"I no longer want to live on this planet."

[flash9286]

This is OBAMA we're talking about, his first and foremost goal has ALWAYS been politics. If you think this is just me calling him names cause I don't like him, just consider how many promises he made during the campaign. I think he broke some records.

there was a lot to fix after the tornado that was Bush.

[DinoDoc]

How was what he said the next day in any way at odds with what he said the day before? He never specifically endorsed the building of the center, he only mentioned it to highlight an example of a case where Muslims were having to deal with a lot of negative perceptions from the American public.

Are we seriously going to play this game when his prepared remarks left the impression in the media covering the event and the audience that he was in favor of the project and the very next day he cowardly walked the statement back?

[Hauldren Collider]

there was a lot to fix after the tornado that was Bush.

I'm sorry, that's bull****. Obama has not really changed anything except added a healthcare law and put through a stimulus, a stimulus BUSH started. The Iraq War's "success" was Bush's troop surge, and Obama has basically not changed ANYTHING in Afghanistan. So this "it's still Bush's fault TWO YEARS LATER" argument is a crock of ****.

[Ben Kenobi]

According to Ben, since I admire the architecture and beauty of cathedrals, I am self-evidently not an atheist.

What positive thing has Obama said about Christ and Christians? Apparently we are all bitter clingers.

[Ben Kenobi]

This all whatever the religious equivalent of racism is... It makes me wonder if, because it's not cool to say you're against him for being Black, that people switch up to something else 'strange and different' like him being a Muslim.

Right, because only Arabs can be Muslims.

Even if he was a freaking Muslim, who the **** cares? Good. We have the first Black AND the first Muslim president. Who gives a ****? It's like when people were opposed to JFK just because he was a Catholic. People were freaking out that Kennedy would take his policy from the Vatican. How do you feel about that one, Ben?

If Catholics had killed 3000 innocents at WTC and were trying to erect a basilica, I'd have a problem with that too.

[flash9286]

I'm sorry, that's bull****. Obama has not really changed anything except added a healthcare law and put through a stimulus, a stimulus BUSH started. The Iraq War's "success" was Bush's troop surge, and Obama has basically not changed ANYTHING in Afghanistan. So this "it's still Bush's fault TWO YEARS LATER" argument is a crock of ****.

Reading comprehension, please learn it. Obama made campaign promises while Bush was still in office, not 2 years later. No where did I blame Bush for anything that is happening now, not that that isn't the case for some things. And if you think the only thing that was happened during the presidency of Bush that liberals want fixed are the Iraq & Afghanistan war and healthcare, then you are delusional.

[Hauldren Collider]

Oh christ. Obama made hundreds of campaign promises and you believe that it's because Bush broke so many things rather than him just pandering to every voter group in existence? I think I understood your post perfectly fine, and you are not only naive, but fail to grasp the concept that presidents have to present more than just "we won't be the guy who's in office right now".

[flash9286]

I don't buy that Obama pandered more than any other person running for president, which is what seems to be your suggestion. If your argument is increased campaign promises equals more pandering, there are other reasonable explanations that are equally likely, e.g. Obama was more specific (i.e. his blueprint), increased media coverage, distancing himself from an unpopular president, his need to establish policy positions since he was relatively unknown compared to past presidential candidates, etc.
If you understood my post correctly I wouldn't have had to correct you. And given that we have a two party system, which usually means that on contentious issues presidents of opposing parties are going to be at odds, I really don't have a problem with any president of a different party than the current president from presenting himself or herself as "[I] won't be the guy who's in office right now."

[Barnabas]

BREAKING NEWS! - Is Barack Obama Really A Saudi / Muslim "Plant" in the White House?



Obama bows to the Saudi King

[Imran Siddiqui]

Obama has not really changed anything except added a healthcare law and put through a stimulus, a stimulus BUSH started.

Regardless of what side you were on, I'd think health care reform, a financial reform bill, and a stimulus (which is not at all foreseeable that Bush would have done) is pretty big and claiming "Obama has not really changed anything" is kinda silly.

[Boris Godunov]

Are we seriously going to play this game when his prepared remarks left the impression in the media covering the event and the audience that he was in favor of the project and the very next day he cowardly walked the statement back?

Why should anyone expect your interpretation to be any different from the above?

Again, cite me some contradictory statements between one day and the next. I do find it hilarious that you're basically saying that if the media portrays something a certain way, that must be how it is.

[Elok]

If Catholics had killed 3000 innocents at WTC and were trying to erect a basilica, I'd have a problem with that too.

Actually, to make this even comparable, you'd have to say something more like "If some crazy-ass Christian militia from the sticks killed 3000 innocents at WTC and a totally unrelated Christian group wanted to build a community center there, I'd have a problem with that too."

No, I don't expect to change your mind, but that remark of yours really illuminates the immense ignorance at the heart of this ludicrous "scandal," so I thought I'd use it. We spent most of the last seven years trying to keep the Sunnis and Shiites of Iraq from exterminating one another, yet somehow some cretins still think the billion or so Muslims on this earth are a single monolithic group. It seems the majority of Americans know nothing whatever about Islam, but wish to continue badmouthing it anyway.

Anybody else remember how, back in the Bush days, people kept speculating for months, without anybody apparently noticing the flaw, about how Iran might be helping Al Qaeda in Iraq? Not just morons from middle America, I seem to recall headlines quoting actual members of the intelligence community suggesting that. To my surprise, they didn't follow up by suggesting that the Jesuits were arming Protestant terrorists in Ireland...

[Hauldren Collider]

So you're saying it's implausible that Iran would want to fund terrorism? What?

Also I don't get your signature. Did I really say that?

[Elok]

Yes, you did, or at least I think it was you. In the Civ5 forum a few weeks ago, IIRC. If you'd prefer, I'll remove the credit.

And it's not implausible that Iran would want to fund terrorism, but it is utterly implausible that they would want to fund Al Qaeda. AQ (like its many imitators/branches in places like Iraq) is a group of Sunni Muslim extremists, while Iran is strictly a Shiite stronghold. AQ regards Shiites as slightly lower than pigs but just barely above Americans. Given that Iraq is right next door to Iran, and the former was undergoing a violent conflict between the two sects at the time the allegation was made...it's a pretty damned idiotic thing for supposed intelligence analysts to say. If the Iranians had wanted to simply further the conflict for whatever reason, they'd have done better to funnel cash to the Shiite militias, who were a little outnumbered anyway.

[DaShi]

Why should anyone expect your interpretation to be any different from the above?

Again, cite me some contradictory statements between one day and the next. I do find it hilarious that you're basically saying that if the media portrays something a certain way, that must be how it is.

This is DD you're talking about:

How Fox Betrayed Petraeus
By FRANK RICH
THE “ground zero mosque,” as you may well know by now, is not at ground zero. It’s not a mosque but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room. It’s not going to determine President Obama’s political future or the elections of 2010 or 2012. Still, the battle that has broken out over this project in Lower Manhattan — on the “hallowed ground” of a shuttered Burlington Coat Factory store one block from the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club — will prove eventful all the same. And the consequences will be far more profound than any midterm election results or any of the grand debates now raging 24/7 over the parameters of tolerance, religious freedom, and the real estate gospel of location, location, location.

Here’s what’s been lost in all the screaming. The prime movers in the campaign against the “ground zero mosque” just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan. The wrecking ball they’re wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America’s already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques.

So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats — that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

You’d think that American hawks invested in the Afghanistan “surge” would not act against their own professed interests. But they couldn’t stop themselves from placing cynical domestic politics over country. The ginned-up rage over the “ground zero mosque” was not motivated by a serious desire to protect America from the real threat of terrorists lurking at home and abroad — a threat this furor has in all likelihood exacerbated — but by the potential short-term rewards of winning votes by pandering to fear during an election season.

We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy’s evolution. He reports that there was zero reaction to the “ground zero mosque” from the front-line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page article on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingraham, filling in on “The O’Reilly Factor,” interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project’s organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingraham gave the plans her blessing. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” she said. “I like what you’re trying to do.”

As well Ingraham might. Rauf is no terrorist. He has been repeatedly sent on speaking tours by the Bush and Obama State Departments alike to promote tolerance in Arab and Muslim nations. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic reported last week, Rauf gave a moving eulogy at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan, at the Manhattan synagogue B’nai Jeshurun. Pearl’s father was in attendance. The Park51 board is chock-full of Christians and Jews. Perhaps the most threatening thing about this fledgling multi-use community center, an unabashed imitator of the venerable (and Jewish) 92nd Street Y uptown, is its potential to spawn yet another coveted, impossible-to-get-into Manhattan private preschool.

In the five months after The Times’s initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up, jettisoning Ingraham’s benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper’s inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X’s illegitimate son. Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on, promoting the incendiary libel that the “radical Islamists” behind the “ground zero mosque” were tantamount either to neo-Nazis in Skokie (according to a Wall Street Journal columnist) or actual Nazis (per Newt Gingrich).

These patriots have never attacked the routine Muslim worship services at another site of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon. Their sudden concern for ground zero is suspect to those of us who actually live in New York. All but 12 Republicans in the House voted against health benefits for 9/11 responders just last month. Though many of these ground-zero watchdogs partied at the 2004 G.O.P. convention in New York exploiting 9/11, none of them protested that a fellow Republican, the former New York governor George Pataki, so bollixed up the management of the World Trade Center site that nine years on it still lacks any finished buildings, let alone a permanent memorial.

The Fox patron saint Sarah Palin calls Park51 a “stab in the heart” of Americans who “still have that lingering pain from 9/11.” But her only previous engagement with the 9/11 site was when she used it as a political backdrop for taking her first questions from reporters nearly a month after being named to the G.O.P. ticket. (She was so eager to grab her ground zero photo op that she defied John McCain’s just-announced “suspension” of their campaign.) Her disingenuous piety has been topped only by Bernie Kerik, who smuggled a Twitter message out of prison to register his rage at the ground zero desecration. As my colleague Clyde Haberman reminded us, such was Kerik’s previous reverence for the burial ground of 9/11 that he appropriated an apartment overlooking the site (and designated for recovery workers) for an extramarital affair.

At the Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation, the hypocrisy is, if anything, thicker. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified “reports” that Park51 has “money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas.” As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a member of the Saudi royal family. Perhaps last week’s revelation that News Corp. has poured $1 million into G.O.P. campaign coffers was a fiendishly clever smokescreen to deflect anyone from following the far greater sum of Saudi money (a $3 billion stake) that has flowed into Murdoch enterprises, or the News Corp. money (at least $70 million) recently invested in a Saudi media company.

Were McCain in the White House, Fox and friends would have kept ignoring Park51. But it’s an irresistible target in our current election year because it revives the most insidious anti-Obama narrative of the many Fox promoted in the previous election year: Obama the closet Muslim and secret madrassa alumnus. In the much discussed latest Pew poll, a record number of Americans (nearing 20 percent) said that our Christian president practices Islam. And they do not see that as a good thing. Existing or proposed American mosques hundreds and even thousands of miles from ground zero, from Tennessee to Wisconsin to California, are now under siege.

After 9/11, President Bush praised Islam as a religion of peace and asked for tolerance for Muslims not necessarily because he was a humanitarian or knew much about Islam but because national security demanded it. An America at war with Islam plays right into Al Qaeda’s recruitment spiel. This month’s incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing is a national security disaster for that reason — Osama bin Laden’s “next video script has just written itself,” as the former F.B.I. terrorist interrogator Ali Soufan put it — but not just for that reason. America’s Muslim partners, those our troops are fighting and dying for, are collateral damage. If the cleric behind Park51 — a man who has participated in events with Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, for heaven’s sake — is labeled a closet terrorist sympathizer and a Nazi by some of the loudest and most powerful conservative voices in America, which Muslims are not?

In the latest CNN poll, American opposition is at an all-time high to both the ostensibly concluded war in Iraq (69 percent) and the endless one in Afghanistan (62 percent). Now, when the very same politicians and pundits who urge infinite patience for Afghanistan slime Muslims as Nazis, they will have to explain that they are not talking about Hamid Karzai or his corrupt narco-thug government or the questionably loyal Afghan armed forces our own forces are asked to entrust with their lives. The hawks will have to make the case that American troops should make the ultimate sacrifice to build a Nazi — Afghan, I mean — nation and that economically depressed taxpayers should keep paying for it. Good luck with that.

Poor General Petraeus. Over the last week he has been ubiquitous in the major newspapers and on television as he pursues a publicity tour to pitch the war he’s inherited. But have you heard any buzz about what he had to say? Any debate? Any anything? No one was listening and no one cared. Everyone was too busy yelling about the mosque.

It’s poignant, really. Even as America’s most venerable soldier returned from the front to valiantly assume the role of Willy Loman, the product he was selling was being discredited and discontinued by his own self-proclaimed allies at home.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22rich.html?_r=1&ref=homepage&src=me&pagewanted=print