Mosque arrogance in New York

Michael Goodwin:

Now he tells us. According to Mayor Bloomberg, the "yelling and screaming" about the Ground Zero mosque is just "people trying to stir things up to get publicity and trying to polarize people so they can get some votes."

He said that on the Jon Stewart show, on Comedy Central. Maybe he was joking.

Or maybe he was teeing off on the unwashed masses before jetting off to join President Obama on the golf course. There's nothing like a round with an unpopular president deep in an election season to dispel suspicion that you're playing politics.

It's probably a coincidence that Obama and Bloomberg are among the few officials in America defending the mosque, just as they defended holding the 9/11 trial in lower Manhattan.

Both see themselves as citizens of the world who ascribe ugly motives to anybody who disagrees with them.

It's the "good to be king" syndrome and Bloomberg is no piker, as he showed in his first over-the-top mosque speech. With the Statue of Liberty helpfully framed behind him for TV cameras, he called the mosque a life-or-death test of religious freedom.

It is not, but mission accomplished. Liberals loved it -- Obama's State Department posted it on a Web site and The New York Times swooned.

New Yorkers and the rest of America, not so much. The speech turned a simmering location controversy into a holy war as the mayor tarred as bigots anybody who opposed the mosque or dared to question its $100 million financing.

In his second speech, to a Muslim group, he rejected all compromise and now takes to Comedy Central to find political motives running wild among opponents. It's a strange conclusion, given that two-thirds of the country wants the mosque to move, along with major Jewish, Catholic and even some Muslim groups. As ultra-lib Democrat Howard Dean said in defending his support for moving the mosque, "65 percent of the people in this country are not right-wing bigots."

...

As evidence that I am not a bigot, I am willing to oppose any 13 story religious facility at the Park 51/Ground Zero location. The proposed facility and the proponents like Bloomberg are making an insensitive choice worse the more they persist in insulting the people who oppose it.