Our politically tone-deaf leader

Memo to President Barack Obama: The American people DO NOT want a Muslim mosque built just 600 feet from Ground Zero in New York City, where almost 3,000 people died because of Muslim fanatics. And, Mr. President, your party’s chances already looked shaky in the upcoming off-year elections. So why, pray tell, did you voice support for the building of the mosque?

To be sure, Obama only said that the Muslims wanting to build the mosque-community center (so-called), “have the legal right to build it there on privately owned land.” After hearing a lot of negative feedback from his fellow Democrats, not to mention Republicans and independents, he appeared to crawfish a little the next day, saying that he makes no judgment about whether they’re morally entitled to build it. But he’s stirred up more of a hornet’s nest even than the prospect of the mosque’s being built had caused before his ill-chosen words. Can you say, “Big political campaign issue for the Republicans”?

You did some mealy-mouthed moralizing about “freedom of religion” making it imperative that the Muslims be allowed to build the mosque where they want it to be, Mr. President. You made the statements while hosting a “Ramadan dinner” in honor of the big Muslim holiday. Many Americans still suspect that you were, at the very least, raised in a Muslim culture, despite the fact that you say you’re a Christian now. Muslims, as an organized group, are the main perpetrators of murder and carnage in the world today, so your words increase the suspicions of those Americans.

Look at it this way, Mr. President. You were born in Hawaii (you WERE born there, weren’t you?) and so, imagine that, just after World War II, an organization of Japanese people living in Hawaii had announced plans to build a big Shinto shrine, very close to the site of the Pearl Harbor attack where Japanese planes dropped bombs that wrecked the U.S. Pacific Fleet and killed roughly as many Americans as died on 9/11. Can you imagine what the reaction of Americans would have been? Do you think for one minute that President Harry S Truman would have defended their legal right to build that shrine? Do you think the people of Hawaii as a whole would have held still for it?

Or do you, deep down, feel the way that the boxer Muhammad Ali said he felt in his infamous statement when he refused to be drafted into the U.S. military during the Vietnam War: “Them Viet Cong never called me ‘nigger’.” Maybe if you had been alive in the late 1940s you would have felt that way about the Japanese military.

So let’s choose a hypothetical situation closer to home for you, so to speak. Suppose that, down in Birmingham, AL, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a civic organiztion that strives to keep alive the memory of the sacrifices of Confederate soldiers in the Civil War (it actually has a few black members, too), announced that it had purchased land just across the street from, or next door to, the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where Martin Luther King was once the pastor. Imagine that the Sons said they planned to build a Museum of the Confederacy there. Would you be defending their legal right to build said museum? You know the answer to that as well as I do. Blacks in Birmingham — and some liberal Whites, too, no doubt — would be marching in angry protest of such a move, and would most likely try to physically stop any construction of that building, saying that it would be a sacreligious desecration of an area dear to the history of the civil rights movement.

So there you are, Mr. President. Circumstances alter cases, don’t they? It depends on whose ox is being gored, doesn’t it? What’s sauce for the goose isn’t necessarily sauce for the gander, is it?

What you said at that Ramadan dinner no doubt went over well with your Muslim guests, and with the extreme Left in your party (I’m a Democrat, too, but I’m much further Right than any of your people). But it didn’t please the bulk of the American people. I heard someone the other day refer to you as a “master politician.” If you are, then they’ve made major changes in the definition of that term since I last heard it. Because what you said about the mosque was — with all due respect, Mr. President — POLITICALLY DUMB.