Excerpt:
Tea Party favorites Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin and Larry Klayman spent most of last week bashing Muslims and introducing the "Quran" and "Allah" to the shutdown and debt ceiling debate that they are losing in Congress.
Unfortunately for them, Muslims are in fact more popular and viewed more favorably by Americans than the far right movement.
Having failed at governance and the basic task of securing an operational government, the Tea Party leaders had to retreat to ugly screams of Islamophobia in order to distract attention from their downfall and to drum up support with fear tactics. Larry Klayman, a clownish figure who started the Tea Party group Freedom Watch, brought a whole new dimension to the budget and debt ceiling debate last weekend, claiming that the U.S. is "ruled by a president who bows down to Allah" and who needs to "put the Quran down." Klayman is not alone, 17 percent of Americans -mostly his constituency, according to a Pew poll - believe that U.S. President Barack Obama is a Muslim.