Does anyone know of a tick tock that explains how the “Ground Zero mosque” became a sudden cause célèbre among the tea party wing of the conservative movement? Here’s a New York Times story from last December, and it doesn’t so much as mention any objection to the purchase of the building in question (which is two blocks away from the World Trade Center site). By May, Newsweek was suggesting that plans for the mosque were “prompting outrage in the blogosphere,” but not much of anywhere else. At the same time, CNN reported that local residents were divided but that the Community Board of lower Manhattan had approved the project unanimously.
Now, a couple of months later, it seems to have erupted into a full fledged right wing frenzy. So who started it? Hannity? Rush? Sarah P.? Does anyone have a timeline showing how and when the noise machine picked up on this as the outrage du jour?
UPDATE: Here’s a start from TPM, which takes the story through May 28. Anybody got something more recent that explains when the big guns started getting involved?
