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Obama agrees with me about the mosque near Ground Zero.

Ben Smith reports:

Speaking to reporters today, President Obama drew a sharp line under his comments last night, insisting that his defense of the right to build a mosque does not mean he supports the project.

"I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding," he said.

Obama's new stance is logically consistent with his words last night, if a bit less "clarion," as Mike Bloomberg called the first remarks.

I had to Google "Mike Bloomberg." Oh, Mayor Bloomberg. Do we call him Mike?

Anyway... Ben, Mike... everybody... could you possibly take the trouble to pay attention to words?

And read the Althouse blog. It was all always obvious, as I told you here and here.

Obama's new remarks, literally speaking, re-open the question of which side he's on. 

Re-open the question only because you foolishly visualized a closed question.

"Literally speaking" ... what the hell does that mean? If you knew how to be literal, you wouldn't have read more into the old remarks than was there. You read subjectively. You let idiotically soaring hopes cloud your eyes.

Obama has made his brilliant career out of saying the most crashingly banal things to people who hear what they want to hear. Could everyone please wake up? Please!

Most of the mosque's foes recognize the legal right to build, and have asked the builders to reconsider.

But the clarification is, in political terms, puzzling. The signal Obama sent with his rhetoric last night wasn't that he had chosen to make a trivial, legal point about the First Amendment. He chose to make headlines in support of the mosque project, and he won't be able to walk them back now with this sprinkling of doubt. All he'll do is frustrate some of the people who so eagerly welcomed his words yesterday as a return to form.

Allow me to help you solve your little puzzle? You are a chump. You need to wake up, smarten up, and realize that words have meaning.

Full post as published by Althouse on August 14, 2010 (boomark / email).