Weasel election results

The Watcher of Weasels stayed up late last night and counted votes. The results are in and I’m happy to report the following:

For posts written by Council members, first placed went to Big Lizard’s Does American Elect Defeatists? As you’ve probably noticed, I don’t share with you where the posts I supported placed, but I will tell you here and now that I voted for this one and am glad it won. When I wrote that I felt stale, flat and unprofitable, part of my malaise resulted from depressing predictions for 2008. Dafydd cheerfully predicts, however, that Americans will not vote for defeatists, and that one party or another is going to have to stand for victory to win. Second place went to my friend Laer for “The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time,” the title of which is a quotation from a long-time and leading expert in climate CO2, who charges that modern scientists have systematically rejected thousands of CO2 measurements, not because they were deemed inaccurate, but because they were inconsistent with received wisdom about the human impact on climate change. Someone needs to call Gallileo and tell him everything old is new again.

On the non-Council side, victory went to Michael J. Totten’s “Better a Thousand Israel Invasions. . . .” which says that Israel’s attempt to destroy the Lebanese civilian infrastructure in order to cause Lebanese to turn on Hezbollah was doomed to failure. Hezbollah is seen inside Lebanon as a bulwark against civil war, and the Lebanese will take anything, even a sustained attack on their infrastructure, to avoid a repeat of that nightmare:

“Better a thousand Israeli invasions than another civil war,” is a refrain I heard more than once from Lebanese who detest the very existence of Hezbollah. Israeli military and defense officials would be well advised to tattoo that phrase on their foreheads before trying again to use force inside Lebanon to alter its politics. Israelis don’t have to like this feature of Lebanese political culture, but they do need to understand that it is a feature. (Call it a bug if it makes you feel better.)

Second place went to Cup of Love’s Two Words.  The two words are “Walter Reed,” and that stand as the starting point for the fact that the author, a military wife, thinks it would be a disaster if we let Congress place health care in the Government’s incompetent hands.  Most of the post is a harrowing tale of the writer’s childbirth experiences, with long- and short-term outcomes that never would have occurred in most, if not all, private practice facilities.