Yeah of course I got lapped again, with Watchers Council results coming out before I've even blogged the nominations. Pretend that isn't true for a little while and mull over the Council nominations from last week.

Of course a lot of the posts revolve around Operation Cast Lead, exploring both the sources of the conflict and the potential solutions. Rhymes With Right treats Hamas's belligerence as a straightforward deterance breakdown. JoshuaPundit extends that point, suggesting that - having started out that way - Hamas's intransigence has metastasized into a genocidal ideology. The historical murkiness of the conflict - a result, as per my post, of deliberate and brazen historical revisionism - is often used to mask the true extent of Hamas's radicalism (because "they're genocidal" apparently isn't good enough these days). SoccerDad tries to untangle some of those reasons, which end up making the Saudi Plan - described even by serious people as 100 years of dhimmitude - get described as magnanimity. Regardless of the reasons, The Razor does the comparative work to demonstrate what it would be like to have 25% of the United States subject to indiscriminate enemy shelling while Bookworm Room's explains the stark alternatives facing Israel.

On the domestic front The Provocateur has a breaking story from a smug and unapologetic liberal: contrary to what we've been told dissent is very much not the highest form of patriotism. Quite to the contrary: apparently mild detachment from your birthplace and community is the height of sophistication. And sure there are 2,500 years of ethics and philosophy that go the other way, stretching from pre-Socratic notions of the polis and extending all the way to cutting-edge sociology on constitutional patriotism. But Joel Stein's 4th grade teacher told him that his thoughts were really shiny and he should never hesitate to express them. So he became a journalist, helping to stoke the kind of demagogic double-standards that the Colossus Of Rhodey discusses and that have made political discourse in this country such a pleasure. Those points are sharpened by Right Truth's despondence regarding contemporary politicians and by The Glittering Eye's disgust with the cultural decline that's imploding the US economy. As a society we should be having frank discussions about these issues. Instead we're pretending, per Cheat Seeking Missiles, that Caroline Kennedy is "one of us."

References:
* Year End Weasel Watching [Watcher Of Weasels]
* What It's All About [Rhymes With Right]
* Gaza:A Tale Of Selective Morality and Tribal Warfare [Joshua Pundit]
* Anti-Israel Partisans Set New Record For Decades-Old Trick Of Brazenly Rewriting History, Blaming Israel [MR]
* Talkin' turki [Soccer Dad]
* Walking In Israel's Shoes [The Razor]
* Hamas' "Heroes" -- and the need for total victory over evil [BookWorm Room]
* A Liberal's View of Patriotism [The Provocateur]
* The bar has been lowered SOOO far ... [Colossus Of Rhodey]
* WANTED: Politician to Represent Me [Right Truth]
* Trust [Glittering Eye]
* The Most Ridiculous Story Of The Year: Part 7 [Cheat Seeking Missiles]

Previously:
* Watchers Council Nominations: We Don't Know Much About Obama. Or How To Fix The Economy. Or Really, Anything.
* Watchers Council Nominations - Contradictions Are Not Your Friend
* Watchers Council Nominations - Anti-American Stupidity Is Not The Stuff That Holiday Cheer Is Made Of