PrintAugust 22, 2010
Speaker of the Institutionalized
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a national embarrassment with a long train of gaffes and abuses. It can give you angina to bear in mind that she's two heartbeats from the presidency. Beats one and two are stressors enough.
Pelosi told a San Francisco radio station on Tuesday that she wants to know who's funding those opposed (make that nearly 70 percent of Americans) to building a mega mosque at Ground Zero. Said the Speaker:
"But there is no question that there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded."
Is Pelosi hearing voices? She's admitted to seeing people "carrying swastikas" at town hall meetings that no one else has seen. Is she completely delusional? Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer called her statement "sheer lunacy."
Pelosi thinks the issue might be "ginned up" in order to help Republican candidates, according to New York Daily News.
Other than a handful of conservative women who rile the left, who thinks of Republicans as a force for ginning up anybody?
What Pelosi and Barack Obama can't comprehend is that most Americans remain "ginned up" about the slaughter of 3,000 fellow Americans in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania by 19 Muslim terrorists who took their mosque lessons seriously. Calling it "a zoning issue for New York City" is like calling the attack on Pearl Harbor trouble in paradise. What Americans can't comprehend is why Pelosi and Obama aren't ginned up as well.
Only those whose moral compass is guided by political polls and personal ambition could think that opponents to the mosque location are motivated by politics and bigotry rather than patriotism, honor and decency.
We'd all have to be delusional to imagine Pelosi and Obama lecturing us about religious liberty and constitutional rights if white supremacists tried to build a church/KKK cultural center next to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn., where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Who in their right mind would think that a National Socialist worship and cultural center next to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. would "bridge and heal a divide?"
The backlash against Pelosi resulted in her so-called "walk back" statement on Wednesday. But rather than retract her incredibly inappropriate and meddlesome question about who's funding the opposition to the mosque, she compounded her offense. According to politico.com, Pelosi said:
I support the statement made by the Interfaith Alliance that 'We agree with the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] that there is a need for transparency about who is funding the effort to build this Islamic center," Pelosi (D-Calif.) said. "At the same time, we should also ask who is funding the attacks against the construction of the center."
The ADL's statement doesn't mention anything about looking into who is "funding" opposition to the mosque. That's pure Pelosi.
Talk about ginning up the "opposition." Al-jazeera was already jazzed because President Obama "spoke forcefully" in support of the proposed mosque.
Did it occur to Pelosi how describing speech as "attacks against construction of the center" might play in Jihadist hotspots where "attack" is synonymous with IEDs, rocket launchers and suicide bombings?
Pelosi is quite able to distinguish between a physical attack and merely opposing an idea. She supports using thought and belief to enhance the penalty for a "hate crime."
"Pelosi's office clarified that the speaker is not calling for a ‘congressional inquiry,' though she still supports looking into the funding of the mosque's opponents as well as its patrons," according to Fox News.
What kind of "inquiry" does Pelosi have in mind? Don't assume that the woman with the gigantic gavel and subpoena power is walking softly.
Pelosi is already on record pushing the FCC to regulate talk radio and the Internet. Maybe she's prodding Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate a hate crime or other civil rights violations.
It could have been Holder's most colossal case yet -- something he could really get his race-based mind around. Suing one state is chump change when you can nail a whole "nation of cowards" in "things racial."
But alas, along came a couple of Democrat monkey wrenches. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and former DNC chief Howard Dean expressed their opposition to building the mosque at Ground Zero.
In the lineup of Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and Dean, who knew that Harry ("I haven't gotten where I am by my great brain") and Screamin' Dean would come across as the brains in the bunch?
Jan LaRue is senior legal analyst with the American Civil Rights Union.
