Who Could Have Predicted This State of Affairs?

For some time now I have wanted to voice my disgust with the current rampage of the growing percentage of Americans who “want to take the country back.” Back to where? Back to when? These so-called Constitutionalists have either not read the Constitution or want to believe the Founders didn’t really mean what they wrote down at the beginning of our democracy. (I have read it and keep a pocket copy handy to reaffirm its contents in the face of the demagoguery of the idiots wearing hats with teabags hanging from them.)

Don’t get me wrong. Every person has a right to express his/her opinion. What they DO NOT have is the right to make up their own facts and present them as Truth.

In my email today I received this copy of an editorial by Frank Rich of the New York Times. It pretty much reflected my views on a number of current topics, so I decided to reproduce it here for those who have not seen it. To some extent, it saves me from raising my blood pressure over what is happening in this country today.

How Fox Betrayed Petraeus
By FRANK RICH
August 21, 2010 – New York Times

THE “ground zero mosque,” as you may well know by now, is not at ground zero. It’s not a mosque but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room. It’s not going to determine President Obama’s political future or the elections of 2010 or 2012. Still, the battle that has broken out over this project in Lower Manhattan — on the “hallowed ground” of a shuttered Burlington Coat Factory store one block from the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club — will prove eventful all the same. And the consequences will be far more profound than any midterm election results or any of the grand debates now raging 24/7 over the parameters of tolerance, religious freedom, and the real estate gospel of location, location, location.

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?
You’d think that American hawks invested in the Afghanistan “surge” would not act against their own professed interests. But they couldn’t stop themselves from placing cynical domestic politics over country. The ginned-up rage over the “ground zero mosque” was not motivated by a serious desire to protect America from the real threat of terrorists lurking at home and abroad — a threat this furor has in all likelihood exacerbated — but by the potential short-term rewards of winning votes by pandering to fear during an election season.
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.
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.

The Fox patron saint Sarah Palin calls Park51 a “stab in the heart” of Americans who “still have that lingering pain from 9/11.” But her only previous engagement with the 9/11 site was when she used it as a political backdrop for taking her first questions from reporters nearly a month after being named to the G.O.P. ticket. (She was so eager to grab her ground zero photo op that she defied John McCain’s just-announced “suspension” of their campaign.) Her disingenuous piety has been topped only by Bernie Kerik, who smuggled a Twitter message out of prison to register his rage at the ground zero desecration. As my colleague Clyde Haberman reminded us, such was Kerik’s previous reverence for the burial ground of 9/11 that he appropriated an apartment overlooking the site (and designated for recovery workers) for an extramarital affair.

At the Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation, the hypocrisy is, if anything, thicker. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified “reports” that Park51 has “money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas.” As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a member of the Saudi royal family. Perhaps last week’s revelation that News Corp. has poured $1 million into G.O.P. campaign coffers was a fiendishly clever smokescreen to deflect anyone from following the far greater sum of Saudi money (a $3 billion stake) that has flowed into Murdoch enterprises, or the News Corp. money (at least $70 million) recently invested in a Saudi media company.
Were McCain in the White House, Fox and friends would have kept ignoring Park51. But it’s an irresistible target in our current election year because it revives the most insidious anti-Obama narrative of the many Fox promoted in the previous election year: Obama the closet Muslim and secret madrassa alumnus. In the much discussed latest Pew poll, a record number of Americans (nearing 20 percent) said that our Christian president practices Islam. And they do not see that as a good thing. Existing or proposed American mosques hundreds and even thousands of miles from ground zero, from Tennessee to Wisconsin to California, are now under siege.
After 9/11, President Bush praised Islam as a religion of peace and asked for tolerance for Muslims not necessarily because he was a humanitarian or knew much about Islam but because national security demanded it. An America at war with Islam plays right into Al Qaeda’s recruitment spiel. This month’s incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing is a national security disaster for that reason — Osama bin Laden’s “next video script has just written itself,” as the former F.B.I. terrorist interrogator Ali Soufan put it — but not just for that reason. America’s Muslim partners, those our troops are fighting and dying for, are collateral damage. If the cleric behind Park51 — a man who has participated in events with Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, for heaven’s sake — is labeled a closet terrorist sympathizer and a Nazi by some of the loudest and most powerful conservative voices in America, which Muslims are not?

In the latest CNN poll, American opposition is at an all-time high to both the ostensibly concluded war in Iraq (69 percent) and the endless one in Afghanistan (62 percent). Now, when the very same politicians and pundits who urge infinite patience for Afghanistan slime Muslims as Nazis, they will have to explain that they are not talking about Hamid Karzai or his corrupt narco-thug government or the questionably loyal Afghan armed forces our own forces are asked to entrust with their lives. The hawks will have to make the case that American troops should make the ultimate sacrifice to build a Nazi — Afghan, I mean — nation and that economically depressed taxpayers should keep paying for it. Good luck with that.

Poor General Petraeus. Over the last week he has been ubiquitous in the major newspapers and on television as he pursues a publicity tour to pitch the war he’s inherited. But have you heard any buzz about what he had to say? Any debate? Any anything? No one was listening and no one cared. Everyone was too busy yelling about the mosque.

It’s poignant, really. Even as America’s most venerable soldier returned from the front to valiantly assume the role of Willy Loman, the product he was selling was being discredited and discontinued by his own self-proclaimed allies at home.

OMG, This Would Be Funny If It Weren't So Damn Stupid!

For most of the time since Barack Obama was elected I have been having a good laugh at the loonies out there that cannot get over the fact that the nation overwhelmingly elected a black man to the highest office in the land. Instead they continue to foist upon us one of the wacko false fantasies such as his not being a citizen. Will they never stop coming out of the woodwork? These guys and gals remind me of backwoods hillbillies who are so isolated they still speak the “King’s English” as in they just got off the boat!

But now it is just too much. While network news programs don’t keep pushing these fantasy conspiracy theories about Obama, the cable networks can’t get by a single day without citing new or revised stories by the likes of Liz Cheney, Fox “News” personalities, Dr. Orly Taitz, DDS, the attorney defending Army Reserve Major Stephan Cook, who refused to re-deploy to Afghanistan because Obama is not legally our Commander In Chief because he was not born in the United States. ( She lost her first suit, but has since filed a second one. Oh, by the way “Dr” Taitz, DDS, is also an attorney and a real estate agent.) You should have seen John Stewart handle this one! Then there is Rep. Bill Posey, a freshman Republican from Florida. He is presenting a bill in Congress that will require anyone running for President be required to furnish a “legitimate” birth certificate. I’m not sure what will constitute a “legitimate” certificate, since they haven’t accepted that Barack Obama’s certificate is valid.

Warren Holstein, a satirist, in his Huffington Post article posted July 24, 2009 entitled: Liz Cheney: Birther of Crazier Conspiracies, list three things he identifies as Top 3 conspiracy theories. These are some of the crazier theories out there. I’m going to briefly list them here, but you can read his full article for yourself by clicking on the title.

Number 1 was the theory that Obama’s father was recruited to assist in the staged Apollo Moon Landing/walk in the desert somewhere.

Number 2 was that Obama was the third shooter on the grassy knoll from which Kennedy was shot. Never mind that Obama would have only been two years old and hardly could have handled the 6.5 MM caliber Carcano rifle.

Number 3 theorized that Obama is not only an alien, as in born in a foreign country, but also he is an alien, as in from outer space.

Puleeeze folks! Where do these loonies get this stuff? I think they are watching entirely too much science fiction TV.

Unfortunately, the bottom line in these conspiricies seems to be that there is still a significant radical section of the populace that just cannot accept that an African American has been elected to serve the nation. Bigotry and racist hate speech are still a problem in this country. I personally know people who consider themselves upstanding and unbiased who have severe blind spots when it comes to the color of a person’s skin and who are easily duped into believing the conspiracy theories that are circulating. They do not realize they are expressing bigotry or racism because they attach themselves to other theories, such as the birth certificate issue, which are not in themselves based in racism.

I do not expect this article to change anyone’s opinion. I guess I hope that those who read my blog are not counted among those reported on here. In any case, I could not restrain myself any longer. It is simply too scary to think of what can happen when some one or some group takes it upon themselves to take care of the problem by doing something stupid. We have seen this before too many times in our short history as a nation. I pray daily that wisdom and love will prevail in the minds and hearts of all of us and that we will see through personality to the spiritual core reality that abides within each of us, and that if allowed, will emerge to heal our differences and bless our nation.

On The Occasion Following the Inauguration of Barack Obama As President of the United States of America

This is very difficult for me to write about. It is now more than a week since the inauguration. I have waited to post this article in order to be certain I wanted to voice these concerns. On the day after the inauguration of Barack Obama, I was basking in the sense of hope and the realization of accomplishment that we have risen above the bigotry and racial separation that has long limited our full flowering as a people and as a nation. As I rode this wave of enthusiasm about the opportunities now open to us I was brought down to earth with a thud as I realized once again that not everyone feels the same as I do. For some this was still just another election. Still just politics. Still based in self-interest. I guess I am naïve after all. I guess it is too much to hope for that humanity could grasp the real potential for change that is before us. I realized that my path in life had perhaps prepared me to view life differently than many others.

Barack Obama stated in his address that 60 years ago his father would not have been served in a restaurant in the town where he, Barack, now stood taking the oath of office for President. I was so sad because I now realized and remembered what it was like those 60 years ago. I remember the hardship and deprivation and segregation. I did not experience it at that time. As a white person my whole culture and world offered a different set of opportunities and advantages that were taken for granted.

As a child growing up in Portland, Oregon I thought nothing about racial bigotry. I didn’t have any problems thinking about equality or non-equality. As far as I am aware my family exhibited none of the characteristics of racial bigotry. I was raised to respect the individual regardless of heritage or ethnicity. We had a black population and I had no problem with that. Today, I remember that one of the reasons I had no problem with segregation was because that black population was conveniently gathered in their own community. I did not see a black child in grade school. I did not see a black child in high school.

In the late 60s, as a faculty member at seminary, it became quite clear to me that two different worlds co-existed and not in harmony. The school had hired an imposing black man as an adjunct faculty member whose job it was to help bring awareness to our organization of ways we needed to face our white-based operations and open ourselves as Christians to the integration of ideas, cultures and persons within minority communities. It was a tense time of confrontation and it was not easy for many in the white community to understand what all the fuss was about. White people were guilty for the segregationist views that kept minorities in their place. White people often denied they had anything to do with such attitudes. They did not personally hold back minorities from progress.

This naiveté was brought clearly to my attention one day as I conversed with John, the black faculty member. I had asked why there was a general anger against all white people whether they were segregationist or people who never had any encounters with the black community. He said that because I was white I was guilty. It did no good to protest that I felt I had never acted in a way that harmed a black person. He made the point that as part of the white culture I was part of the limitation the black culture had to endure.

It is not my intention here to go into the subsequent details that helped me realize it is not enough to have not personally held segregationist ideas. One must begin a proactive intention to understand the issues and consciously change the cultural position in one’s thinking and acting. To the best of my ability I did that. Being able to attempt these changes among many other attitudinal changes I have made through the years brought me to a point where I tended more toward seeing the likenesses in others rather than the differences. I do not imply that I have perfected this process, but I do know that I have come a long way toward accepting others for who they are rather than requiring them to embody my expectations.

So, again, I have been given the opportunity to see that not everyone thinks as I do. Surprise, surprise! There is still work to do. No, not work to convince others to be what they are not. The work is to be clear about who I am and what I believe. As I make the effort to live what I believe and to share my thoughts and beliefs as clearly as I am able, perhaps others will find something that intrigues them to ask “Why does he believe that?” That, my friends, can be the beginning of openness to new possibilities.

I admit to times of deep discouragement and disappointment in my fellow human beings. That so many hang on to threads of thought that have never produced anything but disappointment is a mystery to me. My conclusion about that to this point is that we have given up our sense of personal responsibility for so long that now we believe it really is someone else’s job to take care of us. While we blame government and politicians for acting without regard for our well being, we at the same time tell them to stay out of our lives. A real community does not work that way. A live community, a successful community, calls on all members to participate in every way they are able. For that positive participation the community prospers and grows and all are served in harmony and satisfaction.

Something more is going on here than concerns about racism. There are major concerns about whether we can rise above politics as usual. It is time to ask ourselves in the context of personal responsibility and what we expect of each other and our government: “What do I believe and why do I believe it? Are my beliefs a positive contribution to my society?”