Obama Steps In It Again

And now he's doing some backpedaling to try and stop the damage:

President Barack Obama on Saturday sought to defuse the controversy over his remarks on plans to build a mosque near Ground Zero, insisting that he wasn’t endorsing the specific project but making a general plea for religious tolerance toward all.

"In this country, we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion,” Obama told reporters Saturday when asked about his remarks at a White House dinner marking the start of Ramadan.

“I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there,” Obama continued. “I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That's what our country is about. And I think it's very important as difficult as some of these issues are that we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about."

But his comments Friday night were widely interpreted as an endorsement of plans to build a mosque a few blocks from where nearly 3,000 Americans perished at the hands of Islamic terrorists on Sept. 11 — an interpretation the White House hadn't disputed until Obama’s comments in Florida.

Already though, Obama's comments on the Ground Zero mosque have transformed an emotion-laden local dispute in New York into a nationwide debate overnight, setting nervous Democrats on edge and creating potentially dramatic political implications in the upcoming midterm elections.

Just as he did in the Cambridge police incident a year ago, Obama involved himself into a situation that did not require his comment and in so doing created a firestorm for himself and his party.  No matter the constitutional foundation for his argument in favor of the mosque, his unequivocal support for the project, coming at a Ramadan dinner in front of a crowd that included some rather shady individuals with ties to Hamas and other radical Islamic groups, only lends credence to the idea that America is not his first love.  It reflects a tone deafness that seems to permeate his administration these days.