Muslims In The GOP Tent

The GOP's fervent pre-9/11 efforts to curry favor with Muslims runs smack into its frantic post-9/11 efforts to paint all Muslims as terrorists. It's all quite odd, but it does demonstrate that Michelle Bachmann's recent flirtation with McCarthyism was actually an old-fashioned power play:

It turns out that there are big intra-wingnut differences over Michelle Bachmann’s attempt to assassinate the character of Huma Abedin, with Limbaugh and Gingrich on Bachmann’s side [She’s not making any accusations, just asking questions. Why is it bad to ask questions? Shouldn’t we be concerned about the security of the country? What are you afraid of learning?] and McCain and Boehner (!), supported by Rubio and Scott Brown, speaking up for elementary decency

...It turns out that Bachmann (and her four fellow Teahadi Congresscritters) didn’t invent the smear against Abedin. Its part of the much bigger Muslims-under-the-bed fantasy invented just after 9/11 by a washed-up Reaganoid named Frank Gaffney. And one of Gaffney’s early (and continuing) targets was none other than the Godfather of the anti-taxers, Grover Norquist.

Now it happens to be true that, in the early days of the W usurpation, Norquist identified Muslim-Americans as a potentially Republican-leaning voting (and contributor) bloc, and pushed his fellow-GOPers to reach out to them. I’m not sure whether any of the outreach was supposed to involve Middle East policy as opposed to patriarchy, though it’s worth remembering that, pre-9/11, W himself treated the Saudi Ambassador as virtually a member of his family, and after 9/11 did everything he could to cover up Saudi complicity in planning the attack.

In any case, Norquist clearly wanted to add Muslims to the Big Tent the GOP was trying to build before it settled down to become the Party of Straight White Christians. Gaffney disagreed, and was more than willing to get ink and raise money by questioning Norquist’s loyalty, with frequent references to Norquist’s Muslim wife. And Gaffney hasn’t given up on Norquist as a target; Grover the Untaxable is prominently mentioned in the same “documentation” Bachmann cited in her attack on Abedin.