For GOP, Islamophobia is the new anti-Communism - War Room
For GOP, Islamophobia is the new anti-Communism - War Room - Salon.com
George W. Bush called Islam “a religion of peace.” But his party’s base never really believed that.
It’s suddenly fashionable on the left to praise George W. Bush.
Granted, the praise being offered is narrow in scope, limited only to Bush’s non-inflammatory public comments on Islam in the wake of 9/11, and backhanded in nature, with his example supposedly demonstrating the failure of today’s Republicans — with their Muslim-baiting response to the “ground zero mosque” — to meet even a modest standard of responsibility in their own rhetoric.
But the idea behind the praise is big in scope: that, as Matthew Yglesias put it in Sunday’s Washington Post, the post-Bush GOP is engaged in an “abrupt slide toward xenophobia” that the party’s Bush era leadership rejected:
[T]he mosque controversy is not a continuation of the dynamics that started on Sept. 11, 2001, but a sharp reversal of course nine years on, one that’s antithetical to the approach during the administration of President George W. Bush. Then, leading conservatives were careful to portray the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks as a targeted campaign against a minority group of murderous fanatics, not a broad cultural conflict with Islam. They appreciated that the latter approach would amount to a strategic and moral disaster.