QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 11:07 P.M. ET:  Excellent talk-show host Mike Scully and Jean Spik, a loyal supporter of Urgent Agenda from our first day, refer us to a superb piece by Dorothy Rabinowitz in today's Wall Street Journal.  She is discussing the conflict over whether a Muslim organization should put a mosque at Ground Zero:

Americans may have lacked for much in the course of their history, but never instruction in social values. The question today is whether Americans of any era have ever confronted the bombardment of hectoring and sermonizing now directed at those whose views are deemed insufficiently enlightened—an offense regularly followed by accusations that the offenders have violated the most sacred principles of our democracy.

It doesn't take a lot to become the target of such a charge. There is no mistaking the beliefs on display in these accusations, most recently in regard to the mosque about to be erected 600 feet from Ground Zero. Which is that without the civilizing dictates of their superiors in government, ordinary Americans are lost to reason and decency. They are the kind of people who—as a recent presidential candidate put it—cling to their guns and their religion.

Wonderfully stated.  Please read the whole piece, for a Dorothy Rabinowitz column is a complete gem.  She takes on the increasingly pompous Mayor Bloomberg of New York, a generally fine mayor who sometimes enters the inebriated state of political correctness.  The mayor supports the mosque, and seems to have the same feeling for the people of New York as Barack Obama has for the people of the United States. 

And consider this, from Dorothy:

The notion that it is for the greater good that the people be led to suspect virtually any cause but the one they had the most reason to fear reflects a contempt for the citizenry that's of longstanding, but never so blatant as today. It is in the interest of higher values, Americans understand—higher, that is, than theirs—that they are now expected to accept official efforts to becloud reality.

And finally...

The center may be built where planned. But it will not go easy or without consequence to the politicians intent on jamming the project down the public throat, in the name of principle. Liberal piety may have met its match in the raw memory of 9/11, and in citizens who have come to know pure demagoguery when they hear it. They have had, of late, plenty of practice.

As I said, read the whole thing...and frame it.

August 4, 2010