There is no verifiable evidence that Bush carried the Muslim vote by anything like 70% (other than Norquist asserting it (w/o footnotes)in the American Spectator and elsewhere.
Until you can indict Norquist, his published expert opinion is evidence. Your whine about "w/o footnotes" is funny; what if he did have footnotes, but the footnoted references didn't have footnotes, and so on ad infinitum!??
I really don't want to debate about percentages with you; the main point, and bigger picture, was summed up very well by Bob J, two hours before your posts:
To: TaxmanWe cannot win the war on terrorism without the help of the moderate Muslim community. I applaud Norquist's efforts attempts to bring what he thought to be moderate elements into a dialogue with Bush. The fact that a few of them have not turned out to be what people thought they were is unfortunate, but then again, no one knew the extent to which the Saudi's had placed operatives in US Muslim organizations.
There appears to have been no security losses over these incidents. As Nick Danger pointed out, they instead directed a spotlight on them and the government has been able to ferret out and prosecute them. Kicking Norquist to the curb over it is unfair and unproductive.
There are those who believe that no Muslim can be trusted and that our only solution is to kill them all and let God sort them out. This viewpoint is shortsighted and will only result in failure, not to mention the acrid genocidal aroma. I've seen this same attitude expressed on other other threads that are race based, immigration for instance.
Allowing these attitudes to fester will result in the marginalization of Free Republic and a failure in achieving it's goals.
221 posted on 12/10/2003 8:15:12 AM PST by Bob J