Frank Rich damns the “virulent 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.” Maureen Dowd says this:

The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown, with the right spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment. The dispute over the Islamic center has tripped some deep national lunacy. The unbottled anger and suspicion concerning ground zero show that many Americans haven’t flushed the trauma of 9/11 out of their systems — making them easy prey for fearmongers.

Many people still have a confused view of Muslims, and the president seems unable to help navigate the country through its Islamophobia.

It is a prejudice stoked by Rush Limbaugh, who mocks “Imam Obama” as “America’s first Muslim president,” and by the evangelist Franklin Graham, who bizarrely told CNN’s John King: “I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father, like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother.” Graham added: “The teaching of Islam is to hate the Jew, to hate the Christian, to kill them. Their goal is world domination.”

A poll last week by the Pew Research Center tracked a strange spike in the number of Americans who believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Obama is a Muslim. And even the ones who don’t think he’s a Muslim don’t necessarily believe he’s a Christian.

(C. Edmund Wright has a response to the Times and similar outlets in the AT.) Not to be outdone by the Times, CNN, which previously reported that seven out of ten Americans oppose the project, has a pictorial history of American religious intolerance posted now.

There sure is a crack-up going on, as Maureen Dowd said. However, the crack-up seems to us to be that of the MSM, so shocked to find that the vast majority of their countrymen are sick and tired of being insulted, lectured and talked down to by people who, for no good reason, are convinced of their own importance and moral superiority.

Indeed, it probably goes further than that. We think there is the shocking realization by the MSM that they find themselves with so little power in setting the journalistic agenda and dictating what the public should think. Note Dowd’s and Rich’s ascribing the political opinions of a supermajority of Americans to the influence of a cable news channel and a talk show host. The MSM have lost their power so they think it has flowed into some other centralized source, when in fact they have been undone by the decentralization of news availability. No wonder they sound so over-the-top and lost.

(More: Richard Cohen in the WaPo and a report from NPR make the Times commentators look almost moderate by comparison. HT: BOTW)

This entry was posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, New Media, Polling, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.