jazeera does that and we get a lot of protests around the world, i guarantee you we ll get sucked in again. i think the faster we can turn this guy s microphones off and turn off the lights, the better. he is living off the publicity and i can t tell you how much this is so this is damaging to the country now. i don t think i think it was unwise for the president to get as deeply involved as he has. i think it did give more len legitimacy to this guy. it s time to shut off the microphones. you were opposed to bill iin that mosque and islamic center near ground zero, although obviously they have the right under the constitution. what do you make, though, of this pastor trying to insert himself into that? it seems like the most craven attempt to extend his 15 minutes of, you know, surreal fame. yeah, exactly. this guy and his congregation
mid terms and specific issues? what happened? a lot of them are depressed. my personal theory is on 2008, election day, starbucks gave free coffee if you vote. starbucks demographics, pretty good for the democrats. caffeine is a stimulant. since then, a lot of states have decriminalized marijuana. pot bad, coffee good. they re sitting at home, smoking it up. a 50% drop in the three statewide elections we ve had post-obama in massachusetts, virginia and new jersey. 50% decline in young people s vote. while many of them are disenchanted perhaps with president obama, i have to tell you, a lot of us older democrats are getting a little frustrated with the youngsters. this is a marathon race. yeah, they got their hopy changy guy in 2008. if they want to actually enact all that change, they have to stay in the game. david, from a republican perspective, do you think the gop would like to see more alan grayson? alan grayson is a big part of
he just wants to be on the air. he is not a rational human being. he is driven by forces we don t understand. and i think it was perfectly legitimate to cover him in terms of the islamaphobia. i do think he is representative of a fever that we see in the country that needs to be contained, understood, contained and we have to talk our way through it. i would hope as we get copycats, they get less attention. i do think he got to a place where he was getting a lot of interviews and people were sort of putting him on. we went live today with it. i know that was a hard decision. it was a very hard decision for cnn to decide what to do when he went live today to claim this, make this preposterous claim that he reached an agreement with the imam. i m sure people are wondering, did we overplay this? these are hard, hard questions for all of us. some guy is standing on a street
the lesson to learn here is that we, as a nation, will never negotiate with terrorists or those that use extreme means of hate to try to manipulate the discourse. and i think, similarly, we ve seen and i think it s not just the media s fault. this guy put this issue on facebook. it then got translated to different websites and the islamist media. from a teaching standpoint, we re in an information war. we need to start to take the offense and say we re going to advocate for ideas of freedom and liberty and stand behind the constitution even though we may pay a price for it. just when they had videos of our soldiers, god forbid, being beheaded. all of that is an information war we have yet to begin as americans. yet, paul, controlling information information has become democratized. anybody can put anything on the web. this guy will videotape this pastor will probably videotape it, put it on the web and it will be out there. that s the thing. i m trying to move back, who comme
a florida imam had lied to him that the proposed new york mosque was moving. he said, quote, we are rethinking our position. we re little back to square one and we hope this thing works out. this is a guy with a flocking a few dozen people, sparked international demonstrations, draw a presidential warning, a warning from the head of the military in afghanistan, a call from the defense secretary of the united states today, a visit today from the fbi and more. it is all, frankly, surreal. earlier today, he announced the koran burning was off and this was the reason he gave. we have or he has been in contact with the imam in new york city. i, with the imam here, i will be flying up there on saturday to meet with the imam at the ground zero mosque. he has agreed to move the