http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/opinion/18dowd.html?hp
Our Mosque Madness By Maureen Dowd NY Time Op-Ed: August 17, 2010 Washington Maybe, for Barack Obama, it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is. When the president skittered back from his grandiose declaration at an iftar celebration at the White House Friday that Muslims enjoy freedom of religion in America and have the right to build a mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan, he offered a Clintonesque parsing. "I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there," he said the morning after he commented on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. "I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That's what our country is about." Let me be perfectly clear, Mr. Perfectly Unclear President: You cannot take such a stand on a matter of first principle and then take it back the next morning when, lo and behold, Harry Reid goes craven and the Republicans attack. What is so frightening about Fox News? Some critics have said the ultimate victory for Osama and the 9/11 hijackers would be to allow a mosque to be built near ground zero. Actually, the ultimate victory for Osama and the 9/11 hijackers is the moral timidity that would ban a mosque from that neighborhood. Our enemies struck at our heart, but did they also warp our identity? The war against the terrorists is not a war against Islam. In fact, you can't have an effective war against the terrorists if it is a war on Islam. George W. Bush understood this. And it is odd to see Barack Obama less clear about this matter than his predecessor. It's time for W. to weigh in. This - along with immigration reform and AIDS in Africa - was one of his points of light. As the man who twice went to war in the Muslim world, he has something of an obligation to add his anti-Islamophobia to this mosque madness. W. needs to get his bullhorn back out. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are both hyper-articulate former law professors. But Clinton never presented himself as a moral guide to the country. So when he weaseled around, or triangulated on some issues, it was part of his ultra-fallible persona - and consistent with his identity as a New Democrat looking for a Third Way. But Obama presents himself as a paragon of high principle. So when he flops around on things like "don't ask, don't tell" or shrinks back from one of his deepest beliefs about the freedom of religion anywhere and everywhere in America, it's not pretty. Even worse, this is the man who staked his historical reputation on a new and friendlier engagement with the Muslim world. The man who extended his hand to Tehran has withdrawn his hand from Park Place. Paranoid about looking weak, Obama allowed himself to be weakened by perfectly predictable Republican hysteria. Which brings us to Newt Gingrich. Gingrich fancies himself an intellectual, a historian, a deep thinker - the opposite number, you might say, of Sarah Palin. Yet here is Gingrich attempting to out-Palin Palin on Fox News: "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington." There is no more demagogic analogy than that. Have any of the screaming critics noticed that there already are two mosques in the same neighborhood - one four blocks away and one 12 blocks away. Should they be dismantled? And what about the louche liquor stores and strip clubs in the periphery of the sacred ground? By now you have to be willfully blind not to know that the imam in charge of the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is the moderate Muslim we have allegedly been yearning for. So look where we are. The progressive Democrat in the White House, the first president of the United States with Muslim roots, has been morally trumped by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, two moderate Republicans who have spoken bravely and lucidly about not demonizing and defaming an entire religion in the name of fighting its radicals. Criticizing his fellow Republicans, Governor Christie said that while he understood the pain and sorrow of family members who lost loved ones on 9/11, "we cannot paint all of Islam with that brush." He charged the president with trying to turn the issue into a political football. But that is not quite right. It already was a political football and the president fumbled it. *** http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tracy-rosenberg/what-did-they-mean-by-tha_b_687187.html What DID They Mean by That? A Week of Truthiness and Media By Tracy Rosenberg, Executive Director, Media Alliance HuffingtonPost: August 19, 2010 01:57 AM Ever had one of those weeks where the distance between what was said and what was done stretches way out into the blue yonder? In my job as director of Media Alliance, many things pass my desk that generate moments of disbelief, but the 1st week of August was truly remarkable. On Monday, I got a tip about Bloomberg News, the business-oriented polling, news and analysis outfit. Their website at Bloomberg.com states "In 1981 Bloomberg started out with one core belief: that bringing transparency to capital markets through access to information could increase capital flows, produce economic growth and jobs, and significantly reduce the cost of doing business." So far, so good. I share their core belief that bringing transparency to capital markets can only be a good thing. So what market is Bloomberg News bringing transparency to this week? You guessed it: oil-drilling. Specifically, the temporary moratorium on deepwater drilling imposed by the Obama administration after the Deepwater Horizon spill. Bloomberg reported, somewhat stunningly to those of us who think we know the pulse of current opinion, "Americans in 73% Majority Oppose Deepwater Drilling Ban." The first line of the story read "Most Americans oppose President Barack Obama's ban on deepwater oil drilling in response to BP's Gulf of Mexico spill." That's quite a headline. 73% of Americans rarely agree on anything, much less trivializing environmental catastrophe. What was the original poll data that generated this startling fact? Here it is: Do you think this spill proves offshore drilling is just too dangerous and should be banned in U.S waters or was this a freak accident and offshore drilling can be made safer and should not be banned? So the only choice for any poll respondent who thought the Gulf disaster was more than a "freak accident" was to advocate banning all offshore drilling forever in US waters. Talk about a limited set of options. The stated subject of the poll; a temporary ban on only deepwater drilling until industry demonstrates improved safety procedures. What does the poll question have to do with the subject of the poll? Absolutely nothing. Then along came Wednesday. On Wednesday, word leaked out that Google, the glorious leader of the Open Internet Coalition, had inked a secret deal with Verizon Corporation to exempt wireless internet from any pending net neutrality regulations and while they were at it, prioritize Google-owned content on Verizon's wireless and wire line networks. What this means is the foremost corporate champion of an open Internet did a 180 degree about-face about where we're headed in the future. Regulations are apparently okay for people still plugged into walls, but mobile users will play by corporate rules or more to the point, by no rules at all. Public interest groups had been chafing for over a month at the FCC decision to open private negotiations with industry on the contentious net neutrality issue. Who was at the table to represent consumers in these talks? Just Google? More sanguine elements of the public interest community took heart at Google's stalwart history of not being evil (at least outside of China) and their vociferous leadership of the pro-net neutrality industry cohort group, The Open Internet Coalition. Yet somehow, despite the seeming clarity of the English words - "open" and "Internet"- the Googlezon deal was announced. Shortly afterwards, the industry-only talks collapsed due to the upsetness of AT&T and Skype at being left out of the big corporate sell-out deal. Less sanguine elements of the public interest community sang a sad refrain of "remember, corporations are not your friends." Again. Finally it was Friday, On Friday, I came across a local "Save KPFA" benefit that evening in my hometown. I was interested because I am on the board of the Berkeley community radio station (the first of its kind in the country). How wonderful someone was having a benefit for KPFA in this horrible economy. Reading further, the event turned out not to be a benefit for KPFA the radio station, but a benefit for a group called Save KPFA. Now I have some experience with groups called Save KPFA, Take Back KPFA, Save Pacifica and so on. I have police records (3 of them) from the widely-publicized Pacifica democratization struggle of a decade ago. What was this new Save KPFA? Must we save it again? It is the nature of aging that first, we fight the power, and then we become the power. I could accept that some raging firebrand twenty-somethings were picking up a call-to-arms and demanding something better from progressive media than they were getting. But much to my surprise, Save KPFA turned out to be a bunch of folks in their sixties and seventies (and maybe eighties, too). Their call to arms? The cause to donate my money? More professionalism and more hierarchical structure. Run the famously radical radio station like a proper corporation and get rid of all this community empowerment mumbo-jumbo. Fight the power, indeed. I guess if you can't beat the Googlezon, the only thing left is to impersonate the Googlezon. Here's hoping for a week to come that is a bit less reminiscent of Comedy Central. Follow Tracy Rosenberg on Twitter: www.twitter.com/twrling ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
