Mosque Debate: Unnecessary Distraction

19 August 2010 |permalink | email article

First of all the fuss over the “Ground Zero Mosque” is a misnomer. It won’t be, as Hendrik Hertzberg observed in The New Yorker, at Ground Zero. It’ll be on Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site (from which it will not be visible). That aside, President Obama’s comments on a proposed mosque, and the way he flip-flopped off his jobs message in explaining the case for its existence,  erupted into a stunning bipartisan firestorm.

Democrats are not the only ones consumed by the debate. As Politico pointed out, a quiet tug of war has erupted between those who want to embrace the hard-line opposition that has emerged as the Republican Party line and those who have urged their fellow tea partiers to refrain from rallying opposition because it is inconsistent with the movement’s focus on economic and constitutional issues – and their desire for strict adherence to the principles of individual liberties and limited government.

Pat Buchanan, the conservative MSNBC commentator who relishes controversy, said Newt Gingrich went “too far” when he compared the developers behind the Muslim community center to Nazis. “It’s absurd. There is no valid comparison there.” He also called Gingrich a “political opportunist” for trying to be more controversial than Sarah Palin.

California notebook

If the state budget impasse lasts beyond Labor Day it could lead to another year of California issuing IOUs instead of cash for invoices, Controller John Chiang told the Sacramento Press Club on Wednesday. But he’s not issuing a firm deadline to lawmakers again this year, but sticking with his forecast earlier this summer that, absent a budget, the state’s bank account would be empty by late October, close to the Nov. 2 election. Without a budget the mid-October statewide gubernatorial debate between Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman could be pivotal

Quotable

“We are never going to build a stable, flourishing society in Afghanistan. What we desperately need is a campaign of nation-building to counteract the growing instability and deterioration in the United States.” – Bob Herbert, the New York Times columnist who has read the tea leaves.

“I accepted segregation as a way of life. But I’ve come a long way. Very few of us, I suspect, would like to have our passions and profundities at age 28 thrust in our faces at 50.” – James J. Kirkpatrick, a combative conservative columnist who was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers beginning in 1964, in a 1970 interview with Time. He died this week at 89. 

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