Not that the left is immune from doing this, but it’s just that the right seems to have become unusually good at it. Or more accurately, the religious far right who have taken over the Republican party. The ones who proclaim loudly that they believe in that guy who said things like love your neighbor as you would yourself.

Whenever America faces her toughest challenges, you can always count on the right to be there. Sowing hate, stoking fear. So it’s no surprise that in the midst of a great economic catastrophe, the right would search for scapegoats instead of answers. And so we have the fabricated crisis of the “Mosque at Ground Zero.”

Leave aside the fact that it’s not a mosque and it’s not at Ground Zero. This is really about hate and fear, the right’s old friends.

For the last 45 years, at least, no matter who the Republican candidate has been, hate and fear were really at the top of the ticket.

Recall that in 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency by stoking fear of Negroes and hippies. The vaunted Southern Strategy of the Republican Party was at its core a campaign of fear. What a ride it’s had.

It’s no longer fashionable to be officially afraid of blacks, but there is no shortage of substitutes. Who is the right afraid of now?

Read the post to find out the new boogiemen are in their list of things to distract us. Like Muslims in a building a few blocks from Ground Zero. Like there aren’t any anywhere else around there now.

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