ON THE ART OF BEING DUMB

ON THE ART OF BEING DUMB

Some very smart people do some very stupid things.

Exhibit A this week is Anthony Weiner, the talented and pugnacious New York Congressman whose triple-X twitter messages (and pictures) to on-line "fans" have now been plastered all over the tabloids. An emotional apology has not kept the vultures from hovering over the carcass, even as Weiner himself claims not to be dead yet. 

NY pols are already angling for his job, and inasmuch as the state itself is slated to lose two Congressional seats to redistricting in 2012, his is now the downstate seat most likely to be eliminated by the politicians who get to draw the lines.  The same thing happened to New York's scandal-plagued Rep. Stephen Solarz in the early 1990s.  Before the voters get a chance to kick you out, your erstwhile friends do.

Weiner's idiocy, of course, didn't kill anyone.  He hasn't started a war, destroyed a career (other, perhaps, than his own), or polluted the planet (non-metaphorically, that is).  The tweets were supposedly consensual (though I am not sure all his "friends" knew what coming before it got there).  And they were meant to be private (a big stretch in the Internet Age but one in which my kids' generation swears it still believes; their facebook accounts are all private, at least insofar as access by the parents is concerned) .

So why do we care?

Everyone I ask tells me "it's not about the sex." 

This reminded me of those famous lines from Sen. Dale Bumpers' impassioned defense of President Clinton during the latter's impeachment trial -- "When you hear somebody say, 'This is not about the money -- it's about money'. And when you hear somebody say, This is not about sex -- it's about sex."  So maybe, probably, that's exactly what it's about. 

But maybe not. 

Sen. Bumpers was quoting H.L. Mencken when he made those comments.  And the famous Mencken also famously said that "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."  Mencken, of course, was talking about us.  He was noticing our repeated penchant for stupidity.  When the "thems" of the world mess up, we like to think they are not "us."  But in a democracy, we lose that cover.  Because the "thems" we elect are "us."

Sometimes stupid is endearing, even not so stupid. 

The whole point of Forrest Gump was that the bright guys didn't get it.  Not the bright guys in the White House who started an unnecessary war.  Or the smart Lieutenant Dan, tied to a war hero's needless destiny of death passed down through a familial psychosis that the "dumb" guy first saved him from but was only later thanked for.  Or the liberal counter-cultural Jenny, who finally accepted the love that had been there from the beginning. 

The mindless runner turned out to be not so mindless after all.  While everyone else was trying to figure him out, he was noticing a sunrise.  And couldn't tell "where earth stopped and heaven began."  That sort of poetry is hardly stupid.

Unfortunately, Anthony Weiner is no Forrest Gump.

He's just one of us.

GOOD FRIDAY

GOOD FRIDAY

It is overcast and cold on April 22 in New York. 

After a brutal winter, the lawn sports large blotches of patted down straw, a sort of sub-Arctic permafrost in a region that is supposed to have none.  The heavy coats still hang in the pantry ready to be called into action yet again, unable to retire to their seasonal cedar closet.  Even the dog is confused by it all.  She can't  catch the necessary whiff, blown away as it is by the unseasonable chill breezes that never allow spring to come.

There is just nothing good about this particular Friday.

Earlier in the week, the markets were roiled by a ratings agency report from Standard & Poors (or S&P, as they are known in the trade) that  it was not at all confident that America's pols would get their act together and tackle the deficit.  This has been widely reported as an initial shot across the bow by the credit markets, a warning to the borrower that the bill will come due and the lenders were worried they might not get paid.  The borrower is the US government.  The lender is the rest of the world but at this point largely China. 

My first reaction was to say "What gall!"  S&P, after all , was one of the three ratings musketeers who told us not more than five years ago that all those mortgage backed securities, three-tiered collateralized debt obligations, and insurance like credit default swaps were triple-A investments.  Perfectly safe.  About as likely a risk to default as the US itself.

Namely, none at all.

They were not even close to being right.

Now we are all supposed to believe that the US deficit, which is largely a problem that would go away if the Bush era tax cuts were allowed to expire and we were careful about not starting any more unpaid for wars, has for the first time attracted S&P's attention because it is unsustainably large. 

This is pure rubbish.  As a percentage of GDP, the deficit is nowhere nearly as high as it has been at times in our past.  There is no danger of default, at least not one uninduced by right wing politicians in Washington refusing to raise the debt ceiling.  And, to top it off, the real problem now is an anemic recovery that DC's deficit hawks threaten to kill with their hypocritical zeal to stop all non-discretionary spending.  A recovery, by the way, necessitated by that near-death, near-Depression we experienced in 2008, for which S&P (along with the other ratings agencies who failed to do their job, and the then GOP government in love with deregulation, which had for eight years failed to do its) was among those responsible.

But I have now calmed down.

Because I realize that, in some sort of feat of cosmic consistency, the ratings agency's hypocrisy and gall has at least come at the right time in the liturgical calendar.

We are in what we Christians call Holy Week.  As a matter of history, the week had a lot of ups and downs.  It started off well enough.   A triumphant entry into Jerusalem from the non-Roman east, on a donkey no less, that  inspired some of the poor masses.  But that entrance sent the authorities into fits of worry that a city exploding with Passover pilgrims might throw off the Roman yoke.  Which more or less explains the rest of the week -- a banquet of sorts with twelve very close friends, and then an arrest, show trial and killing by those same worried authorities. 

Through it all the watch word was hypocrisy.  Whether it was the hypocrisy of Roman authorities trumping up charges . . . or of crowds choosing to save a felon and kill a saint . . . or of friends denying they even knew you.

There was, in truth, not much good about that Friday either.

We need a lot more honesty from the institutions that nearly killed us in 2008, which includes Standard & Poors.  And they should at least start with the notion that, having been fatally wrong and egregiously self-interested in 2008, they ought not repeat the act in 2011. 

The creditor class in this country and in the world is worried about their money.  In particular, they are worried about the value of their assets, which happen in large part to be the loans they have made to all the debtors, most of whom are now having trouble paying them back.  The creditors succeeded earlier in the decade in making it much more difficult for debtors to be discharged in bankruptcy.  And they now do not want the governments of the world easing that debt burden by spending or inflating, which effectively devalues the debts and, consequently, their wealth.  Standard & Poors is in glorious hock to the creditor class.  The banks pay S&P and, as we saw in 2008, S&P does their bidding.

What we need most at this point is to finally hold the hypocrites to account and to start calling a spade a spade. 

And what we need in our politics right now is a little . . .

Easter.

PS  In my last post I talked about a lecture I was going to give at the end of March.  I did so, at Mt. Aloysius College in Cresson, Pennsylvania.  For any who are interested, here is the you tube link -- http://youtu.be/ByKsGr6NF8k



THE PROFESSOR IN ME

THE PROFESSOR IN ME

I am teaching a college class at the end of March. The class will be at a small Catholic liberal arts college in western Pennsylvania.

What will I say to them?

I have already spoken to the President of the college, a friend from law school. I told him I wanted to say something taking off on the theme that "those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it." I told him that this was a point made by the philosopher George Santayana in the early part of the last century. But in beginning to prepare the presentation, two problems have emerged.

The first is that the theme creates an enormous number of possible discussion topics. One would think a theme might narrow things down a bit, sort of like a topic sentence in a paragraph. But this theme is a "no-go" on that score. In fact, it does the opposite, creating an almost infinite number of emblematic moments.

Some are fairly self-evident to any of us over fifty. It is, for example, fairly obvious that, in the run up to Iraq, W and Cheney and Rumsfeld never read Robert McNamara's mea culpa account of US hubris in Vietnam. McNamara, a former chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, was JFK's and LBJ's Secretary of Defense in the '60s and substituted statistics (body counts, bomb tonnage, numbers of bombing runs or "sorties") for any real knowledge of the history and culture of Vietnam. Though warned by the French, victims of their own ill-fated effort at Dien Bien Phu in the early '50s to preserve their influence on what had previously been a French colony, the so-called "best and brightest" (McNamara was among the famous "whiz kids" or proverbial geniuses at Ford when Kennedy tapped him for Defense)doubled down in Vietnam, claiming (erroneously) that if Vietnam went communist Thailand and the Philippines were sure to follow, and that (again erroneously) if they just dropped more bombs and deployed more troops, all would be well.

It didn't turn out that way.

For years now, the revisionist conservative history on Vietnam is that we "cut and run" just as things were getting better. According to this view, a new commanding general, Creighton Abrams, and a new strategy, counter-insurgency, was beginning to take hold and create success in the early '70s, just as the overwhelming majority of Americans turned against the War. I have my doubts. Counter-insurgency was not going to end corruption in the South Vietnamese government, nor was it going to tip control in the north. Unlike in Korea, a stalemate was not really possible because there were too many ways into the south (many through Cambodia and the famous Ho Chi Minh trail) and too many indigenous fighters (the famous, or infamous, Viet Cong) living in the south's villages.

But let's for a moment assume the revisionists on Vietnam are right.  One would think that W and Cheney and Rumsfeld would have embraced that revisionism and learned from it before decamping into Iraq.  Here, however, is the bad news.

They ignored that "history" as well.

The failure in Iraq was a failure to both accurately anticipate how the the country would look once Hussein's regime fell and to deploy sufficient resources to maintain and rebuild the nation at that point.  Neo-conservatives hate nation building and spent all of the 1990s condemning Bill Clinton for it.  Nevertheless, when General Petraeus finally came to them with the counter-insurgency surge strategy in 2007, they were just embracing nation building by another name.  For that is what Petraeus' counter-insurgency strategy was and is -- a studied effort to deploy troops as ambassadors of de-centralized security and  service so as to give locals the space to rebuild their lives and their economy and create stakeholders in that new reality.  It basically sucks the oxygen right out of the local bad guys.  But it takes resources.  Lots of them.  And for four years W's Administration never committed the necessary resources to that effort.  They weren't nation builders.

Whew!

That's just one topic.  I could also tell the students I'll be talking to that the run up to the financial collapse in 2008 was just a replay of what went on in the 1920s before the Great Depression -- speculative stock buying and selling run amok with little or no underlying value and a corresponding absence of regulatory oversight.  Or that the thirty year period of conservative emergence and governance that began in the mid-1970s was a lot like the 19th century's Gilded Age -- the economic returns from enormous productivity gains (owing to nationalization of the American market thanks to railroads in the Gilded Age, and computerization of the home and workplace in our own time) migrated almost exclusively to the top. Or that Abu Ghraib was not really a "unique" event -- just ask the Native Americans.

Too much to say.  I'll have to make choices.

And then there's that second problem. It turns out that George Santayana did not say that "those who refuse to study history are condemned to repeat it." What he said, in his book Life of Reason I, is that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". More importantly, as his students have noted, his point was really more a part of his theory of knowledge rather than any sort of exhortation to learn from history so as to avoid colossal errors.  Apparently, however, the notices have been sent out and my appearance has been tied to the wrong quote. And the wrong context.  And it's all on me, because I gave them the wrong quote. And context.

I hope the students don't catch me.

If they do, I'll be forced to tell them the truth.

Which is this . . .

Even their professors make mistakes.

SILENT NIGHT

SILENT NIGHT

"And so this is Christmas. And what have we done?"

John Lennon's question hangs in the air this frustrating year.  

For liberals, the answer is "Not nearly enough."  For the conservatives, it is "Way too much."   For the putative guy or gal on the street, it is "Would the both of you please get a life."

Bemoaning the supposedly never satisfied "professional left,"  the Obama Administration has trotted out its litany of accomplishments as the year closes -- health care reform, financial regulatory reform, a wind down in Iraq, analysis (at least) on Afghanistan, a second stimulus, the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," Elena Kagan and the soon to be passed START Treaty.   This has been book ended by a number of ostensibly conservative columnists like David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer praising the President for compromising on extending W's tax cuts and governing "to the center," the always touted sweet spot of American politics.

This is a more than fair list. 

American federalism requires any would be reformer to navigate his way through a minefield of competing regional and ideological interests.  The consequence is that progress is generally incremental and always messy.  The attacks on Obama, from the nutty birthers to the angrier Tea Partiers, are not particularly different from what was visited upon FDR in the '30s, the civil rights activists in the '50s, or LBJ's attempts at a Great Society in the '60s.  Put simply, going to a rally (or tuning into Limbaugh) and calling this reasonably progressive President a socialist or a communist is obviously the screamer's right and may make him (or her) feel good.

But it is not remotely original.

Nor is it particularly accurate.

Whatever else may be said of the reforms wrought by Obama, socialism they are not.  The health care reform jettisoned a proposed public option in favor of an individual mandate and delayed the advent of state based insurance exchanges and the elimination of exclusions for pre-existing conditions until 2014.  This will allow the insurance companies to pare their rolls and raise their rates long before these de facto monopolists ever have to worry about the competition exchanges are supposed to create.  Similarly, on the financial front, the elimination of proprietary trading by Wall Street's enormously conflicted investment bankers carries with it six loopholes through which creative lawyers will easily steer the Goldman Saches of the world.  My favorite is that the ban does not extend to foreign entities, more or less inviting the creation of off shore repositories for all that proprietary money.

The problem, therefore, is not socialism. 

It is ineffectiveness.

And that is what has the progressives worried.

The fact that Obama was able to wrestle a second stimulus from the GOP by agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts for two years is a testament to his political abilities.  Whether that second stimulus comes to pass, however, is an entirely separate question for which the answer is in serious doubt.  To stimulate, the payroll tax cuts, small business tax breaks and extended unemployment compensation payments must actually create a net increase in demand  (there will be no increase whatsoever from preserving the Bush era tax rates, which are the rates everyone is already paying).  Once the GOP takes over in the House, however, they will beat the drum on deficit reduction and the conservatives in the Senate will help them along.  If they cut enough elsewhere. and they certainly want to, they can  suck any of the incremental gains created by Obama's eleventh hour tax compromise right out of the economy.  The only thing that could stop them then would be an Obama veto.

Which Brooks and Krauthammer won't report as governing "to the center."

So, we have a health care reform that gives insurance companies two years to stack the deck, a financial regulatory reform that invites investment banks back to business as usual, and a tax cut compromise that continues to explode the deficit with no real guarantee that its good parts will create their intended results.  It is great that we are ending the unmitigated hypocrisy that allowed gays and lesbians to die for their country so long as they never told us who they slept with.  And I am counting on Elena Kagan.

But I still do not have a good answer for John Lennon.

THE TESTOSTERONE GAP

THE TESTOSTERONE GAP

Maybe it was just a matter of time.

For the past week,Sharron Angle has been garnering national headlines with her sexist challenge that Harry Reid "man up." The Nevada GOP Senate nominee has told enthralled crowds that her opponent Harry Reid's problem is an accountability one. She blames him for failing to take responsibility for the anemic recovery, an insufficiently patriotic appreciation of the success of the surge in Iraq, and whatever problems may befall the Social Security trust fund some years down the road. When he quite properly demurs, she'll have none of that.

"Man up, Harry Reid," cries the Tea Party temptress.

"Shut up, Ms. Angle," say I.

Roughly a quarter century since the beginning of the modern equal rights movement for women, and two years after Hillary Clinton put those 18 million cracks in the ultimate glass ceiling, it has come to this. The powerful Senate majority leader, whose unsung expertise in herding cats created the only sixty vote Senate majority on the only system wide health care reform bill ever to pass the US Congress, suffers from . . .

How else to put it . . .

A testosterone gap.

This would be silly and somewhat amusing if it weren't so fundamentally sad.

The economic challenges we now face are daunting. And the policies that led to those challenges have hardly been kept secret. The Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath was the product of the combined effects of deregulation on Wall Street and shrinking incomes on Main Street. Finance capital ran amok as (conservative) government let Wall Street seize the productivity gains of the computer age with products that gave alchemy new meaning -- securitized sub-prime mortgages backed up by derivative instruments that allowed the inevitable crash to course like a rampant virus through the entire economy.

At the same time, Main Street's incomes shrank given the unmitigated wage arbitrage practiced by corporate behemoths who outsourced our manufacturing base to poorly paid day laborers in Asia, while tepid (conservative) laws made it virtually impossible to organize wage laborers into collective bargaining units to do for them what unions did for workers in the wake of the New Deal.

Before that New Deal began, those who suffered the highest rate of poverty in America were the aged. Social Security ended that problem. And had Sharron Angle's predecessors in the Grand Old Party listened to Bill Clinton in the late '90s, and used that Democratic President's surplus to "save Social Security first," the trust fund would have no long term solvency problem today.

They, of course, didn't.

Instead, led by Newt Gingrich, who was also out in Nevada this week stumping for Sharron Angle, the GOP gave the bulk of the surplus to the rich and then proceeded to run up record deficits with unpaid for wars and unfinanced benefits to Big Pharma. Meanwhile, Wall Street's greed-is-good-guys created two finance bubbles -- first in internet stocks and then in the real estate market -- and now want us all to forgive them for the very painful hangover.

None of this matters in Sharron Angle's invented world of Tea Party anger and extreme right wing denial. Her party is responsible for about 7/8ths of the existing deficit and all of the current recession. Neither she nor it have proposed a single new idea designed to combat the anemic recovery. Their mantra of tax cuts for the rich and government spending cuts for the rest is as old as it is useless. The rich don't need and won't spend the marginal taxes they will otherwise pay once W's tax break albatross is partially lifted from America's neck. And spending cuts in recessions and depressions are ludicrous. They make things worse, not better.

Bereft of ideas, Sharron Angle has been reduced to a mirror image of that sexist male who for years substituted his own prejudicial fantasy for fact. We all know him. Girls couldn't play with the boys. Women couldn't work with the men. Separate, and never equal, the boys who traded size jokes in schoolyards became the CEOs who reinforced that glass ceiling with steel. As Sharron Angle would no doubt understand, those guys really knew how to "man up."

Harry Reid doesn't need another ounce of testosterone.

Just six more years in the Senate.

For our sake.

Not his.

IT'S THEIR PARTY

IT'S THEIR PARTY The big news this week is the multiple victories wrought by so-called Tea Party candidates in Republican primaries in Delaware and New York. In the former the GOP stole general election defeat from the jaws of almost certain victory by casting aside Rep. Mike Castle in favor of Christine O'Donnell as their nominee to run for the US Senate, and in the latter the nomination of Carl Paladino virtually guaranteed the election of Andrew Cuomo as New York's next Governor. In both states the fortunes of the Democrats were sagging. Castle was favored to win fairly easily in Delaware and was central to any GOP takeover of the Senate. And though New York's endorsed Republican Party candidate, former Rep. Rick Lazio, was not remotely favored to beat Cuomo this fall, Paladino's nomination makes that more or less impossible and may substantially damage GOP under ticket prospects as well. This, moreover, is a bit of a political hat trick here in New York inasmuch as the under ticket of state Senate and Assembly incumbents -- the substantial majority of which are Democrats -- is almost universally despised. As a Democrat, of course, I should be happy. Perhaps even send the Tea Party a thank you note. But I am not. And I won't. And here's why. The country is in desperate need of moderate Republicans, nowhere more so than here in New York. As was made clear in this year's debates on health care and financial reform, the GOP's steady drift to the far and fringe right has made progress on policy virtually impossible. Though the 2010 health care bill was almost a carbon copy of what Republicans themselves proposed as an alternative to HillaryCare in 1994, the GOP en masse opposed the 2010 version. There was no prospect for any public option so long as Democrats attempted to fashion a filibuster proof margin on the bill. And once the public option was eliminated, there really was no prospect for cost control, a private insurance based model having been made the base line for any bill and the competitive pricing pressure that would have been created by the public option having been eliminated. The GOP similarly opposed the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act even though the Democrats had jettisoned from it a host of measures to which Wall Street objected. Left on the cutting room floor, for example, was the resurrection of some form of Glass-Steagall (separating commercial and investment banks, or, as it were, investors from speculators), as well as any outright ban on proprietary trading by banks for their own accounts (which creates enormous conflicts of interest, with large houses like Goldman ultimately on both sides of ostensibly arms length market bets). Financial reform, therefore, much like health care reform, has turned out to be largely an effort in shoring up the very entities which led us to near economic death in the first place. We now require banks to have far larger capital reserves (a good thing). But we have done very little to stop them from engaging in some of the practices that helped generate the financial collapse in the first place. And we did nothing to free up credit now, reduce the on going risk of foreclosure (which is real for many), or grant real relief to those now underwater. My somewhat counter-intuitive view is that a House with 20-30 GOP moderates and a Senate with 10 of the same would have made these results impossible, essentially because there would have been a group of truly swing voters in play that would have changed both the Democrats' initial "asks" and the final form of any compromise. On health care, although you wouldn't know it from the rhetoric that turns any Democratic legislative proposal into this era's version of Marxist dialectic, the public option was a compromise. True lefties favored some form of single payer or Medicare for all, and the right wing's plan was essentially limited to killing suits for medical malpractice (either by capping damages awards or creating specialized health care courts where medical experts determine liability and damages). The middle ground between these poles was the public option, offering the choice of enrollment in a public Medicare-like plan to any who wanted it, which in turn would have created real competition with the private insurers and thus helped keep a lid on costs. If there had been real GOP moderates in play, the Democrats might have started with single payer and then fallen back on the public option. Instead, they made the public option their starting point. Unfortunately, however, you can't sell the public option as the compromise it was meant to be if as a practical matter there is nothing on the table to the left of it. There wasn't. And so what we got was health care reform circa the pre-Gingrich 1994 Republican revolution, and none of the post-Gingrich Republicans voted for it anyway. Something similar happened on Dodd-Frank. Wall Streeters sharpened their knives and made sure that virtually nothing about the inherent structure of 2008 finance was changed in 2010, and in response Democrats in Congress kept compromising the regulatory measures that would have changed that structure by taking them off the table. At the end, what you got was some mild regulatory oversight coupled with capital reserve reform, but nothing more. Speculative trading will be curbed a bit. But the major players will still be on both sides of the market, and "too big to fail" will have been rejected only until the next implosion requires a reprise of the measures taken in late 2008. In contrast, a Democratic bill that started with separating the commercial and investment banks a la the New Deal, in a Congress with 20 GOP House members and 10 GOP Senators in play, could easily have led to a compromise that ended the heavily conflicted practice of proprietary trading and took the wind out of the speculative sails fueling Wall Street's greatest abuses. Alas, it was not to be. Instead, the Grand Old Party has morped into the Tea Party, an amalgam of the very angry and the apparently inept. Paladino in New York tells us he is "mad as hell" and I believe him. In fact, his madness may be clinical as he proposes to "seize" Ground Zero so as to prevent the (non) Ground Zero Mosque, a trick that uses the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to gut the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Welcome to Carl's Constitution. Where the Bill of Rights is at war with itself. For her part, O'Donnell in Delaware parades as a lower 48 version of Sarah Palin, oblivious to her obvious deficiencies (e.g., non-payment of taxes) as she promises to cut spending and "take back the country." Given that spending cuts in a near Depression are the last thing any sound economist advocates, her plan can only make it more difficult to pay the mortgage on which she has apparently defaulted. Or refund the campaign contributions she used in a prior race to pay her personal expenses. It's their party. You can cry if you want to.

ON MOSQUES AND MADISON

ON MOSQUES AND MADISON

St. Peter's is the oldest Catholic Church in New York City. It is located on Barclay Street in lower Manhattan, a block from Ground Zero.

The church was founded in 1840 and is iconic for New York Catholics as the place where Mother (now St.) Elizabeth Seton converted to Catholicism. The church property includes a narrow strip on its western border, fronting the appropriately named Church Street. And here stands another iconic memorial, the steel cross which was among the remnants of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The cross was "consecrated" shortly after it was discovered and now awaits its final resting place at Ground Zero alongside the Church located a block away.

Though there were Muslim victims among the thousands of innocents slaughtered on 9/11, none of their families or friends complained when the cross went up at St.Peter's. It was not perceived as insensitive to them or their fellow believers, nor was it said to inappropriately inject an element of division into the planned memorial.

No politicians complained either.

Now, some New Yorkers want to build an Islamic Cultural Center on Park Place in lower Manhattan. The owners bought the land and have obtained zoning approval for the Center. The site is between West Broadway and Church Street, about equidistant from City Hall and Ground Zero. It is not, however, being labeled the "City Hall Mosque." Though even closer to the lower boundary of Tribeca, it is also not being called the "Tribeca Mosque." Rather, in a fit of geographic invention, it is now lampooned as the "Ground Zero Mosque."

Lots of politicians are complaining. Lest any side seize the moral high ground, the complaining is unfortunately bipartisan. For the GOP, the yellers are led by Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and a host of Congressman and candidates. For the Democrats, the Senate Majority Leader has weighed in against the so-called mosque, saying it should be built elsewhere, as has New York's Democratic Governor. The President appeared to initially favor the Center but now has equivocated, claiming that his defense of the "right" to build it did not necessarily constitute an endorsement of the "wisdom" in building it.

Many of the families of the victims of 9/11 are also apoplectic with anger, indeed rage.

Where to begin?

Let's start with the families. In my book, they get a pass. They are victims themselves. And entitled to be as angry as they want at whoever and whatever appears to them to be insensitive. They are not ipso facto racists or intolerant, anymore than the legion of South Boston Irish protesting busing in the '70s were racists. The Irish cared about their kids and did not want them going to lousy schools. The 9/11 families care about their memories, which is all the terrorists left them with after slaughtering their loved ones.

So the families get a pass.

But no one else does.

Not Newt . . . or Sarah . . . or Sen. Harry Reid . . . or New York Governor David Paterson. Not even Barack.

They all should know better.

To begin, this is America, not Saudi Arabia. When Newt Gingrich bellowed that a mosque should be built at Ground Zero when a church is built in Saudi Arabia, my jaw dropped. The whole idea behind our "shining City on the Hill," to quote Ronald Reagan, is that we are different. The values of religious tolerance and pluralism that inform our First Amendment in particular and our entire culture in general obviously fall on deaf ears in Riyadh.

And I do not want to be "like them."

So, Newt, no thanks. I'd rather see a thousand mosques in lower Manhattan if the price I have to pay to keep one out is waiting for a church to be built in Saudi Arabia. And curiously, until Newt made his comment, I thought he agreed. He is, after all, of the party that decidedly rejects the notion that any of our constitutional liberties should be informed by foreign practices or customs. The right wing loudly decries any attempts to pour content into the notion of American due process by embracing the European Convention on Human Rights or the progressive social mores of our western brethren. But they now appear to have lost their analytic nerve. Or at least Newt has.

Because he wants to read our First Amendment through the prism of Saudi intolerance.

Newt's constitutional ignorance, however, may be trumped by the Democrats' transparent political cowardice. So many are running for cover, it is now taking on the look of a stampede. Granted, the right wing has done what it has always been very good at doing -- finding and exploiting a wedge issue shortly before the season of electioneering kicks off in earnest. The "Ground Zero Mosque," which for the (irrelevant) record is not at Ground Zero and is not just or even primarily a mosque, is simply this year's version of the Willie Horton ad -- designed to divide and conquer as it appeals to both our basest fears and our sometimes visceral intolerance for "the other."

The Democratic defense, echoing the President's apparent volte face, is that a Constitutional right to undertake any course of action is distinct from the utility or propriety of doing so. This distinction between rights and wisdom, however, is too cute by half. Religious freedom in America is fundamental. And it is paramount. Well intentioned sensitivity to the feelings of those offended by another's practice, or place of practice, is never a sufficient basis for limiting that freedom.

Among America's elites, the only profile in courage last week was Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He did not insist that we compromise basic rights. Or that we ignore all we have hitherto held sacred. He eschewed any phony distinction between rights and wisdom because he knew that the rights bequeathed by James Madison, among them religious freedom, are our wisest inheritance.

He came out four square for the Islamic Cultural Center.

"This is America," said Mayor Bloomberg.

Case closed.