By FRANK RICH (one of my favorite columnist) 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.
Republicans Want as Many Unemployed People as Possible, Because They Think It Will Get Them Elected.In addition to Davis, who has a history of openly discussing subtle voter suppression techniques, the committee includes
Tom Davis
Just last week Davis admitted to engaging in subtle voter suppression techniques 10/10/08:
I think it's fair to say, yeah, I think it's fair to say we're not going to spend any money educating them on what they need to do but that's what you do in these kinds of elections… I'm just saying in terms of vulnerability of our congressional candidates, you've got to look at these high African American voter urban style districts and recognize that it's not business as usual as a candidate, that you're going to deal with an electorate that is significantly different from what you see in off years. And I just think that's the fact.
It’s no surprise, Tom Davis has encouraged vote suppression before. The Native American newspaper, The Circle reported on November 30, 2004,
In 2004, after a Democratic candidate won a special Congressional election in South Dakota, the power of the Native American voting block was expressed by the former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), ‘If you take out the Indian reservation, we would have won.’… Unfortunately, as the Native voting population turns out in larger numbers, attention to their voting influence can also attract efforts to discourage them on Election Day. One of the most common tactics employed in recent elections has been the challenging of Natives’ voting status by poll watchers on Election Day.”
Cameron Quinn
Cameron Quinn, was a director of the American Center for Voting Rights that according to McClatchy, deployed resources “deployed in battleground states to press for restrictive ID laws and oversee balloting.”
In addition Slate reported,
ACVR's method of argument followed a familiar line, first set out by Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund in his book, Stealing Elections. First, ACVR argued extensively by anecdote, pointing to instances of illegal conduct, such as someone, somewhere registering Mary Poppins to vote. Anecdote would then be coupled with statistics showing problems with voter rolls not being purged to remove voters who had died or moved, leaving open the potential for fraudulent voting at the polls. Finally, the group would claim that the amount of such voter fraud is hard to quantify, because it is after all illegal conduct, hidden from the public. Given this great potential for mischief, and without evidence of actual mischief, allegedly reasonable initiatives such as purging voter rolls and requiring ID seemed the natural solution.
Sound familiar? The article also point out:
cachet would be used to support the passage of onerous voter-identification laws that depress turnout among the poor, minorities, and the elderly—groups more likely to vote Democratic. Where the Bush administration may have failed to nail illegal voters, the effort to suppress minority voting has borne more fruit, as more states pass these laws, and courts begin to uphold them in the name of beating back waves of largely imaginary voter fraud.” The article notes: “the group would claim that the amount of such voter fraud is hard to quantify, because it is after all illegal conduct, hidden from the public. Given this great potential for mischief, and without evidence of actual mischief, allegedly reasonable initiatives such as purging voter rolls and requiring ID seemed the natural solution.
Bill Jones
Jones according to the LA Times:
has advocated an anti-fraud program that includes calling for citizen naturalization numbers and Social Security numbers on registration documents, as well as requiring some form of identification at the time of voting. Reached later in the day, Jones said he supports changes in federal law to permit the monitoring of those who register and vote, but is concerned about the poll-watcher proposal. ‘There is nothing inherently wrong with poll watchers as long as it does not cross the fine line to intimidation as happened with the poll guards’ in 1988 in Orange County, Jones said.
In addition according to the San Francisco Chronicle on 11/1/99:
Jones wants to have people put the number of their driver's license or California identification card on their voter registration card and show some type of ID before they can vote…That proposal has gone nowhere in the state Legislature, which is reluctant to do anything that could discourage people from casting a ballot. ‘There's a need to strike a balance between accessibility and security,’ Charles said. ‘But right now, voting is extremely accessible, but with holes in its security that could lead to fraud.'
Susan Molinari
Molinari has a long history of crying wolf about voter fraud.
According to House Congressional testimony, Molinari, who chaired the Commission on Federal Election Reform, alleged the close victory for John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential race in Wisconsin was due to “illegal votes,” citing the joint task force led by U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic. However, according to the Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal, the “nearly yearlong investigation into voter fraud in 2004 has yielded no evidence of a broad conspiracy to try to steal an election, U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic said.”
And according to House Congressional Testimony, as a Federal Election Reform Commissioner, Molinari argued “that states should adopt photo identification requirements because the Washington race was ‘decided by illegal votes’ and that ‘this fact was established by a lengthy trial and decision of the court.’”
However, a Superior Court decision in Washington State found no evidence of voter fraud, declaring,
While there is evidence of irregularity, as there appears to be in every election, based on the testimony of various county election officials, there is no substantial evidence by clear and convincing evidence that improper conduct or irregularity procured Ms. Gregoire's election to the Office of Governor.
Larry Thompson
Larry Thompson gave Bradley Schlozman his job at the Justice Department.
According to the New York Times, Bradley Schlozman
“made his name in the Bush administration by helping to turn the department away from its historic commitment to protecting the voting rights of minorities. Mr. Schlozman was one of the political appointees who approved Tom DeLay’s Texas redistricting plan and Georgia’s voter ID law, over the objection of career lawyers on the staff, who insisted that both violated the Voting Rights Act.”
Salon reported:
“Less than a week before the 2006 midterm election, in which Missouri was the scene of one of the year's tightest Senate contests, Schlozman announced the indictment of four people for voter fraud. […] The indictments were trumpeted by myriad conservative blogs and such national outlets as Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. More than four months after he announced them -- and after incumbent Republican Sen. Jim Talent lost a close election to Democrat Claire McCaskill – Schlozman’s four indictments have produced one guilty plea.”
In addition the Washington Post reported
“Georgia voter ID program has been the subject of fierce partisan debate since it was approved by the state's Republican-controlled legislature in March. The plan was blocked on constitutional grounds in October by a U.S. District Court judge, who compared the measure to a Jim Crow-era poll tax.”
David Bauder/Sept. 8 2008NEW YORK — MSNBC is replacing Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews as co-anchors of political night coverage with David Gregory, and will use the two newsmen as commentators.
The change reflects tensions between the freewheeling, opinionated MSNBC and the impartial newsgatherers at NBC News. Throughout the primaries and summer, MSNBC argued that Olbermann and Matthews could serve as dispassionate anchors on political news nights and that viewers would accept them in that role, but things fell apart during the conventions.
Gregory, the veteran Washington hand, will anchor MSNBC's coverage of the presidential and vice presidential debates and election night, network spokesman Jeremy Gaines said Sunday. The change was first reported by The New York Times.
The tipping point appears to have come during the GOP convention when Olbermann criticized MSNBC for showing a Sept. 11-themed video prepared by the Republicans.
MSNBC executives, who had publicly defended their anchors' roles while privately monitoring them throughout the political season, made the change over the weekend after discussions with Olbermann. Despite the controversy around him, Olbermann has been a hero with left-leaning viewers and keyed MSNBC's growth among coveted young viewers.
During her acceptance speech last week, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin talked about the "Washington elite" not accepting her qualifications for the job. Some delegates on the convention floor began chanting, "N-B-C, N-B-C."
Olbermann began to have difficulty keeping his opinions in check, or simply stopped trying.
He sarcastically dismissed GOP pundit Pat Buchanan on the air after Buchanan said the Republicans had been enlivened by the entrance of a conservative Republican.
"Those reading US Weekly with the picture of her and her youngest daughter with the word `scandal' written across it won't be so happy," Olbermann said.
He expressed little sympathy at another point when GOP anger at rumors over the Internet about Palin were being discussed.
"We'll see if people feel sorry for unfounded rumors on the Internet," he said. "If that's the case, Senator Obama's probably standing up and cheering and waiting for people to feel sorry for him."
Perhaps most embarrassing, Joe Scarborough was discussing positive developments in John McCain's campaign at one point when Olbermann was heard on an offstage microphone saying: "Jesus, Joe, why don't you get a shovel?"
Scarborough, a former Republican congressman and host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," got in another nasty on-air exchange with MSNBC reporter David Shuster, and Matthews snapped at Olbermann on-air when it appeared Olbermann was criticizing him for talking too much.
All the drama made MSNBC a punch line when top NBC anchor Brian Williams appeared on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" last week. "Is there no control?" host Jon Stewart asked him. "`Is it `Lord of the Flies?'"
A sheepish Williams said that every family has a dynamic of its own.
"But does MSNBC have to be the Lohans?" Stewart said.
Olbermann was in Denver during the Democratic national convention, but performed his co-hosting duties for the GOP convention in a New York studio. NBC President Steve Capus said the decision was not political, that Olbermann had been sent back to anchor coverage of Hurricane Gustav.
MSNBC's decision comes just before Olbermann's "Countdown" show is set to air, on Monday, his interview with Barack Obama. That will put Olbermann in direct competition with his nemesis, Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, who interviewed Obama last week and is airing a portion of it Monday in the same 8 p.m. EDT time slot.
Olberamann and Maddow are the only ones that have the guts to say anything. If you are sick of MSNBC kiss As---ways email them at:
GeneralComments@feedback.msnbc.com
viewerservices@msnbc.com
Support Keith by sending him a copy
countdown@msnbc.com
Hopefully he will get it!
Let them know how you feel!-Mem
