On Friday night it seemed very clear that President Obama gave moral support to the Ground Zero mosque builders, but on Saturday he appeared to backtrack, saying: “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding.” (Then White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton weighed in Saturday night to walk back the walkback: “Just to be clear, the President is not backing off in any way from the comments he made last night.”)

Obama’s waffling is being criticized across the political spectrum. In the words of left-wing blogger Glenn Greenwald, Obama’s Saturday clarification “diminished his remarks from a courageous and inspiring act into a non sequitur, somewhat of an irrelevancy. After all, the ‘right’ of the mosque isn’t really in question and didn’t need a defense.”