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Rep. Weiner Again Dodges Taking Position on Ground Zero Mosque

By: Brian Faughnan (Diary)  |  August 7th, 2010 at 03:00 PM  | 

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Cross-posted to Liberty Central.

New York City Mayor Anthony Michael Bloomberg is a strong proponent of the Ground Zero Mosque. He has gone out of his way to speak up in support of the rights of Cordoba House to build a mosque at Ground Zero, in Manhattan. The Wall Street Journal reports that Congressman Anthony Weiner – a frequent rival to the Mayor – has written to compliment Bloomberg on his handling of the controversy – but has managed to do so without clearly affirming his own support for the project. Weiner’s refusal to take a stand on the project has previously been noted and criticized; does he intend this letter to clarify, or confuse?

It seems safe to conclude that Weiner supports the mosque. He certainly does not forthrightly oppose it, and his words of encouragement to Mayor Bloomberg really leave no other interpretation. Why then, does he not make his support clear?

COMMENTS

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  • gfwarhol

    and do not understand why ANY Jew would possibly support this blatant Muslim attempt at place a mosque as a sign of victory. There is NO other reason for them to want it at ground zero. NY Jews must have a death wish?

    • gmosucks

      The organization has been in that neighborhood for 27 years and actually does good community work, but that is a different topic.
      Wasn’t Wiener just screaming something on the floor the other day “You vote yes if you mean yes …blah blah blah” ? If so, why isn’t he standing up and supporting or admonishing this, could it be he’s a wiener?

    • whoframedrudy

      … as Israel flying the Flag of Quraish over the Knesset as a symbol of goodwill–while Netanyahu tragically fires on Hezbollah’s human shields. Petraeus is revamping our rules of engagement re civilian casualties while we sing Kumbaya at Ground Zero? I’ve seen cartoons with a more adult worldview than the Mosque. Wartime diplomatic gestures need to be measured carefully. With sympathies*, Mayor Bloomberg sounds like a stroke victim gurgling up buried emotions from his childhood. Obviously, the Ground Zero Mosque is not promoting harmony.

      I don’t read anything sincere in Weiner’s letter. He’s latching onto church-state just as an excuse to stay out of it as a Congressman. It’s just a well-crafted dodge; hire him as your lawyer. This is about wartime diplomacy, not religious freedom. The whole mess is a diplomatic screw-up, mainly Bloomberg’s fault, but no kudos to Weiner, the non-conscientious objector. Now a diplomat needs to step in and clean up this mess created by Bloomberg’s childlike failure to anticipate the shockingly obvious negative reaction. Here’s a laugh — maybe Obama?

      (*I personally suspect the Mayor isn’t well. Speaking of the WTC rebuilding fiasco, he said he wasn’t going to ‘leave this life with that hole in the ground.’ I found it curious that he framed the question in terms of his own mortality.)

  • mikerazar
  • johnt

    but he may want to suggest that government get out of the business of controlling building permits and having Landmark Commissions. and also abolish that one religious public school in New York.
    The muslim one.
    When he’s done with that he can crawl back into his sewer, if the other creatures will have him & can stand the odor.

  • http://jakespeaks.wordpress.com/ Jake W

    Anthony is Rep. Weiner’s first name.

    Anyways, it doesn’t surprise me at all that Weiner won’t take a definite position on this. Probably wants to avoid offending people, particularly Muslims. Also, I agree with what gfwarhol said in the first comment on this post.

    • Brian Faughnan

      Stuck thinking about Anthony Weiner…

  • m_quick

    For all we know, he may just support Bloomberg’s stance on religious freedom, not the mosque itself. You can tolerate something without supporting it.

    For example, I don’t like people smoking in restaurants I go to. But I wouldn’t have the government force those people to leave the restaurant just because I didn’t like it. I would tolerate smoking in restaurants, but I wouldn’t support it.

  • kowalski

    He’s a fraternity brother of my father’s and mine, so I know his name.

    • kowalski

      With a Harvard pedigree after having graduated from Johns Hopkins (you go non-ivy to ivy elite if you want to be a successful politician). He named the School of Public Health at JHU after, essentially, himself. He didn’t begin as a doctor at Hopkins, though. He graduated in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, and he later got his MBA from Harvard. The rest is history.

  • kowalski

    Weiner can’t endorse the Mosque but he’s willing to listen if Bloomberg goes through with it. Then they’ll just make it work together. It’s a 10 second decision.

  • kowalski

    What always amazes me about Potentates is how much 10 of their words mean versus 100,000 or a million of anyone else’s words.

    Ted Turner can get up in front of a camera and say: “It’s time we stopped covering the pervert of the day.” And WHAM that changes the entire editorial policy at CNN. Mike Bloomberg can get up in front of a microphone and say: “I don’t see anything in our country’s tradition that should stop a mosque from being built at Ground Zero” and WHAM that will change everyone’s tune. Instantly everything will be altered, like there was never anything else.

    All of the rest of what everyone else does, regardless of party, is just to spend a lot of time creating buzz about decisions that have already been made.

  • throwback59

    mayor of NYC, so he doesn’t want to go on record as supporting the mosque.

  • Michael Dugas

    Weiner see the flack Bloomberg is taking and doesn’t want to deal with that himself so the lack of a concrete stance on the subject is business as usual. Very few Politicians speak the hard truths or want to be the messengers of bad news. It’s not good for business. But the result is that problems get out of control because they are not addressed in an appropriate amount of time.

    Liberals such as Bloomberg are showing an abysmal lack of concern for the feelings of those Americans who were up close and personally touched by this crime against humanity. The living victims of 9/11 and the majority that disagree with the mosque being built there are being ignored or over ruled by the ruling elite who claim to know better. This is a common train of thought amongst Liberals that even if the majority disagree with them they know better and are justified in over riding even the votes of the people themselves, i.e. Gay Marriage Ban in Cali.

    Hide you true stance on controversial issues.

    Use parliamentary tricks and buried wording in incidental legislation to over ride the will of the people.

    Use policy and legislation to destroy wealth and create a society of victims dependent on the government.

    Everything Democrats do is cloaked in darkness, hidden by mirrors and twisted up in double speak. Honesty is a long dead virtue in Washington D.C.

  • http://www.ArchitecturalShots.com mdyou

    Weiner is a pussy. Period. He thinks that if he’s nice to terrorists, they won’t cut his head off. He’s an idiot.

  • DirtyDave

    This has to be what it is. I never believed it until recently, mainly from events like this. Given the prevailing antisemitism, he should be fighting this with all the ridiculous rhetorical skills he posses. Instead he just wimps out. When we need courage, he cowers. Maybe he’s just embarrassed to be Jewish.

    What an ultra-maroon.

    Maybe political correctness has so addled his brain he just goes into cowardliness mode. Playing nice with people who kill so casually, with such delight, is not going to work. He needs to man-up, as un-PC as that may sound to him

  • Hera

    Weiner just married a Muslim, which could be one reason he would not speak publicly against the ground zero mosque. Another reason could be the unpopularity of this mosque not just in NY but nationwide.

    One thing is clear if this mosque was ever ment to promote healing and tolerance (which it was not), that is impossible now.It should be moved. Mayor Bloomberg instead of giving tearful speeches in support of this mosque should have been working behind the scenes to ensure it was never built near ground zero. That’s what a skilled politician would have done.

  • kowalski

    Let’s get something straight right now:

    The Mosque at Ground Zero is an *entirely* inside baseball New York phenomenon. It is so inside it couldn’t get more inside even if it was outside.

    For Bloomberg the cultural imperative is to demonstate to moderate Muslims in New York that the city doesn’t discriminate, and even to apologize to them for whatever discriminations have occurred in their minds. And, in a technocratic sense to help build his database of cars and vehicles that travel around Manhattan, so that he can preemptively deploy police officers.

    Believe me, if it happens, it will be the most well-watched Mosque in the world. My guess is that there will be more cameras on it than there are eyes normally looking at places in lower Manhattan.

    That doesn’t change the fact that people feel powerfully about it, but listen: Bloomberg is going to get his way. The Mosque is going to be built, and it’s going to be watched from the Earth and the Sky and Underneath the Earth and the Sky, and probably with laser beams bounced off its windows.

    In the meantime Bloomberg will be sitting back watching the data pour in.

    It’s very important to understand how he made his fortune when you consider things like this. He’s a technocrat who flirts with totalitarianism.

    • kowalski

      When he received one of his Entrepreneur awards, and basically violently dismissed a professor in the audience who dared to question his imprimatur for Bloomberg TV and its expansion across the globe, and I quote him:

      “I have an army of lawyers that I employ to make sure that I can do whatever I want.”

      Siddown, Mr. Professor.

      • Achance

        I’d let them build a Grand Mosque on the Washington Mall if American contractors could build it. It ain’t like we don’t have a little experience with this stuff with various embassies, though we haven’t always come out on top; the Soviets were pretty good with their tradecraft too.

    • Hera

      The NY post just reported that these muslims don’t even own all the land for the proposed mosque and they’ve collected a grand total of $200 in donations yes that’s $200 of the $100 mil needed for the project. So the Imam and the muslims who Mayor Bloomberg defended lied about owning the property. As Rep King asked “what else are the hiding”. How’s Mayor Bloomberg going to look after defending these people at the expense of the majority of Americans and 9/11 victims when this all blows up in his face?

      http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/half_baked_mosque_8ItuaW0WIByZa5xZ0rCmpJ

  • kowalski

    That is why the distinction in this world has changed very rapidly in the past 10 years. It is no longer a problem of the “haves” versus the “have nots”. It is, rather, a difference between the “knows” and the “know-nots”.

    It is a matter of information and who has access to that information, and the larger the information gathering network is, the fewer people per capita are needed to stay on top of it. That’s why Facebook has 500 million users but employs less than 2,000 people: they don’t NEED more people than that: the users themselves tell them almost everything they want to know.

    All of the stuff people send around every day on the internet (the vast majority of it, anyway, including text and phone messages and with the exception of a few financial transactions) are done in plaintext. All of that information is being collected and parsed and filtered through and sliced up a million ways to Sunday. It’s an inexact science right now, but that’s only because it’s just getting started.

    People like Mike Bloomberg were in the vanguard of the information revolution in financial markets: his job was to provide more and better information to people who wanted to lease or purchase his Bloomberg terminals, and that is how he made his fortune. His entire tenure as Mayor in New York City, including the decreases in crime rates he’s been celebrated for, are a result of careful analysis of data and distribution of resources according to that data.

    Sure, it doesn’t always work perfectly. Nobody claims that. But his time in New York City has convinced him that his approach is absolutely successful, which is why he wants much more access to much more information when it comes to his pet projects, like going after gun manufacturers. He’s not kidding, and believe me the “fresh” memories Weiner talks about in that letter are just a minor bump in the road.

    Bloomberg makes mistakes sometimes that come from prejudices – that’s why in the Times Square incident he was hasty to blame “a homegrown, someone who has a political agenda” or someone not happy with the health care bill. He was looking (or maybe he was pretending he was looking) in the wrong direction, there.

    But he’ll fix that up. Everyone in New York and Chicago is going to be under 24/7 surveillance in the next decade, everywhere they go, and regardless of what they do. It’s essential to Bloomberg and Daley’s maintenance of their cities they way they want them to run that everyone be watched all the time, and that the data is collected and used according to what they think is a good way to run the place.

    That’s it, folks! There’s nothing else more sophisticated than that: it’s a matter of watching everyone under their domain all the time, and feeding that back into a constant loop of self-improvement in terms of policing and law enforcement. The whole country will eventually be this way.

    • http://www.ArchitecturalShots.com mdyou

      Believable, but depressing.

    • http://www.scragged.com petrarch

      you’d think there’d be less youth violence in Chicago. At least Bloomberg, to his credit, has kept the crime rate reasonably low in his fief.