Tracinski has a great column on great American Larry Silverstein’s Freedom Tower going up as we speak at Ground Zero. Robert Tracinski is the editor of the must read TIA Daily.

“Never Bet Against New York”

While everyone has been fixated by the controversy over the Ground Zero mosque, we’ve been missing the real story: Ground Zero is no longer a hole in the ground.

I want to emphasize again what a non-story the Ground Zero Mosque will probably turn out to be. I’ve thought this ever since I realized how little money is actually behind the project. David Frum is not my favorite conservative commentator—he’s a squishy welfare-state “moderate”—but he does us a good service by laying out clearly who owns the property, who is behind the project, and the fact that they don’t appear to have anything near the $100 million required to build it.

The picture that emerges is that would-be Ground Zero imam Feisal Rauf is a huckster who sold a couple of Arab businessmen on a pie-in-the-sky project whose only real impact will be to boost Rauf’s career—making him a fake martyr to “Islamophobia”—while putting his backers $5 million into the hole. Here is how Frum puts it:

The more I read about Feisal Rauf, the more I see a very dangerous kind of man—no, not the Islamic extremist kind of dangerous—but rather the kind of guy who can convincingly say, “$100 million? That’s nothing! I have a cousin in Abu Dhabi who could write a check for $100 million himself! Don’t worry about anything, leave it to me, I’ll get the money, that’s the easy part. You get the zoning rights, we’ll buy you out, all cash, easiest money you ever made.” The streets of New York are littered with the carcasses of dead developers who met and believed the Feisal Raufs of this world.And that brings me back to another point I’ve been making: that the mosque is irrelevant and would have no impact, not even a symbolic one, if not for the fact that we still haven’t built a tall, soaring tower on the World Trade Center site. That’s the symbol we need to show the world that we have not been defeated and that we won’t back down.

About a month ago, I linked to a good column by John Podhoretz excoriating New York’s politicians for obstructing the rebuilding of the WTC site for nine years. But a few weeks after that op-ed was published, it was made obsolete by news that—quietly, while we weren’t paying attention—there is something being built to replace the Twin Towers.

Various legal and political disputes have been resolved, and the structure for the new One World Trade Center—the pretty good design for the 1,776-foot-tall “Freedom Tower”—is already more than 36 stories tall. Follow that link for a few pictures of the construction in progress. But also go to the official WTC website for some very nice renderings of what the final project will look like when it is completed in 2013.

When this is happening, it’s inexcusable that we’re all talking about that two-bit con-man Feisal Rauf, when the real story here is the enormous achievement of Larry Silverstein, the owner of the WTC site and the developer who has devoted the past nine years of his life to a crusade to rebuild. He fought against self-aggrandizing politicians who tried to oust him from the project, against defeatists who wanted to turn the whole site into a memorial, against the little minds who wanted to build small. Thanks to him, it looks like the Freedom Tower will be standing tall before they even break ground on the Ground Zero Mosque, if they ever do.

On September 11, the Wall Street Journal published a terrific profile of Silverstein in which he described his motive for rebuilding the site. Silverstein is 79 years old and has taken this on as the last project of his life, in the hope that he will be around long enough to enjoy seeing it completed.

Critics have questioned his personal and financial agendas. “You know, this has gone totally beyond the concept of money,” Mr. Silverstein says. “If making money was the important factor, I’d have been stupid to hold on. It makes no sense at all. Because the reality of what I could have accomplished with the same time, effort, and energy in the last nine years spent elsewhere [is] much, much greater than anything I could have accomplished here. This has been an issue of pride, of determination, of recognizing as a New Yorker what’s important to get done down here and how badly it’s needed.”

He tells the reporter, “You know you always have people who are naysayers. This can’t get done and that can’t get done…. The one thing I can tell you: never bet against New York.”

When we look at those who pass as the nation’s political leaders, it can be easy to succumb to despair. But we should always remember that they are not the real story. The real story is the American people—those who turned out by the millions at Tea Party rallies, those who have volunteered to fight against radical Islam in the armed forces, and can-do businessmen like Larry Silverstein who won’t let war or recession stop them from building. They are the ones who really move the world, in the long run.

Never bet against New York? That’s good advice. Even better advice: never bet against America.—RWT