Potpourri

A small grab bag today. Well, actually a couple of Sarah Palin-connected stories and another on the anti-Muslim mania in the country.

• There's really nothing more illustrative than letting Ms Palin speak for herself. How this woman, a past master of vacuity, can possibly be taken seriously by anybody continues to utterly baffle me. That she is by millions of people, however, is reason for alarm. But to the quote. She was speaking in sight of the Statue of Liberty: “This Statue of Liberty was gifted to us by foreign leaders, really as a warning to us, it was a warning to us to stay unique and to stay exceptional from other countries. Certainly not to go down the path of other countries that adopted socialist policies,” And the crowd cheered. This needs no comment.

• And then there's this birdbrain, one Shannon Love, who is trying to figure out why "leftists" like me can't abide this woman. Let me just quote an example or two of the compelling logic this dude (dudette?) displays:
• "The best explanation for the left's bizarre Palin obsession is status-anxiety. Status-anxiety occurs when a person believes that their position in a real or imagined social hierarchy is threatened. Leftists react emotionally to Palin because of the threat she poses to their own individual sense of status. All their other arguments are just put forth to rationalize that emotional reaction." So we are jealous of the bubble-brain, and we're really just upset aout it all the time. We get so emotional. Right. That explains it.
  
• "In short, it is not the ideas she puts forth, its [sic] that someone like her is significant at all." Actually, no. It is her simplistic, contorted, uninformed, and vacuous ideas that disturb us. And, correction. I could apply many adjectives to this woman, but "significant" would surely not be one of them.

• Finally, this. I'll just quote the top two paragraphs of the story. I didn't know this, and I can guarantee you all those people screaming about a Muslim "mosque" being too close to Ground Zero didn't either. But you think this knowledge is going to make any difference to them? 

The New York Times has a story up about what it calls a Muslim “prayer center” in the World Trade Center. Muslims who worked in the Twin Towers met there for their daily prayers — there was even a wash room nearby set up for the pre-prayer ritual cleansing.

By any measure, the “prayer center” in the trade center is much closer to the definition of a mosque than Park 51, the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” — a 12-story non-sectarian community center with a culinary school and sports facilities.