A Must-Read and Maybe a Few Comments (Updated)

From Mahablog, this excellent commentary on the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy. O'Brien demonstrates one thing conclusively: so-called "conservatives" hate the idea of the Bill of Rights, and have no compunctions about lying their faces off to subvert it.

Update:  If Joe Lieberman is against it, ;you know it's the right thing to do.

"I'd say I'm troubled by it, but I don't know enough to say that it ought to be prohibited," Lieberman said on "Imus in the Morning" on the Fox Business Network. "But frankly I've heard enough about it and read enough about it that I wish somebody in New York would just put the brakes on for a while and take a look at this."

The key thing here is that he doesn't know enough to say anything, really.  But being the total tool he is, he's got to weigh in in the side of "wait and see."

This is even worse -- now he wants a religious litmus test for being able to put up a building:

The Connecticut senator, who's often been hawkish on national-security issues, has said the project should be put on hold until the developers of the project can be more fully vetted.

"I've also read some things about some of the people involved that make me wonder about their motivations. So I don't know enough to reach a conclusion, but I know enough to say that this thing is only going to create more division in our society, and somebody ought to put the brakes on it," he said. "Give these people a chance to come out and explain who they are, where their money's coming from."

Leaving aside the tinfoil hat element here, this is a pretty disgusting thing to say.  (Think about it -- he wonders about the "motivations" for putting up a community center.)

The issue seems fairly clear-cut to me:  a moderate Islamic group wants to build a community center on land it owns a few blocks from the site of the Twin Towers.  The community center will contain a place for worship, which is being labeled a "mosque," which, strictly speaking, it's not.  The right wing of the right wing is up in arms at the idea that a group that Osama bin Laden would like to wipe off the face of the earth might want to put a Muslim place of worship a couple blocks from "sacred ground" as an insult to the memory of those who died on September 11, 2001 -- some of whom, by all reports, were Muslim.

We were also told by the former hero of this wing of of the wingnuts, George W. Bush (who now, apparently, cannot be counted as a "true conservative"), that Osama bin Laden hates us because of our freedoms.  So the solution to this is to launch our own attack on those freedoms so he doesn't have to?  Excuse me?

Another Update

Read these remarks by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- the only politician I've seen who has confronted the issue squarely.

And of course, the "conservatives" have no sense of proportion, nor even the instinct for self-preservation that would save them from things like this:



Yeah, there is a constitutional tie-in here, although it's as thin as most of the Prop 8 proponents' arguments in Perry -- God (that's their god, not yours) forbid that Teh Gays should actually be allowed to travel across the country -- by train, yet -- being . . . um, gay. (Actually, that's just a thin excuse to repost this video, which is a stitch.)

This bit, via Bil Browning at Bilerico, is almost as good.

 It occurs to me that no one -- and I mean no one -- refers to riding a horse without a saddle as "barebacking."  As far as I and my Anglophone peers know, that's always referred to as "bareback riding."

Oh, wait -- this is a Republican from Indiana.  'Nuff said.