Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Eugene Robinson: Jefferson Would be Ashamed of Republican Mosque Panderers

Lies, distortions, jingoism, xenophobia-another day, another campaign issue that Republicans can use to bash President Barack Obama and the Democrats. First it was illegal immigration. Now it’s the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” which is not at all what its opponents claim.

First, it’s not at Ground Zero. The site in question is two blocks north of the former World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan; an existing mosque is just a few hundred feet more distant from the site of the collapsed towers. Second, while the planned building will indeed house a place of worship, it is designed to be more of a community center along the lines of a YMCA. Plans include a fitness center, swimming pool, basketball court, bookstore, performing arts center and food court. Kebabs do not threaten our way of life.

Most important, organizers have made clear that the whole point of the project is to provide a high-profile platform for mainstream, moderate Islam-and to stridently reject the warped, radical, jihadist worldview that produced the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.

William Saletan: Islam Is Ground Zero

Why we should build the proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan.

Are we at war with Islam?

That’s the central question now in the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero. On Friday, President Obama entered the debate, defending the right of Muslim-Americans to worship where they choose. He was then chastised by Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, House Minority Leader John Boehner, and other Republican leaders. Yes, they conceded, the project’s sponsors can legally build it at the planned site, two blocks from Ground Zero. But that isn’t the issue. The issue, they argue, is propriety. As Palin puts it: “We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they?”

Confronted by that question on Saturday, Obama ducked it. “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there,” he said. “I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have.”

Joan Walsh: Why Catholics should thank anti-Catholic bigots

Who knew I owe my freedom to Nativists who killed Irish Catholics! The “ground zero mosque” debate gets uglier

I would like to thank New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, on behalf of my Irish Catholic relatives; indeed, on behalf of all Irish Catholics, including the Kennedy family, for reminding us of the debt we owe to anti-Catholic “Nativists.” Yes, even though I was raised to believe the Nativists spread anti-Catholic prejudice and bigotry with lies about who we were and what we believed, Douthat says I was raised wrong (not surprising, given I was raised by Irish Catholics). In fact, Catholics like my family and the Kennedys should apparently thank the Nativists, because, as Douthat patiently explains, “Nativist concerns about Catholicism’s illiberal tendencies inspired American Catholics to prod their church toward a recognition of the virtues of democracy, making it possible for generations of immigrants to feel unambiguously Catholic and American.”

Got that? Until today, I had always thought the belief that Catholics couldn’t be “unambiguously Catholic and American,” or that the Catholic Church had “illiberal tendencies,” represented prejudice, the kind of prejudice that collided with and eventually gave way to American ideals about equality and religious freedom. I didn’t realize my people had to be “inspired” into fully embracing “the virtues of democracy” by Nativists, often by violence: from Charlestown, Mass, where Nativists burned a Catholic convent in 1834, to Philadelphia in 1844 (where thousands of Nativists attacked Irish Catholics, derided as “scum unloaded on American wharfs,” burned Catholic churches and convents, invaded the homes of Irish Catholics and beat residents), to St. Louis, where a Nativist riot against Irish Catholics killed 10 and destroyed 93 Irish Catholic homes and businesses, or Louisville, Ky., where Nativist mobs killed at least two dozen Catholics on “Bloody Monday,” Aug. 6, 1855.

Bob Herbert: No ‘Graceful Exit’

The reason you hear so little about Lyndon Johnson nowadays despite his stupendous achievements – Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – is that Vietnam laid his reputation low. Johnson’s war on poverty was derailed by Vietnam, and it was Vietnam that tragically split the Democratic Party and opened the door to the antiwar candidacies of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. The ultimate beneficiaries, of course, were Richard Nixon and the Republicans.

President Obama does not buy the comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnam, and he has a point when he says that the U.S. was not attacked from Vietnam. But Sept. 11, 2001, was nearly a decade ago, and the war in Afghanistan was hopelessly bungled by the Bush crowd. There is no upside to President Obama’s escalation of this world-class fiasco.

We are never going to build a stable, flourishing society in Afghanistan. What we desperately need is a campaign of nation-building to counteract the growing instability and deterioration in the United States.