The hyperventilation over the mosque near (but hardly "at") Ground Zero in Manhattan demands a response, but then I remembered that Henry L. Mencken said it all many years ago:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."*
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right..."
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*This quote is sometimes rendered with "taste" rather than "intelligence," but I can't source either version.
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