. . . was the fact that Pastor Flapdoodle in Florida got a knock on his door from the FBI right before he canceled his weenie roast.

I’m on record in the posts below of thinking the pastor is, to put it mildly, misguided. Though he may be on shaky biblical grounds, he was on rock solid terrain where is First Amendment rights were concerned.

Like me, the guys over at the Powerline blog are wondering what the heck the FBI is doing in this story:

This raises the suspicion that the FBI visit was an attempt to intimidate Rev. Jones. A vist for this purpose would be an entirely improper infringement on his (and by extension our) civil liberties.

That fact that the likes of President Obama, former President Bill Clinton, Gen. Petraeus, the FBI, the Pope, Oprah, the cast of Jersey Shore, and that guy from the Staples commercial who yell’s Wow! That’s a low price!” are all predicting new waves of jihadis and suicide bombers because some loon in Florida says he’s planning to burn some Korans, tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the moral equivalence of Islam and Christianity.

Andy McCarthy, the lead prosecutor on the 1993 WTC bombing case has it right when he says:

Terry Jones is a jackass. . . But that’s beside the point. Burning a book sacred to Muslims is a stupid, provocative thing to do. Yet, it is conscious avoidance — okay, willful blindness — to claim that Jones is causing the threat to our troops, in addition to the threat of other attacks and riots by Muslims (of the sort we’ve seen with the Danish cartoons, the false claims of Koran-flushing at Gitmo, the school teacher who named a teddy bear Mohammed, etc.).

Those are all pretexts. The cause is Islamist ideology, which is dehumanizing of non-Muslims (or, in the case of the Ahmadi, even of Muslims who reject core parts of Islamic doctrine). It is the ideology that puts the world’s Muslims on a hair trigger.

Christians are grieved and sometimes outraged when sacred symbols of the faith or even Christ himself is desecrated or defiled in art, film, theater or public protest. But such are commonplace in our culture and around the world precisely because those who do it know they have nothing to fear.

So some knot-head pastor in Florida with a congregation of 40 people announces an idiotic publicity stunt and it dominates the national headlines for a week and counting?

Really?

Sweet mother of cheese . . . the Pope felt obligated to weigh in on the matter today.

A commenter on some blog pointed out that on any given day, there are probably several dozen pastors of tiny churches doing something weird in this country.

Sadly, he’s probably correct. But it is also true that on any given day there are thousands of churches across this country doing wonderful things in their communities.  Sacrificial things. Redemptive things. Noble things.

And those acts will go unnoticed. Which is fine, because they are not done for show or for the praises of man.

So why is this nutburger with extra cheese the central topic of the national conversation day after day? Obviously, it is exacerbating a pre-existing condition. Namely, the debate over the proposed mosque near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.

Indeed there is a lovely symmetry with these two proposed actions. In both cases, the parties have a constitutional right to do what they are planning. In both cases, they should decline to exercise that right.

Yes, I know that Muslim activist groups in this country are constantly whining and bellyaching about sensitivity and deference to Islamic sensibilities which makes the mosque project gallingly hypocritical.

But then Muslims don’t have Jesus in the Koran establishing what we call the Golden Rule. Those who claim the Bible as their final authority and guide do have encouragement to “treat others as you want to be treated.”

In his heart of hearts, does Pastor Goofball want to see groups of skeptics, atheists, Muslims, or Wiccans holding Bible burnings? I doubt it. So the biblical course of action is clear. But I doubt that he’ll see it that way any more than that detestable Fred Phelps fellow and his creepy cult followers do.

And so the media circus continues, with a little Florida church serving as the clown car in the center ring.

This truth is becoming so obvious that even the Washington Post is acknowledging it:

“Small Businesses Feel Squeezed by Obama Policies”

Of course, this is WaPo we’re talking about so note the qualifier “feel.” The acknowledgement is not that small businesses are being squeezed by Obama policies–only that they feel they are.

Squeezed is actually the wrong word. Crushed, smothered, traumatized, shell-shocked, or “under siege”  . . . by Obama policies would be a better descriptor of what the business community is “feeling.”

(via Mediaite)
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Okay. One comment.

Can you imagine any Katy Couric doing that?