Frank Rich: Your complaining about the mosque* at** Ground Zero undermines Petraeus

by folkbum

Of course, Rich doesn't offer any stats or an actual quote from Patraeus to show that that's true, but he makes a compelling case that it may well be:

Here’s what’s been lost in all the screaming. The prime movers in the campaign against the “ground zero mosque” just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan. The wrecking ball they’re wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America’s already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques.

So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right--abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats--that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

Rich goes on to lay out show how the ignorant stupid-head critics of the Park 51 plan are not merely ignorant stupid-heads wrong on the facts, but also ignorant stupid-heads intent on scoring a few electoral points at the expense of nine years and trillions of dollars trying to undermine and eradicate radical Islamists around the globe.

I ask, politely, that my ignorant stupid-head anti-Park51 readers to explain to me how Rich is wrong.

* it's not a mosque
** it's not at Ground Zero