The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
How It Got the Gloves Off, We’ll Never Know
“Alligator Caught With Bare Hands in Charles River”–headline, WCVB-TV website (Boston), Sept. 10
Help Wanted
” ‘Balding Bandit’ Wanted for Three La Mirada Bank Heists”–headline, Pasadena (Calif.) Star-News, Sept. 8
Bottom Stories of the Day
“Sharron Angle Cancels Debate, Infuriates Reporter”–headline, Washington Post website, Sept. 10
Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control
The above headline usually goes lower in the column, but it seemed fitting for this item. Luther Campbell, described by the Miami New Times as “the man whose booty-shaking madness once made the U.S. Supreme Court stand up for free speech” (he was lead vocalist for the raunchy hip hop group 2 Live Crew), weighs in on the Ground Zero mosque:
I don’t believe there should be a mosque next to the Ground Zero memorial site in New York City. While the United States is a free, beautiful country that opens its arms to all people, the fact is that some Muslim thugs hijacked two planes, blew up the Twin Towers, and killed 3,000 innocent people. I don’t care how anyone tries to spin it; the people behind the mosque are using our kindness as a weakness. You’ll never see the Ku Klux Klan try to put up a building in the heart of Liberty City.
Liberty City is a largely black Miami neighborhood. The reason everything seemingly is spinning out of control is that Campbell sounds disquietingly like Newt Gingrich, who employed a similarly over-the-top analogy, something about Nazis and the Holocaust museum.
The trouble with this analogy is that whereas Nazi or KKK activity is offensive regardless of the location, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with building a mosque. A better analogy would be to a hypothetical plan to build a United Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters adjacent to the site of Martin Luther King’s assassination or the 1963 Birmingham bombing.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
