to deliver opinions? It’s a fair question, I think.
A fair question that we’ll never get an answer to.
Finishing second in the voting was E.Claire’s excellent rant against the leftist idiots who want to turn the memorial at Ground Zero into an anti-American Disneyland. Here, Claire gently takes the organizers to task for their use of the word “freedom:”
“Not a word to shy away from?!? Whendahell have Americans ever shied awya from using the word “Freedom�!? I hear President Bush use it regularly as his choices have freed 50 million people in the last few years.
Yanno what your “plan†is making me think, now? I’m thinkin’ I sure would like to be free of you and your inaccurate, biased and shame-meaning “explorations.â€
Whatinhell, you might ask, does this have to do with US being attacked by raving 7th century religious nuts?
Gently, Claire…Oh Well. Read the whole thing but be forewarned; take your blood pressure meds before doing so.
Another excellent post from the Council was Gates of Vienna’s “The Slave Owner’s Book Store.” A Saudi couple in Colorado were keeping an Indonesian woman as a virtual slave:
If you were wondering how she escaped, the authorities were given “a tip” that the family was harboring an illegal alien. They got a search warrant in November, 2004 and discovered the slave. She was removed from the home and legal proceedings began.
One nice note: this couple has known since November that they were going to be indicted. That’s a lot of sleepless nights between November and June. Kind of gives you a warm feeling to dwell on their predicament.
If the benighted MSM doesn’t bury this story under toilet paper, it will be interesting to see how the trial goes and what the sentence is. Perhaps old Al-Turki should talk to Michael Jackson, see what the secret is.
Indeed.
Thw winning non-Council post was from Winds of Change entitled “Zimbabwe Changed My Mind: Guns Are A Human Right:”
As many of you know, I’m from Canada. We have a pretty different attitude to guns up here, and I must say that American gun culture has always kind of puzzled me. To me, one no more had a right to a gun than one did to a car.
Well, my mind has changed. Changed to the point where I see gun ownership as being a slightly qualified but universal global human right. A month ago in Yalta, Freedom & The Future, I wrote:
“Frankly, if “stopping… societies from becoming the homicidal hells Mr. Bush described in his Latvia speech” is our goal, I’m becoming more sympathetic to the Right to Bear Arms as a universal human right on par with freedom of speech and religion. U.S. Secretary of State Condi Rice’s personal experience as a child in Birmingham [Alabama] adds an interesting dimension; I hope she talks about this abroad.”
This week, I took the last step. You can thank Robert Mugabe, too, because it was his campaign to starve his political/tribal opponents and Pol-Pot style “ruralization” effort (200,000 left homeless recently in a population of 12.6 million) that finally convinced me. Here’s the crux, the argument before which all other arguments pale into insignificance:
The Right to Bear Arms is the only reliable way to prevent genocide in the modern world.
Even though I myself am something of a lukewarm 2nd Amendment supporter, I can see the truth in what he says. There is also truth in the idea pushed by gun rights supporters here that America will never know tyranny as long as people have a right to keep and bear arms.
Something to be said for that too.
If you’d like to participate in next week’s watcher’s vote, go here and follow instructions.