Smack dab in the middle of the front page of the Times today, you have to read nine breathless paragraphs and some 400 words of nonsense before you get to the substance of this story:
[T]he movement is arguably directed at a problem more imagined than real.
Naturally, this is not on Page 1 where it belongs, but buried in the back of the news section. And there's nothing "arguable" about this---these people are seriously deranged. Just because one guy in New Jersey won a shariah court case, it doesn't validate the paranoid fears of a bunch of birthers and bigots. It's this same selective cherry-picking of factoids, and drawing false conclusions from them, that led us into fucking Iraq in the first place---with a big assist, of course, from the Times.
Seems to me the real story here is the shadowy network of right-wing organizations that are pushing this shariah crap. They're mentioned in passing, but we're not really told who they are beyond their paid TV spokesmodels, are we? Like, who really runs these groups? Where are they based? And most germanely, where do they get their money?
But I guess that would require a journalist who's willing to dig deep into the weeds and uproot some worms instead of a stenographer who uncritically passes along the ravings of a madman and calls it reporting.
Like I said yesterday, a society that draws few if any distinctions between its craziest members and everyone else is destined to live under Crazyman Rule, and anyone who professes shock over what has transpired in Washington over the past decade and a half simply hasn't been paying attention. One need only have read the political reporting in major dailies like the Times and the Post on a semi-regular basis to see where our political discourse was heading. The endgame was always easy to extrapolate, and we have finally reached it.
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Vitelius