The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
You Call That Fair and Balanced?
“Fox Bites Woman’s Ear as She Sleeps”–headline, Daily Telegraph (London), Sept. 10
News of the Tautological
“Cities Increasingly Turn to ‘Trash Police’ to Enforce Recycling Laws”–headline, FoxNews.com, Sept. 8
Bottom Stories of the Day
“Armenia Sets Record for World’s Largest Chocolate Bar”–headline, Agence France-Presse, Sept. 11
Only Nixon Could Go to China
“One of the things that I most admired about President Bush was after 9/11, him being crystal-clear about the fact that we were not at war with Islam,” President Obama said in his Friday press conference. It doesn’t speak well of Obama’s leadership, or his manners, that one’s first thought on hearing this is the old gag about the shortest book ever written. Step aside, “Dr. Kevorkian’s Motivational Speeches,” and make way for “The Things I Most Admire About George W. Bush” by Barack Obama.
It speaks still more poorly of Obama’s leadership when even Obama’s most devoted supporter, Barack Obama, implicitly acknowledges that Bush did a better job in this regard than Obama is doing. The excitable Peter Beinart exaggerates when he complains that under this president’s leadership, America is “in the worst spasm of paranoia and bigotry since the Cold War.” But there’s no doubt that American mistrust of Muslims has been surfacing lately with some intensity, or that Obama has exacerbated matters by managing the situation insensitively.
The prevailing media narrative has it that America is suffering from an acute case of “Islamophobia,” an irrational fear of Muslims. This seems to us quite wrong. American mistrust of Muslims is no more irrational than black mistrust of whites or Jewish mistrust of Germans. That is not to say that it is completely justifiable, only that it is completely understandable, for Americans have been, and continue to be, the targets of Islamic supremacist violence.
Because mistrust of Muslims is not completely justifiable, Obama and his backers in the media feel no obligation to understand it. “I think that at a time when the country is anxious generally and going through a tough time, then fears can surface, suspicions, divisions can surface in a society,” Obama said Friday, echoing Robert Reich’s Marxism Lite analysis, which we noted last month.
This is a complete non sequitur. No one, not even the unhinged anti-Muslim types on the right, is blaming Muslims for America’s current economic difficulties. American mistrust of Muslims is a reaction to Islamic supremacist terrorism, especially 9/11. That mistrust has surfaced recently because another group of Muslims is seeking to exploit that atrocity by building a fancy mosque adjacent to its site.
The reason President Bush did a better job at managing Americans’ mistrust of Muslims is not, as Obama seems to suggest, that the Bush economy was so much better than the Obama one. It is, rather, that Americans, on this matter, trusted Bush. There’s an old Vulcan proverb: Only Nixon could go to China. Bush commanded trust when he spoke up for peaceful Muslims, because Americans understood he was on our side against the terrorists.
Obama’s antiterror policies have been largely continuous with Bush’s, to the consternation of the anti-antiterror left and the great relief of the rest of us. But his rhetoric has often been ambiguous, as exemplified by this comment from his news conference:
Al Qaeda operatives still cite Guantanamo as a justification for attacks against the United States. Still to this day. And there’s no reason for us to give them that kind of talking point when, in fact, we can use the various mechanisms of our justice system to prosecute these folks and to make sure that they never attack us again.
The president is siding against what are now his own administration’s antiterror policies, and he bolsters his argument by citing what he calls al Qaeda “talking points.” It’s the sort of argument you expect to find in a column by Nicholas Kristof or some other mildly clever pundit who disdains America. Coming from the president of the United States, such mixed messages are confusing and dangerous.
At the Friday news conference, Obama was asked again about the Ground Zero mosque. “Now, I recognize the extraordinary sensitivities around 9/11,” the president lip-serviced. But on the substance of the question he took refuge in bloodless legalisms: “If you could build a church on a site, you could build a synagogue on a site, if you could build a Hindu temple on a site, then you should be able to build a mosque on the site.”
Obama’s election was supposed to be a corrective to Bush’s bellicosity. In a sense, Bush played against type by exhorting Americans to rise above their suspicions of Muslims. But the Nixon-to-China principle goes both ways. As Bush the cowboy had moral authority with Americans, Obama the conciliator has moral authority with Muslims. So far, he hasn’t done much but pander to them–most notably at last month’s iftar dinner, where he endorsed the right to build the Ground Zero mosque–further alienating Americans.
What if he made it his mission to understand Americans’ feelings on the matter and challenged Muslims to respect those feelings by building the mosque elsewhere? That would be an act of reconciliation worthy of George W. Bush at his most admirable.
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