What's The Play Here?

The who's who of wingnuttery is lining up against Pastor Terry Jones and his "Burn a Quran Day" in Florida on Saturday.  From Pam Geller to Erick Erickson to Sarah Palin, the right is coming out against Jones's vile stunt.

And while it's the right thing to do, the reasons behind it are anything but altruistic concern for our American Muslim brothers and sisters.  So why the change of heart?  A couple of theories:

1) The Petraeus Factor:  Since Gen. David Petraeus came out earlier this week against the Quran burning and voiced concern that it might harm US troops in the Middle East, the Wingers have fallen into line.  After years of "Listen to the generals, stupid Liberals!" they are suddenly neatly and completely trapped by their own logic.  Some have picked a fight with Petraeus but have gotten nothing but grief from the rest of the Right for it, and the rest have fallen into line.

2) The Park51 False Equivalency:  No doubt some of the overwhelming criticism of Pastor Jones is because the Wingers see burning Qurans to be "as controversial as the Park51 project in Manhattan".  Only extremists would want anything as crazy as burning Qurans or building a victory mosque on the atomized remains of Ground Zero, you know extremists like Liberals and Muslims.  This false equivalency is absolutely motivating much of the protests, especially for the real hard-core Muslim-haters like Pammy.

3)  A Winger Too Far:  In the end it's just impossible to really defend Jones here, even for Wingnut logic.  Certainly none of the Presidential hopefuls in 2012 are going to back Jones on this, so voila!  Everyone from Moose Lady to America's Favorite Wealthy Mormon are out against this.  Quran burning is not good optics.  Not even Wingers are this dumb.

4)  Mainstreaming Islamophobia:  The real reason, and the one reasons 1-3 relate to, is maintaining the illusion that Islamophobia is acceptable mainstream in America.  It's a lot easier to say "Well I don't think they should build there" when you can back it up with the absolving addition of "But hey I'm not burning books or anything, those guys are the real fruitcakes and we're not like that."  Move the Overton Window to the right and work the vast real estate between outright McCarthyism and "mild disapproval of that weird religion".  It's classic Winger stuff here.  Openly questioning the patriotism of Muslims is now "perfectly normal".

So yes, in the end don't be fooled:  The Right is still leveraging the crazy.