Newt's Defining Foment

Robert Wright recalls Newt Gingrich's 2010 demagoguery about Muslims and declaration of war on the First Amendment:

Gingrich said they shouldn't be able to build a mosque within a few blocks of the World Trade Center site just as "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington." Surely Gingrich is smart enough to see the problem with this analogy. (Hint: The 9/11 attacks were organized by a terrorist group called al Qaeda, not by a religion called Islam.) But he knows that people who hate Muslims won't fuss over details--and if the Nazi comparison amps up their hatred, so much the better for the politician who champions their cause.