I haven’t weighed in on the Ground Zero Muslim community center “controversy” because I find it painfully stupid.
It’s the same thing that always happens in August: The Republican drool machine gins up, working the lower end of the GOP evolutionary hierarchy into a screaming froth, giving that bottomless well of undirected, generalized anger (caused in large part, I’d argue, by an economic system that’s so heavily weighted toward entrenching the already-wealthy at the expense of the same angry folks) a new focus.
It’s like dangling a chicken in front of a gator–any chicken will do. And the media follows along, anxious to report on the bloodbath instead of who’s causing it. This kind of nonsense gets started in the minds of people like Grover Norquist, and it’s all aimed at misdirecting attention to enable GOP electoral gains. To wade into the current controversy du August isn’t worth the typing. Norquist and crew are in full swing. They’ll do anything they can–deride, bait, cajole, whatever works–to get us all chattering about their subject instead of issues that truly deserve the moniker “crisis.”
An anonymous reader who wrote to the editors of TPM nailed the “August Maneuver” perfectly:
Republicans ALWAYS run on symbolic issues. Their substantive positions are not popular. People don’t like tax cuts for the rich, they don’t like endless military commitments, they don’t like corporatism, they don’t like lax regulations, etc. So Republicans always pick some symbolic, unimportant issue and make it sound like it’s the most important thing in the world. This is nothing more than the flag factory, the swift boats, and Reverend Wright all over again.
Yes, I know that the issue isn’t totally “unimportant”– religious freedom and our relations with Muslim world have some importance– but think about it in this way: of all the problems we face right now, with the economy, banking regulation, health care, our commitments in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, the Iranian nuclear issue, the budget deficit, etc., how does building this mosque / cultural center or not building it solve any of them?
What ticks me off about this is they do this every election cycle. They never want to talk about substance, and they get their way– every election cycle we talk about whatever they want to talk about. Our political system fiddles while America burns, and it’s because the Republican message machine dictates the conversation.
…The real problems our county faces are too important to once again have ourselves get dragged down into a six month long fight on some manufactured non-issue that Frank Luntz thinks polls well.
