For your consumption:

A new “Audio Files” col­umn is avail­able for view­ing at When Falls the Coliseum. Topics float from Wang Chung to Glenn Danzig to Carl Sagan to liq­uid orgasms to Boris the Sprinkler.

Scroll down the page a bit and there’s an excel­lent piece by Daniel Kalder on the din of dystopian chat­ter that enshrouds the Ground Zero-Mosque “dia­logue.” Writes Daniel:

The the­ory goes like this: (Imam) Rauf is a fraud, a man who won’t denounce Hamas, who said numer­ous dodgy things about America after 9/11; he is merely pos­ing as a mod­er­ate and this struc­ture is designed to be a sym­bol of Islamic tri­umphal­ism, spit­ting in the face of our val­ues, a front guard in the spread of Sharia law around the world.

FACT, OR BOLLOCKS? Who the fuck knows? He cer­tainly equiv­o­cates when it comes to Hamas but then so do many mem­bers of the “Professional Left”. That’s not just a Rauf thing.

He also likes to ram­ble on about Sharia, allegedly a sys­tem of per­fect laws handed down to man by God in Heaven via Mohammed but then again Sharia is not mono­lithic. For all I know Rauf may have devel­oped his own groovy ret­conned inter­pre­ta­tion that jet­ti­sons all the gay-bashing, woman-oppressing, hand-chopping, other-religions-subjugating stuff you find in the harsher vari­ants. Or he may not have: again it would be nice if some­one in the media had actu­ally taken the time to ask a few ques­tions to clear up some of these issues.

All that aside, it cer­tainly doesn’t help that the peren­ni­ally grin­ning Rauf is too cow­ardly to appear in pub­lic to argue his case; nor that the sources of the building’s fund­ing have not been revealed. If it has been paid for by mys­ti­cal Sufis, or an enlight­ened soul like the Aga Khan (not a Sufi NB but rather an Ismaili) then we could dis­miss these fears out of hand. If it’s been funded by the Saudis how­ever, well then it prob­a­bly is a front for some truly appalling ideas. However, pix of Rauf yukking it up with the occa­sional anti-Semitic/genocidal freak such as those which have been unearthed on Pajamasmedia don’t prove all that much. That’s what you do when you’re a jet­set­ting global dia­logue coach get­ting lots of cool stuff for free from the pub­lic teat as Mr. Rauf most assuredly is.

Consider our own pres­i­dent for exam­ple, who by con­trast has a real and quite oner­ous job. Mr. Obama vis­ited Saudi Arabia in June and imme­di­ately went into full grov­el­ling mode, thank­ing King Abdullah for his ‘wise coun­sel’ and other such crap. King Abdullah of course is the geron­to­crat who pre­sides over one of the most oppres­sive states on earth, an appalling tyranny which enforces gen­der apartheid, reli­gious apartheid and even today cru­ci­fies peo­ple on occa­sion. Lovely! But still, when King A. hands a bucket of luke­warm shit to Prez O., the Harvard edu­cated, oh so urbane ex-Constitutional Law pro­fes­sor laps it up, pats his swollen belly, turns to his grin­ning host and yums: Oh your Highness you are really spoil­ing us!

Scroll down fur­ther still and the redoubtable Ricky Sprague offers up hilar­ity as only he can in a piece about Obama’s automobile-themed rhetoric:

For the entirety of my so far very short life (I am a young man), both democ­rats and repub­li­cans have “dri­ven” the gov­ern­ment. They have gone to great lengths to ensure that mem­bers of other par­ties, and those with­out any party affil­i­a­tion, have a very dif­fi­cult time mak­ing it into “the driver’s seat.”

“We’ve made sure that third-party can­di­dates don’t get their hands on our keys!” Obama needs to say. (Can you imag­ine how much worse off we would be if some­one who wasn’t a demo­c­rat or a repub­li­can got elected to a major polit­i­cal office?)

It’s as if the econ­omy is one of those “econ­omy” cars that you some­times get stuck with when you don’t pay close atten­tion at the rental agency. And the rental agency is run by the American peo­ple. They say to the renters, “Here is your car, the 2010 American Economica, please take care of it.”

Then the renters (politi­cians) say, “Okay, I won’t do any­thing to mess it up.”

And then when they take the keys, they wink.

Now, some red meat for the snarling masses:

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