TPM Reader EA notes how the kind of boffo over-the-top ‘branding’ games that are the norm in 30 second attack ads can be rather more pernicious when applied to religious hate speech …
It seems like enough damage has been done with the misnomer “Ground Zero Mosque,” but Palin’s tweet that the mosque is just two blocks away from “9/11” is similar to the crawl headline I saw in the Trentonian over the weekend visiting my Grandmother in the Philly burbs. It said, “Obama supports 9/11 mosque.” (I wonder where this construction originated and how widespread it has become relative to others)
As if “Ground Zero Mosque” wasn’t inaccurate and incendiary enough, I guess headline writers felt compelled to even further remove their coverage from the actual controversy, detaching the proposed community center from a phrase that at least approximated its location to one that more viscerally and inextricably pairs the Cordoba House with the day/event/trauma of 9/11.
I guess as Tweets are concerned, 9/11 mosque takes fewer characters than Ground 0 Mosque. Democrats have always bemoaned their own inability to boil issues down to bumper sticker format. Twiitter’s not exactly in our wheelhouse.
That’s the huge problem with this issue. It’s one that everyone has heard about but not that many people actually know about. A nuanced position about rights, religion, local agency, and cultural sensitivity MUST BE boiled down to being FOR or AGAINST the 9/11 MOSQUE.
