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| Finally, a patriot has cracked that dastardly Obama's secret code! |
I mean, it’s really a shame the Republicans don’t have the White House any more and can’t gin up any pre-election “terra terra terra” fear porn. Poor dears. Ginning up anti-Muslim fear is the next best thing, especially when the president of the United States is a Muslim!!!11!!!11!!! ZOMG!!!!
How awfully inventive. Transparent, but inventive.
As Frank Rich observed yesterday, the whole Park51 fauxtroversy is so obviously manufactured, the only thing more appalling is that so few media figures have hit the LexisNexis data base to begin with (and Rich gives proper credit where it's due to Salon.com’s Justin Elliott for doing just that).
One wonders why CNN or The Today Show or Brian Williams or anyone else on the TeeVee hasn't reported any of these facts which Rich mentions in his column:
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.
(By Ingraham he does indeed mean Laura Ingraham. You can watch said "benign take" here.) The controversy started with Murdoch’s propaganda outfit? I’m shocked! CNN and the rest of the media simply repeat the Republican Party talking points? Still shocked! No, I’m not, actually. It was to be expected, because we have an election in a few months and this shit happens every time we have an election in a few months.
So now we have anti-Muslim fear suddenly front page news all across the nation. What a coinky-dinky that we also suddenly have that tired, oft-debunked “Obama is a Muslim” story also suddenly front page news all across the nation.
And I’m sure in a few weeks we’ll have “rumors” of some kind of Al Qaeda/Osama Bin Laden tape which Jerome Corsi suddenly found in a dark cave somewhere. Right next to Obama's Kenyan birth certificate, of course.
Because there’s one thing I know about the Republican Party: they love to recycle old ideas. Scaring the pants off of people has been their winning strategy for years. So we have “Muslims are scary” and “Obama is a Muslim.” All we need to wrap this package up with a bow is “... and they want to kill you, SEE?”
