The Council has spoken

The winning entries in the Watcher's Council vote for this week are The Total Witlessness of Obama Apologists by Right Wing Nuthouse, and An Anatomy of Surrender by City Journal.

Here are samples. First from Right Wing Nuthouse:

Obama’s problem associations with Wright, Rezko, and Ayers have really got the creative juices flowing on the left as they twist themselves into rhetorical and intellectual pretzels trying to downplay or dismiss, their candidate’s monumentally poor judgement in hanging around with these folks for much of his adult life.

Some may read this apologia for Obama’s associations from Reed Hundt at TPM Cafe and shake their heads in wonderment at the cluelessness of the author. Others may marvel at the sheer brazenness of Hundt’s dismissive comments about Ayers and Wright, admiring the guts it took to reveal oneself as an idiot.

Still others may laugh at the appellation “Swiftboating” as a descriptive for people who tell the truth about what Wright and Ayers have sermonized and accomplished in the past that makes them such problematic friends. Even the candidate has accepted as true what these hateful FOO’s (Friends of Obama) have said and done thus making the charge “Swiftboating” Obama pretty silly – as if the candidate would “Swiftboat” himself.

[. . .]

The left will continue to downplay, dismiss, or just plain lie about Obama’s associations and why they are important. But as revelations continue to bubble up from the murky depths of American radicalism about these two characters and others, questions about Obama’s judgement, his core beliefs, his honesty and integrity, and how he feels about the rest of us will continue to be raised.

Next from City Journal:

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho­meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

Go read the rest. It is long, but well worth the effort.