Friday, August 08, 2008

Council Winners

The latest batch of Watchers Council winners have been posted.

First place in the council went to Winning in Afghanistan by Joshuapundit.

Votes also went to Why Exploit Our Domestic Resources by Wolf Howling; What is a Windfall Profit? by Rhymes with Right; and Marin County’s Hidden Conservatives by Bookworm Room.

The last post reminds me that many blogs are strongest when they hew most closely to the daily realities of the people who write them. That is the one topic about which you may be assured I know more than you do: What happens to me day in and day out. But it is not possible to write a daily blog on world affairs or politics in that vein unless you are one of the 300 or so people who move and shake those places. In which case you probably don't want to broadcast your daily life.

Outside the council, the winner was Obama Be by Classical Values, which was worthy for recalling in detail the program for radicals (what we now generally call "progressives") outlined circa 1970 by Saul Alinsky. It's impressive to see how deeply it has taken root, so deeply that many people who swim in it daily never heard of Alinsky or realized that someone first spelled it all out. Hillary Rodham wrote her senior honors thesis at Wellesley College on Alinsky. Obama certainly owes him a debt, in his community organizer phase. Wikipedia sums up Alinsky thus:

Alinsky was a critic of a passive and ineffective mainstream liberalism. In Rules for Radicals, he argued that the most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired ends, and that an intermediate end for radicals should be democracy because of its relative ease to work within to achieve other ends of social justice.

Votes also went to The Forgotten Christians of Lebanon by Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, a post remarkable because not only does it detail a distant problem, it suggesting things that the average American can do that might help relieve it.