Admittedly a provocative headline, but during his trip to NYC today, how many times will Obama superfluously assure Muslims that we are not at with them? How many times will Obama note that America is no better or more important than any other place but insist that we hold ourselves to unprecedented levels of high-minded restraint in the wake of Osama's long-awaited death?
Will Obama mark the occasion at Ground Zero with support for the Ground Zero Mosque/Osama bin Laden Islamic Memorial Center?
What do you think?
On Obama's New York City schedule today:
Barack Obama is scheduled to arrive at Kennedy Airport on Air Force One at 10:40 a.m.
He will then head to Manhattan to meet with members of the city's police and fire departments as well as Port Authority police.
Obama will travel to Ground Zero for a wreath-laying ceremony starting at 1:25 p.m.
Afterwards, he will have a private meeting at the Sept. 11 Memorial Museum with 50 9/11 victims' families selected by the White House.
We should befocusing on issues relating to the upcoming elections, but this is quite a remarkable distraction development... Last night, the Ground Zero Imam provided a new rationale for building his 9-11-11 MegaMosque, even in the face overwhelming opposition from New Yorkers and Americans across the country:
“If we move from that location, the story will be the radicals have taken over the discourse, the headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack. Our national security now hinges on how we negotiate this, how we speak about it. The battlefront is between moderates of all sides… and the radicals on all sides.”
Moving the project to another location would strengthen Islamist radicals’ ability to recruit followers and will likely increase violence against Americans, the imam said."
Let's get to the heart of the matter. Apparently, if Mr. Feisal Abdul Rauf moves his controversial project down the street, radical Muslims will feel defeated and they will become so upset they will become a threat to our national security. Alternatively, if the Park51 Landing Gear Mosque stays as close to the Ground Zero crater as possible, violent Islamic extremists will be appeased, i.e., the terrorists win.
On the other hand, our liberal self-anointed betters have astutely pointed out that if opponents of the Park51 Healing Outreach Cordoba Mosque are successful in persuading the Ground Zero Imam to take his divisive prayer palace elsewhere, Islamic extremists will gleefully exploit that story to recruit new extremists. In that case, the terrorists win.
Is this a win-win for Islamic terrorists? I'm confused!
Rauf should not concern himself with the opinions of those who invent ridiculous excuses to kill innocent Americans. Moreover, if the peace-loving imam really wants "to give back to the city and the country that has given us so much," surely he must want to respond in a gracious fashion to the wishes of the huge majority of Americans (including New Yorkers) who think Mr. Rauf should pack up and go build his monument in a location where 9-11 landing gear did not fall.
Exit question: The good imam seems pretty confident that unhappy pro-Park51 extremists would pose a bigger security threat any of the anti-Park51 folks. I wonder why...
Exit thought: Someone should ask Rauf what he means by "giving back."
The debate over the Ground Zero Mosque has been a delightful one, but the elections are right around the corner, so I'm going to tear myself away from the hope, healing and conciliatory dialog. But before I put the Mosque story on hold, here's a little video highlighting the evolution of Obama's appreciation for our First Amendment rights...
Image: Chris Christie looking out for taxpayers and polling well
by the Left Coast Rebel
Now and then a story comes along that smashes ruling class Republican orthodoxy to pieces. Typically the squishy, statist-appeasing Republican leadership trembles at the sight of blood or a good fight for the American taxpayer, left to cower in the shadows --- reading the New York Times --- betraying the party's limited government platform.
And then in the meantime these pols then lose public favor and elections as recent polling has shown that America is 40+ % self-identified as conservative.
But what about tough, plain spoken leaders like Chris Christie?
I'm sure that he is hated by the New Jersey taxpayer-pillaging interest groups/liberal-leftist lobby. And New Jersey is a deep blue state too. But what does the overall public in the state think of him and his tough governance?
New Jersey Online: The Quinnipiac University survey of 1,190 registered voters found 51 percent approve of Christie’s job performance, while 36 percent disapprove. Voters are also more likely to identify Christie as a “leader” (51 percent) than as a “bully” (39 percent) when asked to choose.
It’s a significant improvement from June, when voters were split down the middle on both Christie’s approval rating and whether he’s more of a bully or a leader.[…]
Christie’s ratings are better than what his predesessor, Democrat Jon Corzine, chalked up in his first summer. Coming off a battle with the Legislature that temporarily shut down state government, Corzine had a 44 percent approval rating in a July 2006 Quinnipiac poll.[…]
Garden State voters are split on how they feel about President Obama, with 47 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving — his lowest rating in any New Jersey Quinnipiac poll. [MORE]
Clifton easily sums this news up:
If Chris Christie can make the hard choices in a blue state like New Jersey and no suffer from it, then national Republicans need not worry about making the hard choices when they take control of Congress. The American people have pretty much figured out that the bill for decades of reckless spending has come due.They are pretty much ready to take the harsh medicine needed to put our financial house in order. All that is required is a dose of honesty from Washington and change in the national narrative.
Christie has successfully changed the narrative by casting the tax payer as the victim and government largess as the victimizer. Christie will continue to be a success so long as he stays clear of foolish comments like opining on Snooki and the Ground Zero Mosque.
Republicans running now and running the show after November - do you have the cajones to take on the statist special interests that are bleeding the wealth and future of our nation?
"The Ground Zero mosque is not a bridge for peace. If it were, it would not open on September 11th within walking distance from the hole where America’s heart is..."
Thank you for the much-needed reminder, No Sheeples.
So many have forgotten what happened on that day, it's almost hard to believe that it hasn't even been 9 years yet.
The 9/11 attack(s!) weren't just an assault on a random target in lower Manhattan. Remember the planes that went down in Virginia and Pennsylvania?
Those men were going after the heart of our society that day... it was an attack on all of Western Civilization. The attackers weren't a little band of wingnuts, cut off from the rest of the world. They were part of an international islamic network that is still alive and well.
The people who want to build a mosque at ground zero aren't interested in dialog and healing. If they were, they would be talking. Where will the money come from? Why build your mosque in the debris field of the most horrific attack in American history? Why are you insisting on ripping open "old" wounds?
Defiance does not foster good will. Silence does not engender trust.
Interesting factoids from a new survey by the Pew Research Center:
Nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009.
A plurality of Americans say 43% they do not know what Obama's religion is.
Only 34% of Americans say Obama is a Christian, down from 51% in October 2008.
Eleven percent of those who say Obama is a Muslim say they learned of this through Obama's own words and behavior.
Among Democrats, only 46% say Obama is a Christian, down from 55% in March 2009.
The share of Republicans who say Obama is a Muslim has nearly doubled over the past year and a half – from 17% to 31%.
Other fun facts:
Among all the subgroups examined in the Pew survey, "moderate/liberal" Republicans were least inclined to say Obama is a Christian (34%).
Only 39% of "conservative/moderate" Democrats think Obama is a Christian.
There is widespread agreement that politicians should be religious: 61% say that is important that members of Congress have strong religious beliefs; only 34% disagree.
I'm inclined to say that Obama's religion is Obama.
Update: Neo-neocon has a very sensible opinion: "I’m with that 43% who don’t know. I would add that I not only don’t know what religion he practices, I don’t know if he practices one—and if he does, I don’t know whether it is for show or because he believes in the tenets of that religion."
...as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable..
Then Obama's toadies started saying things like this:
Obama didn't just stand up for the legal right of the group to build the Islamic center. He voiced powerful support for their moral right to do so as well, casting it as central to American identity. ... Obama went much further than [to acknowledge the legal rights of the project's backers]. He asserted that we must "welcome" and "respect" those of other faiths, suggesting that the group behind the center deserves the same, and said flat out that anything less is un-American.
But just when the professional left thought they had something to cheer about, Obama "clarified" his stance with this:
I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding.
We really didn’t need Obama to tell us that we have freedom of religion in this country. If a message of religious freedom was the essence of what Obama meant to communicate on Friday, his statement was entirely superfluous. We Americans will cherish and defend our First Amendment rights whether or not Obama chooses to acknowledge or to “believe” in them.
Does anyone seriously believe that religious freedom will have been abrogated when the fight over the GZ mosque is finally settled? I, for one, know of no one who wants to violate the Bill of Rights with their opposition to the GZ mosque.
Bottom line: The conflict over the GZ mosque is NOT a fight over religious freedom. The dispute over the GZ mosque is a fight about abuses of that freedom. It’s a high-stakes debate about a group that claims that it wants to foster forgiveness and reconciliation, but has chosen to do so with an irresponsible, self-defeating approach that has alienated 70% of the country.
Put this in perspective. When someone like Fred Phelps shows up to disrupt and desecrate a solemn memorial, do we mark the occasion with a cheer for First Amendment rights? No, if we have a shred of decency, we recoil in disgust when we observe that kind of behavior.
Obama could have chosen to point out how stupidly the Cordoba House supporters are acting. Alternatively, he could have quietly ignored their antics. Instead, he chose to go off on a tangent about the importance of our First Amendment rights. If that’s really what Obama thinks this Ground Zero debate is about, then I submit that Obama has all of the sophistication and leadership skills of a third grader.
Lovely. While plans for the Ground Zero Center for Jihad moved full steam ahead, workers were still recovering human remains from the World Trade Center site this year:
New York City officials say a renewed search this year of debris in and around the World Trade Center site has recovered 72 human remains...
The greatest number of remains – 37 – were found from material underneath West Street, a highway on the west side of ground zero. The new debris was uncovered as construction work made new parts of the site accessible.
