Seriously? Do the American people need a lesson on the Constitution from Obama or the New York Times? Don’t they get that the “bitter clingers” are not clinging to guns and religion so much as they are the Bill of Rights, which is being threatened daily by the Obama administration and its 32 anointed czars?

Where is the NYT editorial board when we really need them? They never have any interest in defending the Second Amendment. They rallied behind the President on the unconstitutional health care legislation rammed through on Christmas Eve and on the weekend with practically zero debate. They sure didn’t care anything about the rights of private property owners who lost out in the Supreme Court case Kelo v. City of New London or those who lose out every day under Byzantine zoning laws. They don’t care anything about the unconstitutionality of banning offshore drilling in the Gulf. And, despite their newfound concern with “religious freedom,” they don’t seem to mind that the Greek Orthodox church, St. Nicholas, hasn’t been able to rebuild their place of worship at Ground Zero for years.

Why don’t the NYT editors ask why bureaucratic red tape manages to ensnare St. Nicholas’ efforts to rebuild but so easily parts for a sketchy imam backed by foreign governments?

As Jonah Goldberg points out, why didn’t Mayor Bloomberg realize the offensiveness of having a symbol of Islam at Ground Zero, put two and two together and avoid the whole debate in the first place “with a few phone calls”? Instead, notes Goldberg, “It’s as if they’ve wanted to turn a dumb idea into an emotional and unwinnable national controversy.”

A mega-mosque at Ground Zero is beyond dumb. No offense to the millions of moderate Muslims who have to sit by and watch as fundamentalist freaks hijack their religion, but even moderate Muslims know this mosque is a bad idea.

M. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, writes in the New York Daily Post:

This is not about the building of a mosque or a religious facility. It is not about religious freedom. This is about a deep, soulful understanding of what happened to our country on 9/11.

When Americans are attacked, they come together as one, under one flag, under one law against a common enemy that we are not afraid to identify. Religious freedom is central to our nation — and that is why the location of this project is so misguided. Ground Zero is purely about being American. It can never be about being Muslim.

The World Trade Center site represents Ground Zero in America’s war against radical Islamists who seek to destroy the American way of life. It is not ground zero of a cultural exchange.

None of this concerns the NYT, Bloomberg or Obama.

Sadder still, as Dr. Paul Hsieh points out so articulately in his recent essay at American Thinker, this controversy has become a major distraction in our battle against Islamic totalitarianism — a battle we are in danger of losing. Dr. Hsieh writes:

All the energy devoted to this issue of the Ground Zero Mosque is distracting us from the far more serious problem of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. If this more fundamental problem is properly addressed, then the NYC mosque issue will become irrelevant. Conversely, if America doesn’t deal with this more fundamental problem, then any legal or political maneuvers to stop the NYC mosque — even if successful — will make little difference in the long run.

Indeed, I can think of a thousand more controversial issues in America that will be moot if Iran gets a nuclear bomb.

Is anyone else horrified that it’s Mickey Mouse time with our leaders during this critical juncture in history?

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It’s very hard, Mr. Krugman. In fact, it’s impossible to “understand” because the idea is irrational. For people who do not live in a topsy-turvy world where apparently money can be created out of thin air and has no basis in reality, it’s impossible to “understand” how spending more in the face of a massive, mind-blowing deficits is a good idea. When you are broke, you do not need to spend more. You need to stop spending and produce more. People being productive create money. Governments that arbitrarily “stimulate” the economy with future money that doesn’t exist create inflation, not prosperity.

I’m  heartened to see that there is a growing backlash in the media (and among voters) against Keynesians and statists, like Krugman, who believe the only way out of a recession is to increase consumption.

Finally, voices of reason are pointing out that it was government intervention into the economy — (artificially low fed rates, a policy-driven housing bubble and government sponsored entities, Fannie and Freddie) — that got us into this mess in the first place and thus it cannot be government that gets us out of it. The following is an excerpt from today’s Investor’s Business Daily editorial:

The world is going to hell in a handbasket, Krugman suggested this week, thanks in large part to its refusal to follow his advice to the letter.

Actually, he has it exactly backward. Krugman was among those who encouraged the new Obama administration and the Democratic Congress to spend massive amounts of money early on in a kind of Keynesian frenzy to shock the moribund economy back to life.

It didn’t work. With a stimulus — a deficit, that is — of nearly 11% of GDP, our economy is barely growing, while unemployment remains shockingly close to 10% of the adult working population.

Even the European leaders are realizing that we have finally “run out of other people’s money” — Margaret Thatcher’s famous observation on the inherent problem with socialism. Obama’s insistence on implementing socialist and Keynesian policies is yet another power-grabbing tactic and a threat to liberty.

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The president needs to get something passed. Anything. The details don’t matter. Once it’s in place, health-care ‘reform’ can be re-reformed endlessly. Indeed, you’ll be surprised how little else we talk about. So, for example, public funding for abortions can be discarded now, and written in — as it surely will be by some judge — down the road. What matters is to ram it through, get it done, pass it now — in whatever form.

If this seems a perverse obsession for a nation with a weak economy, rising unemployment, and a war on two fronts, it has a very sound strategic logic behind it.

As I wrote in National Review a week or two back, health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. That’s its attraction for an ambitious president: It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in a way that hands all the advantages to statists — to those who believe government has a legitimate right to regulate human affairs in every particular. [emphasis mine]

I hope Obama’s health-care bill does not pass, but I don’t want it to fail because the costs are insane — (the Congressional Budget Office estimates the proposed plan will cost over $1 trillion over the next five years). I don’t want any government plan for health care. I oppose state-run health care because it is a leftist power grab that comes from people who only want more power over others. The left has an insatiable and irrational desire to run everybody’s lives — from how much of your own money you can keep to what cigarettes you can smoke to what sodas you can drink. (Watch, they’ll be taxing soda soon.)

No, there is nothing at all magnanimous about the Democrats’ goal to “reform health care.” Their intentions are not noble. It is never noble to confiscate other people’s money or to declare that you have the right to other people’s money.

For exceptional analyses of the dangers of socialized medicine and why we need to oppose it, I refer you to www.WeStandFIRM.org — a site started by Paul Hsieh and some other Objectivist friends back in Colorado.

His whole background from the earliest days onwards was steeped in anti-white grievance politics of the most bitter and corrosive kind. This was all ignored. His two-decade membership of an anti-white church was ignored, his early anti-white mentors such as Frank Marshall Davis were ignored, his participation on the Nation of Islam ‘Million Man march’ and his association with Nation of Islam cadres were ignored.