Wanted: Strong Voices of Reason . . . .

When the right leaning Cato Institute starts questioning the wisdom and sanity of trying to start a culture war with all Muslims, and specifically American Muslims, you just know that the people (right-wingers, teabaggers, etc.) who are presently in the act of doing just such a thing, do not have America's long term best interests or security in mind.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that not only are the right wingers once again putting themselves and their troglodyte movement on the wrong side of history, they also appear quite willing to put the lives of every single American man, woman and child at risk in order to advance their intellectually and morally corrupt ideological agenda.

Posted by Christopher Preble

Some leaders within the Republican Party seem to have fixed on a useful club with which to bludgeon the president and his fellow Democrats — Cordoba House, aka the “Ground Zero” Mosque. Over the weekend, Republican strategist Ed Rollins explained how the party would use the issue in the coming months:

ROLLINS: Intellectually, the president may be right, but this is an emotional issue, and people who lost kids, brothers, sisters, fathers, what have you, do not want that mosque in New York, and it’s going to be a big, big issue for Democrats across this country.

“Face the Nation” Host Bob SCHIEFFER: So you see it as an issue that’s going to continue?

ROLLINS: Absolutely. No question about it. Every candidate — every candidate who’s in the challenge districts are going to be asked, how do you feel about building the mosque on the Ground Zero sites?

This strategy, exploiting still-raw emotion and implicitly demonizing Muslims, threatens to trade short-term political gain for medium-term political harm to the party. And it most certainly will translate into long-term harm for the country at large.

Opposing the construction of a mosque near the Ground Zero site plays into al Qaeda’s narrative that the United States is engaged in a war with Islam, that bin Laden and his tiny band of followers represent something more than a pitiful group of murderers and thugs, and that all American Muslims are an incipient Fifth Column that must be either converted to Christianity or driven out of the country, else they will undermine American society from within.

Since it appears there are no longer any thinking adults in the GOP who will do the right thing and stand up to the neanderthals who have hijacked their party, it is truly becoming imperative for the remaining sane Americans to step up and start speaking out against this lunacy. Otherwise, it's just a matter of time before history repeats itself in this manner:

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Socialists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Socialist.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak for me."

Sigh . . .




----k