Frank Rich's Excellent OPED about the "Ground Zero Mosque"

[BrklynLiberal]

If this has already been posted, feel free to delete"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22rich.html

How Fox Betrayed Petraeus
By FRANK RICH

<snip>

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?

<snip>

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.

<snip>

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.

<snip>

[LaurenG]

1. I hadn't seen this yet

and doesn't he hit the nail on the head.

[Loge23]

2. With neighbors like this....

It was a terrific piece by Rich - his best in weeks.
I loved how he pointed out how the New York Dolls Gentlemen Club is also only blocks from the site, along with Bernie Kerik's love nest which actually overlooks the site.
Lunacy indeed!

[Bluenorthwest]

3. Off topic, but the New York Dolls Gentleman's Club brings to

mind disturbing images of David Johansen twisting on a pole wearing tasseled pasties.

[Loge23]

4. ..as Buster Poindexter! (eom)

[certainot]

5. rich makes the usual mistake made by mainstream and left analysts

again rich analyzes as if the talk radio monopoly doesn't exist, while it dominates politics and media right under the left's nose manly because it hurts their heads to listen to it and there is no written record of what the RW think tanks are feeding the limbaugh hanntys every day.

recently rich referenced obama as 'messiah', channeling a limbaugh and sons meme (worked since obama got in) without even knowing about it. and again and again most in media and politics give major credit to fox, which would be a tenth it's imprint if it didn't have 1000 coordinated radio stations doing the ground work for it's lying and absurdities and reinforcing it all day long even before prime time. while the media (including gwynn iffil on pbs) keeps claiming obama's mention of the 'mosque' turned this into a national issue they are completely ignorant to the fact that 1000 radio stations have been blasting this molehill into a mountain for weeks prior.

[BrklynLiberal]

7. You are saying the truth. Framing the issues and defining the debates does not seem to be the

strong suit for the Dems.

They have to start reading, studying, memorizing and acting upon the advice and writings of George Lakoff...

If I had $50 for every time I have mentioned his name in the past few years, I would be able to pay my rent for a decade.

My latest attempt:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=8995718&mesg_id=8995758

[certainot]

8. rich makes good points but the ability of the left to

use those points and frame a counter attack re lakoff is about impossible- every time the left starts to get the advantage, and they usually have to rely on common sense and irrefutable truth, the RW talk machine cranks up and it might take a few days or a few weeks but pretty soon a new distraction moves out in front. obama has the loudest voice on a given day but after a few days or weeks of a six hour tag team chewing of reframing and distortion from the rw think tanks through limbaugh hannity, and then all the local wannabes after and between them, they show who has the real bully pulpit.

[BrklynLiberal]

9. Guess Will Rogers had it right: I don't belong to an organized political party; I'm a Democrat.

[Doctor_J]

10. Their "framing" is not the problem

the fact that 0.01% of Big Media on their side is the problem.

[Douglas Carpenter]

6. kick and recommend!!