Stickybuffalo.com

I kind of just want to record these comments, here, for myself as much as anything.

The context of the following quotes is America’s latest useless, brainless, hysterical hissyfit, that over the Cordoba center. The Cordoba center will be more familiar to most people, unfortunately, by its condensed and intentionally-charged, as well as critically-misleading name, “the Ground Zero mosque.” As usual, thanks to our “liberal media” for sacrificing both accuracy and objectivity in favor of attention-getting and, not coincidentally, inflammatory phrasing.

I should offer a gold star to The Economist, however, for not only its reasoned and mature perspective on the matter, but for absolutely piling on. A praiseworthy effort.

Sadly, many of America’s so-called “leaders,” have unfortunately been lacking any similar commitment to those national ideals (not to mention the plain, old-fashioned concept of “standing up for what’s right”) which are apparently inconvenient just now.

Again, credit where it’s due to Michael Bloomberg, for example. One might think that having both New York’s mayor and the highest ideals of America offering cover would be enough for more of the nation’s pols; at the very least for those who aren’t up for re-election.

But President Obama, who has two years left in his first term, and who initially delivered a surprisingly admirable defense of religious freedom in both practice and theory, apparently just couldn’t cope with having people mad at him. Again.

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.

One of those rights, in other words, that (like the filibuster when Republicans are the Senate majority, for example) you are entitled to so long as you don’t want to, you know, actually exercise when a majority prefers that you don’t.

Harry “Broken” Reid, rather more predictably, has taken much the same cowering stance, a spokestool saying that he “thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else.” Real profile in courage, there, Har.

I’m completely baffled, meanwhile, by Howard Dean, who has also waded into the shallow end with comments including:

• ‘a real affront to people who lost their lives,’
• ‘a good reasonable compromise could be worked out,’ and
• ‘another site would be a better idea.’

Et tu, Howard? What the fuck? Reid can at least claim the excuse of being afraid to lose his job, even if that’s no justification. Why is Dean piping up with this? Honestly, I suddenly feel almost glad that Dean will be perennially linked to the manufactured histrionics dubbed by sneering, meanspirited little people in journalism (i.e. many if not most of them) “The Dean Scream.” He certainly can’t claim any ethical superiority, now.

And yes, so long as I’m posting for the record, the instigators of this stupid and hateful playground brawl should not be excused just because one can’t really expect any better of them. Republicans are scum, and the many Americans who are eating up their bigoted hatemongering are looking pretty scummy, too. But the fact that reactionaries are petty and evil is nothing new; I don’t need to make a reminder to myself of particularly eggregious episodes of that pattern.

You other guys, though; this really is a new low. I’m not going to forget it, either.

"We had a spine, but we took it out for a while because it's so much easier and more comfortable to bend without it right now"