More on the Burlington Coat Factory Non-Mosque

I was pretty short on material for today, so I decided to see what the good folks over at National Review were up to, and saw that Charles Krauthammer himself had weighed in on the Burlington Coat Factory Islamic Culture Center controversy with a piece called "Moral Myopia at Ground Zero".  I was not particularly impressed by this one, and I have been impressed by Krauthammer before.  Basically, he lumps the standard liberal argument into an effigy of straw to be sacrificed to the god of conservative caricature. 

After this initial section he denounces the perpetrators of 9/11 (how brave).  The end is not quite enough to be a saving grace but as reasonable as is possible a defense of conservatives being squarely on the wrong side on this one: basically Krauthammer insists that the conservative position is not about denying the center's proprietors their rights in the free market, but merely about questioning the decency of building an Islamic center that close to Ground Zero.  It's a nice try to explain away conservatives being obviously wrong on this one, but why continue then to insist that it is at Ground Zero at all?  Shouldn't Krauthammer take the high road and refudiate his own side?

Krauthammer is a bright guy, and so why then does he gloss over the obvious factual errors of the conservative stance on this issue if it isn't consciously strategic?  There is no mosque: it's not at Ground Zero; it's none of anyone's business anyways.  Besides, who says Ground Zero is sacred?  We've treated that "hallowed ground" like shit for the past ten years.  The fact that we still haven't rebuilt the Twin Towers or built the Freedom Tower or built a 666-story tower shaped like a middle finger and pointing towards Mecca or anything at all is because of the enterprising, unentitled parties constantly throwing in their two cents for personal gain, the same people vilified in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, the same people who stormed Duke after the lacrosse incident my senior year, and the same people who wont shut their fucking mouths now, Sarah Palin.         

And as for Krauthammer's apocalyptically stirring language at the end about the War on Terror justifying the conservative response (which has about as much to do with the Burlington Coat Factory Non-Mosque as Iraq had to do with 9/11), Islamic terrorism - and terrorism of any kind for that matter - is not a big deal.  The number of Americans killed by terrorists each year is dwarfed by the number killed for not wearing their seat belts or not properly washing their hands or eating too many cheeseburgers.  The War on Terror is not the principle struggle of our times by any standard (unless we're talking about how much it has cost us or how many other problems it's created).  In fifty years we'll have nothing to show for it except a bunch of Pakistanis and Yemeni's still pissed off that our shitty drones killed their parents and baby brothers and hellbent on vengeance, ready to go for Round 492 of our civilization's ridiculous battle with Islam.