Prevent It... Because They Want It, Too

[The following essay is a guest post from CY commenter Mike McDaniel, following up The Ground Zero Mosque: Prevent It, Because They Want It]

Among the advantages of adulthood are experience and perspective. If we pay attention, have good teachers—not only in classrooms--and an active conscience, we can put aside childish things like self-delusion, doing the same things over and over while expecting different results and hubris. If not, we become leftists, and if we're really impaired, President of the United States. We also learn--and it's interesting that these lessons appear to be most easily grasped and applied by God and gun clingers--that aphorisms that sounded remarkably profound when we were young are in reality, pretty stupid, and easily recognizably so, when we're adults. Thus is "love means never having to say you're sorry," transformed by experience, the ability to recognize and act upon reality and adult morality into "love means being able and willing to say you're sorry, and meaning it."

Not long ago I wrote about the Ground Zero Mosque and concluded that we should deny those who want to build the mosque primarily because they want it. The point was that those who want it are our intractable enemies, people who accept and honor no separation of church and state, who are using the First Amendment against us to conquer and destroy us. Experience and reason informed by reality should convince us that when our enemies repeatedly express their ardent desire to kill us, we should take them at their word and know that whatever they want is not in our best interests. Gun and God clinging adults understand this; those who inhabit a more exalted moral and intellectual plane of existence--such as Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama--do not and cannot. When our enemies use the Constitution--a document whose principles they neither recognize nor respect--against us, actual adults see it as a cynical, insulting bit of rhetorical propaganda. The morally and intellectual superior see it as an opportunity, and under the Rahm Emmanuel Doctrine, such opportunities are not to be wasted.

So Mr. Obama produced this bit of multi-culti, diverse tripe: "But let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center…in lower Manhattan…This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure."

What are we to make of this? At best, these comments reveal a stunningly unsophisticated, surface misunderstanding of the First Amendment. And to suggest that the Founders would approve of such shallow, foolish rhetoric must certainly have Mr. Jefferson spinning in his grave like a piece of stock turning on a lathe. But for a man who is everything to everyone, a blank slate upon which anything may be projected, yet stands for nothing, such is hardly surprising.

Consider that everything that Mr. Obama has done in the field of foreign relations has been a failure, but not merely a failure, serial failures that benefit our enemies and harm America. Smart diplomacy? Muslim outreach? Speechifying to Muslims in Cairo? An open hand to the Iranians? To the Palestinians? Bowing to despots? Apologizing to those who wish us ill? Not so successful; not so smart. In fact, Obama has been successful only in undermining American interests and the interests of America's historic allies. Insulting England? Insulting Israel? Backstabbing the Czechs and Poles? Letting the North Koreans get away with murder? Telling our enemies exactly when we'll be cutting and running from war zones? All stunningly successful—for our enemies.

Mr. Obama, if his followers are to be believed, is one of the most brilliant minds mankind has yet produced. Constitutional law professor, community organizer, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, a man who will unite the world, sweep aside all division, hatred and racism, heal the planet and reduce the oceans. Yet reality reveals that he was merely an adjunct teacher, never a professor. His brilliance appears, more and more, limited to teleprompter reading. Even he cannot explain what a community organizer is or does. Even he admitted that he doesn't deserve the Nobel Prize, not that he allowed that fact to get in the way of accepting it. He has, in less than two years, driven Americans farther apart than at any time in memory, inciting rather than calming racial tribulation. The planet remains in need of healing and the seas are as restless and flush as ever.

Mr. Obama's greatest failure, one that his words reveal, is his inability and unwillingness to recognize that we are at war. He cannot accept that we have been at war since at least the Carter administration and its Iranian hostage crisis. He cannot understand that even before 9-11, some 800 Americans were killed by our enemies around the world. A president who willfully refuses to identify our enemy surely cannot accept that we are engaged in a war for survival. It is, to be sure, a war the Democrats prefer to ignore, focused like a laser on domestic affairs as they always are (with the exception of adopting foreign policies that harm American interests). And until 9-11, we had the luxury, in terms of economics, world influence and power, to more or less ignore the fact that we were fighting a war that would determine the future of western civilization, and that may well plunge humanity into another dark age from which no Renaissance may be possible.

Even by Democrat standards, Mr. Obama is unique in his obtuseness, in his stubborn refusal not only to accept the reality of the war that is very interested in him despite his determination to ignore it, but in his utter disdain for the greatness of America and the greatness of the Constitution and the fundamental freedoms it reflects. Such behavior does not indicate intelligence, experience and adult responsibility, but a petulantly childish stubbornness, and a refusal to accept that doing things the same way over and over again does not yield better results, results favorable to American interests and the survival of civilization. But Mr. Obama's comments do reflect his default beliefs, shallow and destructive though they are.

What, then, do we make of these comments, hastily flung at the public when his original comments didn't work as intended? "I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding." Right. Apparently Mr. Obama's original comments, which seemed pretty profound, at least to him and those who write for his teleprompter, seemed pretty stupid to the semi-adults among his advisors only hours after their utterance. One can only imagine the volume and intensity of the outcry reaching the White House that would cause such a rapid and clumsy "clarification."

The facts remain, whether Mr. Obama and his followers can understand or accept them: Those who wish to build the mosque are our enemies who plan to use it as a propaganda tool, a victory in a war that they expect to fight for a very long time to eventual victory. They know that they can never defeat us on the battlefield, but that they can defeat us in the propaganda war at home and around the world, just as the North Vietnamese did, with substantial help from Democrat politicians and the news media. The Koran gives Muslims Allah's blessing to lie to infidels in the furtherance of Jihad. The First Amendment does not empower the followers of any religion to build anything they want wherever they want it. The Constitution, according not only to the Founders, about whom Mr. Obama knows so little, but to the Supreme Court, cannot be read as a suicide pact.

When a President of the United States actively supports a propaganda victory by our enemy, particularly during a period of open, declared warfare, it is reasonable to inquire as to exactly whom that President represents and why. Has he grown up and put away childish beliefs and reasoning? Tragically, a slight alteration of my original point is now required. We must deny the mosque because they, the Mayor of New York City, many Democrats, and the President of the United States, want it.