The Council has spoken

The Watchers Council met electronically again this week due to the fact that Hillary Clinton has gone underground. It is well known that she blames the Council for her humiliating loss to B. Hussein Obama in the Democrat primary and she is reported to have vowed to extract vengeance.

This week's winning council post was The Chicken or the Egg? by Joshuapundit. Here is a sample:

Unless you're in a coma, you've probably noticed that a great majority of the violent and barbaric acts in our modern world are done by followers of Islam.

In the Islamic world today, aside from homicide bombings, jihad and terrorism directed against dar harb ( the part of the world not ruled by Islam), honor killings, female genital circumcision and other forms of violence against women are commonplace,and homosexuals are routinely brutalized and murdered.Non-Muslims are treated as barely human in much of the Islamic world, if they're allowed to exist at all. Warfare carried out by Muslims is done with modern tools of the trade provided by the despised infidels, but is a relic of the good ol' primitive and tribal days. Hostages, beheadings and the deliberate killing of civilians are all fair game, and the language of jihad is essentially the same heady stuff used back in the 7th century against the infidel. And through it all, there remains the miasma of seething violent rage at things like the Danish cartoons that simply doesn't exist in other religious groups.

The question nobody wants to ask keeps floating to the surface: Is Islam to blame? Or, to put it another way, are the perpetrators simply bad Muslims or are they actually good ones who are simply more in tune with Mohammed's message than the majority? Does Islam itself promote violence? Or are the acts simply a product of primitive tribal society that persists in spite of Islam?

Actually, this is a trick question. I personally believe that Islam and the primitive tribal culture combined back in the day to sustain each other and can't be separated by their very nature...even though some valiant attempts have been made in the past, and are being made today.

Go read the rest.

The winning non-Council post was What Kind of War Crimes Trials Does Obama Plan? (Updated) by American Thinker. Here is a sample:

Barack Obama's plan for imposing unity on the nation after he takes office apparently entails a close look at war crimes trials for Bush administration officials. He has even said so in an interview with Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News.

This kind of change -- putting your predecessors on trial for their conduct of policy -- may not be what most Americans really want or expect from someone with Obama's gauzy rhetoric of unity. But unity has a dark side in the hands of people who regard their opponents as criminals. America has two centuries-plus of history lacking the totalitarian practice of jailing the predecessors when a new president takes office.

This is the sort of proposal one might expect from a man steeped in Marxism at his church, from his friends like Ayers, and as a member of the Alinsky Left. But I am surprised he let this slip.

Few on the right noticed (except for Rick Moran) and became alarmed, as the interview in question appeared on a Philadelphia Daily News blog,

Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to "immediately review the information that's already there" and determine if an inquiry is warranted -- but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as "a partisan witch hunt." However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because "nobody is above the law."

At the time it was picked up only by the Huffington Post.

To me the terribly frightening phrase is the wish to avoid a "partisan witch hunt." When a Harvard-trained lawyer inserts a qualifier into a phrase, that is a signal of wiggle room being created. In this case, the obvious implication is that if you get Chuck Hagel or some other antiwar Republican on board, then you have cover for your "witch hunt."

Again, go read the rest.

As Always the full results can be seen here.