Whose Fault Is It Anyway?
by digby
Talk about blaming the victim:
Right, if only he said “this is a lie” the whole thing would go away. The problem is not that they are lying about him, it’s that he hasn’t been effective at stopping them from lying about him.
I’m glad Kurtz said it’s an “established fact in his mind” that Obama isn’t a Muslim. That’s a good step, considering that he isn’t a Muslim! But to simultaneously toss aside what Obama said about … well, basically, the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is just malpractice.
There are reasons why all these millions of people believe that Obama is a Muslim and one of the big ones is the right wing media. Since Kurtz is supposed to be a media critic you’d think he would have followed that line instead of questioning what Obama’s doing or not doing to refute what he himself acknowledges is a lie.
Here’s another example from just a few minutes ago on CNN. Rick Sanchez was talking with Deborah Feyerick about the so-called Ground Zero mosque controversy and she explained that the problem was that the builders of the community center didn’t reach out to other Muslim leaders in the nation before planning the project. She said:
They’re dealing with the blowback that they had no idea … they didn’t do the kind of due diligence that or opposition research if you’re going to go with this kind of an issue.
More Church of the Savvy dogma. Do you want to know the due diligence and oppo research they did? How about this:
On December 21, 2009, Laura Ingraham hosted Daisy Khan, a co-founder of Park 51 and the wife of its Imam, Abdul Rauf.
INGRAHAM: I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it. [Mayor] Bloomberg is for it. Rabbis are saying they don’t have a problem with it. […] I like what you’re trying to do and Ms. Khan we appreciate it and come on my radio show some time.
KHAN: Yeah, we need the support of people like you seriously.
INGRAHAM: Alright, you take care.
Up until the time a bunch of shrieking Islamophobes realized that hey could leverage wingnut bigotry and and at Barack Hussein Obama into a sideshow over this project, nobody gave a damn if they were building it. Why would they reach out to national Muslim leaders when there was no controversy and it was supported by religious and secular leaders in the city in which it was being built?
Now all these lemmings in the press are blaming the mosque for not being savvy enough to have seen this onslaught coming, as if there’s been an anti-Muslim crusade going on since 9/11. Except, there hasn’t been had there. Even when the pain was fresh and people were angry and afraid and Bush was leading the cheers from atop the rubble, they weren’t doing this stuff. This “problem” didn’t appear until we elected a new president who these people don’t like.
And that’s his fault too. If he were a more savvy politician his political enemies wouldn’t think he was a black Muslim foreigner and they wouldn’t think the country was being taken over by terrorists. He has only himself to blame for this.
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