So much for multi-culti.

Americans' perception of Islam is trending negative. James Taranto says that the media war against the war in Irag has not just hurt Bush, but Muslims as well:

Our sense is that the media's antiwar bias is feeding the public's anti-Muslim bias. By relentlessly focusing on the bad news in Iraq and playing down the good, journalists perpetuate an image of the Muslim world as a hostile, uncivilized place.

I'm not sure I'd blame it on the media coverage of the war as much as the riots over the Danish cartoons. We all saw those images of Islamic men and women holding up their purple fingers, but they were hard to remember when we saw the crazed attacks on western businesses, flag burning and death threats against the cartoonists and the ruined Golden Mosque. I'm sure that the chorus that the war has been lost hasn't helped, but I don't think that by itself could have caused this result.

Then you have to add the stand Democrats have taken on the DPW deal, calling Dubai, one of our most loyal allies in the region, untrustworthy really feeds this phenomenon. To me, it suggests that the Democrats can't be trusted. They've backed multiculturalism and political correctness for years, forcing Republicans into building whole bureaucracies to protect people from racial hatred or even critical remarks. Now they've turned into racial bigots against Arabs. That's some turnaround.

I don't know much about this area of the law, but it strikes me as pretty hypocritical to have laws that allow foreigners to buy property and businesses here, but now to say "All except you!" is politically expedient but devoid of prinicple. The Republicans look like a Three Stooges movie dealing with this, but it's not what I'd call terribly inconsistent for them to worry about national security and illegal immigration.