Would that the late Boris Karloff were still with us. Someone might be able to convince him to do a reworking of the “Monster Mash” that would fit the lunatic rantings of right-wing blogger Pam Geller: They did the mosque! (They did the monster mosque!)

Yes, Geller referred to the proposed Muslim community center two blocks from the World Trade Center as the “monster mosque.” But it’s far too easy to simply heap opprobrium upon pathetic paranoid freaks like her. No, it’s the established right-wing media and much of our political class that has kept this ball in the air for the past week. Such a remarkable nation we live in – one in which people crow about our constitutional freedoms and yet run hysterically from them whenever they are put to the test. Political figures from every corner of the country have been climbing over each other to denounce the “mosque” as inappropriate, insensitive, unacceptable, “sacrilege” (Charles Krauthammer), and so on.

What you will hear exactly none of them say is that a) it is NOT a mosque; it is a community center with a prayer space in the upper floors, and b) it is NOT at ground zero or in the World Trade Center complex; it is two blocks away in the empty former Burlington Coat Factory building. And while Newt Gingrich (Remember him? He was what was fucked up about the nineties.) likens this to opening an office of the Nazi party next to the Holocaust Museum, it is really more like… someone opening a community center in an abandoned building. Perennial New York State also-ran Rick Lazio was on cable yesterday substituting his sorry judgment for that of the City of New York, complaining that this was not a residential district but a business district. Well, hell – so this is a zoning issue, is it, Rick? Sounds like what they used to use to keep black people out of certain neighborhoods.

Honestly, this would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. And it truly is sad. While millions of Muslims in Pakistan suffer from the worst flooding in that nation in memory, all we can talk about is this non-issue. What is next? Muslims are not allowed to open a business in lower Manhattan? They won’t be allowed to walk within two blocks of Ground Zero? Where does it end?

If the national conversation is being driven by lunatic bloggers – and it evidently is – then we’ve got bigger problems than this manufactured controversy. First Acorn, then the “new Black Panthers”, then Shirley Sherrod, and now this. What next?

luv u,

jp