Newtie panders to the radical right by growing another right hand
In the histrionic debate over whether a group of Sufi Muslims can or should build a community center with a prayer room a couple of blocks from Ground Zero, President Obama’s articulation of their constitutionally guaranteed right to do so over the weekend has got Newtie Gingrich‘s panties in a terrible twist.
Mr. Gingrich accused the president of “pandering to radical Islam.”
Methinks the Newtster projects too much.
It is he who is pandering to the paranoids and bigots who now control his party’s destiny. Unless, of course, President Obama and his political advisers are really concerned about alienating the coveted Islamist terrorist voting demographic.
By Newtie’s logic, no sect of Christianity should be able to build a church anywhere near the site of the former Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma because Timothy McVeigh was, after all, a Christian.
So you have to wonder: Why does Newtie and his ilk hate America? Why are they letting the terrorists win?
Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.
– James Madison (1798)
UPDATE: Gangrene Gingrich dug himself deeper this AM on Fux and Friends, comparing the project to the Nazi Holocaust and the sneak attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor:
Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor.
I missed this last night, maybe you did too. But it’s essential KO:
Yeah, I saw it. As usual, KO hits it out of the park. I especially appreciated his personal visit to the site, where he points out that the actual community center would be four or five blocks away from the WTC memorial, and both buildings would be invisible from the other.
This whole non-issue has become the Rethug’s election year wet dream, seeing as they have nothing to offer the American people but more tax cuts for their billionaire friends. Divide and conquer as a strategy for maintaining the interests of the rich is alive and well. And the Teabaggers are their perfect dupes.
For a time -line of how this made for tv fear and propaganda piece evolved, see How the “ground zero mosque” fear mongering began, from Salon.
And for an analysis of winger religious hypocrisy on the issue, see
Perfectly Exposing The Utter Hypocrisy At the Heart of The Right’s Anti-Mosque Crusade , from Norman Lear’s People For the American Way.
i’m a jew, and i would have no problem if someone put a german restaurant next to a synagogue. of course, i would not like it if a nazi organization set up shop next to a jewish center, but i know that germans ≠ nazis, just as all muslims ≠ terrorists. what’s next? are all muslims going to be banned from walking within a certain distance from ground zero?
Exactly.
Someone should ask Harry Reid and the other fainting couch Dems exactly how far from GZ would be acceptable.