Objectivists are dumb: Part 1 of a potentially very long series

Exhibit A:

The left has gathered itself, picked itself up and brushed itself off about the Ground Zero Mosque issue. For months it seemed that only opponents of the mosque were saying anything about it. It was not an issue on the left until their man in the White House spoke up about it. Now the left is fighting back.

This is of course complete and utter bullshit.

Yes, you guessed it. Josh Marshall explains it for you:

The institutional Republican party has fully (though with some notable and honorable exceptions) hoisted its sail to xenophobia and religious hatred. And as Halperin notes, at least for motivating their own voters, it’s simply good politics. This is not something anybody happened into.

Well, there you go. Those creeps on the right are appealing to xenophobia and religious hatred because that works with the stupid American people. Marshall’s argument is classic leftist thought: forget any subtleties of the issue, just cut to what is important — how the immoral GOP manipulates the American masses with their lies.

There ARE no subtleties. The builders have the right to build, according to all relevant laws and over two hundred years of American legal tradition. "They're hurting my feelings" isn't an argument, neither is "Muslims scare me". But this is all that the anti-"Mosque" people have seen fit to grace us with. "Xenophobia" and "religious hatred" are ugly words. But when the shoe fits...

Obama’s speech on Friday at the iftar dinner with Muslim ambassadors was steeped in multiculturalism:

In my inaugural address I said that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and every culture, drawn from every end of this Earth. And that diversity can bring difficult debates. This is not unique to our time. Past eras have seen controversies about the construction of synagogues or Catholic churches. But time and again, the American people have demonstrated that we can work through these issues, and stay true to our core values, and emerge stronger for it. So it must be — and will be — today.

In a free nation that protects individual rights, none of this is very important. The controversies between various religions are barely noticed because every individual is equal before the law.

But when a nation throws out individual rights and embraces collectivism — the only thing Obama understands — then groups are of primary importance, for governance becomes a matter of pressure group warfare. A controversy such as the Ground Zero Mosque turns into this group against that group.

In other words, First Amendment is a bad thing because it's sometimes necessary. Therefore, the best way to support individualism is to treat Muslims as an undifferentiated mass. Got it.

Obama’s biggest evasion is that the issue is not first about religion, but politics and war. Islam, in addition to being a religion, is a political ideology — a totalitarian ideology that is waging war as it attempts to conquer the world.

Even granting this characterization of Islam, how is this an argument against treating Islam specially. Pat Robertson isn't promoting a totalitarian political ideology? Catholics really do take direction from a foreign power: should we really allow them to build more churches?

The Ground Zero Mosque would be a symbol of Islam’s victory in a battle in its war for world domination.

And this is a bad bad terrible thing worth trashing two hundred years of American political tradition, how, exactly? If Osama bin Laden sees this as a victory, then bully for him. I remain unclear as to what obligates me to agree with him.

Religion and multiculturalism are used to obscure the essential issue and weaken America in its fight against this totalitarian enemy.

I actually agree with this. Where I differ is in the identity of the totalitarian enemy. International Islam may or may not try to take away my freedoms in the future. Myrhaf and the shameless demagogues he's trying to justify are doing it right now.

The second interesting thing about Obama’s response is that it does oppose the 68% majority of Americans who want the mosque built somewhere else. The majority of Americans are right. Still. They understand that this is about war, not religious rights, and they are still willing to stand up for our national self-defense. They have not entirely let go of their individualist sense of life that Ayn Rand wrote about almost 40 years ago. This is the only good news here, and the American sense of life, tattered and torn as it may be, remains our only hope.

I still don't understand what's so individualistic about 68% of the population pressuring the government to void a private transaction in direct contradiction to its principles as explicitly stated in its founding documents, but no doubt a Real American will explain it to me.

If the American sense of life is so insecure that it becomes indistinguishable from mob psychology at the first hint of trouble, then perhaps it isn't worth very much.