quote for the day

As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.

Good for Obama. The flap over this community center has been ridiculous. I really want to know; is this a free nation? Or not? Do we actually follow the constitution, or merely pay it lip service?* Here's what Greg Sargent says about Obama's statement:

The right is engaged in a concerted effort to make it politically toxic to stand up for the rights of Muslims -- and to simultaneously insinuate that Obama is on "their" side, and not on ours. This dispute fits the bill perfectly.

He is not criticising Obama, by the way. I quote him to ask this question: Why, when the Right speaks, do we (and by "we", I mean the "we" of "conventional wisdom") treat their statements as facts which must be proven false, usually with extensive documentation (often from "non-biased" or even conservative sources), which is even then ignored by both the Right (which is hardly surprising) and the CW "We"**? Have we given up even the semblance of innocent until proven guilty? Why dont we have anyone on the Left who has the ability to wrest the power to frame an issue away from those on the Right? Is it because of media ownership? Obama looked like he might have been the one to do so, but has either failed to do so, given up, or was never interested in doing so in the first place.
As long as issues continue to be framed in such a way that even obvious lies are treated as truth, without question (or even the kind of "what the fuck?" incredulousness which so many statements from the Right seem to deserve these days), we will continue to have rancor.


* Duh! Lip service! Hello, Bush years continued on after with little Change™.
** Does that make sense? It works in my head, but I dont know whether it survives in the real world.