Monica Crowley, Traffic Cone-Like or Not, Makes Some Good Sense

Monica Crowley, Fox News contributor and nationally syndicated radio talk show host, also spent four years as a foreign policy assistant to President Richard Nixon until his death in 1994. She then wrote two books about him, Nixon Off the Record and Nixon in Winter; or, as Imus prefers to look at Crowley’s literary accomplishments, “She threw the former President under the bus.”

Luckily, Crowley’s sense of humor is as keen as her intellect, and she laughed off Imus’s criticism, both of her work with Nixon and of the bright orange skirt she was wearing today, which Imus compared to a traffic cone.

“I’m really disinclined to take fashion criticism from somebody who looks like he orders his clothes out of the Brokeback Mountain catalogue,” she said.

Like everyone else, Crowley’s got an opinion on whether a mosque should be built near Ground Zero, as one Muslim group hopes to do. She agrees with the standard view that while they have the right to build the mosque, perhaps a different location would be more appropriate. But there are some other important arguments that she’d like to see raised.

She balked at the typical American “self-indulgent naval-gazing” of wondering what the building of the mosque means for our constitution, for the First Amendment, and for freedom of religion and assembly. “We’re so focused inward on what this controversy means to us and for us,” said Crowley, “that we are spending no time whatsoever focused on what does this mean for the enemy?”

The enemy, she continued, “is looking at this from a completely different vantage point.” As such, she believes we ought to think about the terrorists, a number of whom, along with some more moderate Muslims, have highlighted the Islamic tradition of building mosques on sites of conquest.

“I think the enemy—and I’m not talking about Muslims overall, I’m talking about the jihadi enemy, Islamic supremacists—their objective of building this mosque is not to foster tolerance or understanding,” said Crowley. “It is to create a symbol of Islamic supremacy in the very heart of the 9/11 attacks.”

Like Glenn Beck before her, Crowley was unable to enumerate how many of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are actually terrorists, but she believes a significant number of Muslims are sympathetic to their cause, even if they’re not strapping bombs on themselves and killing innocent people.

“And those are the ones that you really have to focus on how they would interpret the Ground Zero mosque,” she concluded.

Crowley has been coy for years with the I-Man about the identity of her mystery boyfriend, but her sister Jocelyn’s marriage to Alan Colmes isn’t a good sign.

“That’s one strike there against the Crowley girls,” he said, and sighed.

-Julie Kanfer