Murderous rhetoric

Some Bush-loathers rejoiced in the Fallujah atrocities: Mark Steyn says that there is a virus of hate in the Democratic party

New Hampshire

0 n 31 March, four civilian contractors to the Coalition Authority in Iraq were ambushed in Fallujah. They were shot, burned, mutilated, and what was left was then dangled from a bridge while the townsfolk danced for joy in the street. On his website The Daily Kos, Markos Zuniga marked the passing of these four individuals: 'I feel nothing over the death of merceneries [sic]. They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.'

You can find anything on the Internet if you look hard enough. But not many website wallahs who exult in the murder of American citizens are as well-connected as Mr Zuniga. He claims his site is 'the most popular political weblog with over three million monthly visits' and boasts of his access to Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The Daily Kos carries advertisements from Democratic congressional candidates around the country, including incumbents — North Dakota Congressman Earl Pomeroy — and challengers — South Dakota Democratic House candidate Stephanie Herseth, who raised $21,000 in one day on Zuniga's site. It's partly credited with helping Ben Chandler win victory in a special House race in Kentucky a few weeks back, The Daily Kos has been mentioned approvingly in stories on the rising influence of the Internet by CNN, CBS, Business Week, the Associated Press, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and our chums at the Guardian. Zuniga's admirers include Simon Rosenberg, former Clinton aide and president of the New Democrat Network (Markos has done an incredible job'). Howard Dean put him on the payroll as a campaign consultant. John Kerry's website links to Mr Zuniga.

Or did. Over the weekend, the senator's site posted the following announcement under the headline 'Respect': 'In light of the unacceptable statement about the death of Americans made by Daily Kos, we have removed the link to this blog from our website, As John Kerry said in a statement earlier this week, "My deepest sympathies are with the families of those lost today. Americans know that all who serve in Iraq — soldier and civilian alike — do so in an effort to build a better future for Iraqis. These horrific attacks remind us of the viciousness of the enemies of Iraq's future."' Kerry's problem, for over a year now, has been trying to calibrate the precise degree of Democratic derangement to run on. He started out with the same general recipe as Joe Lieberman's Democratic porridge — way too cool. Then Howard Dean came along and wowed the activists, until he got too hot and blew his lid. And just as Kerry is figuring he's got it just right, so comes a reminder that 'just right' is a very fine calculation in the Democratic party these days. Mr Zuniga has since made a weaselly attempt to qualify his original remarks and declared himself a victim of a right-wing smear, but I think we know what he meant first time round: like Jo 'It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury' Moore, Mr Zuniga has attempted to distance himself from a moment of unintended self-revelation.

For a British civil servant to sit in her office on 11 September watching men and women jump to their deaths from a burning skyscraper and see it as an opportunity is a reminder of the dehumanising effect of contemporary politics. No apology can ever take it back: we know her now. It's the same with Mr Zuniga.

The only difference is that, if Ms Moore is the poster gal for the dehumanised political operative, Zuniga is the epitome of the post9/11 re-primitivised political activist. By 'reprimitivised', I mean the armchair insurgent's version of that Fallujah carnival. He doesn't want to dance in the street when he sees dead Americans hanging from a bridge, but he does think: screw 'em.

And, in a way, who can blame him? Where would he have got the idea that American civilians in Iraq are 'mercenaries' who aren't 'trying to help the people' but are there to 'wage war for profit'? Maybe from Senator John Edwards, former presidential candidate, whose solitary reference to the war in his stump speech was a pledge to stop 'Bush's friends' from 'war-profiteering in Iraq'. Or maybe from Senator Bob Graham, another candidate, justifying his vote against the Iraqi reconstruction bill by saying, 'twill not support a dime to protect the profits of Halliburton in Iraq.' Or DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe declaring on TV last October that Bush would never withdraw from Iraq because 'I don't think they want to give up Halliburton and the $6 billion of no-bid contracts they've got on oilfields over there.' Or Kerry sidekick and former senator Max Cleland, who fumed that Bush's 'insane' war was all to do with profiteering and 'oil wells' and 'Cheney getting income from Halliburton'. Or John Kerry, who says, `Halliburton is guilty of shameful war-profiteering.'

For a year, any reference to Halliburton has been a surefire applause line for Democratic candidates: 'Halliburton' is shorthand for everything that's wrong with everything — the war, the reconstruction, the economy, why gas is up to a buck seventy-seven a gallon in California (Those are not Down prices, those are Halliburton prices,' says John Kerry). Halliburton is why your roof leaks, why your car radio's stuck on the polka station, and why your Viagra isn't working. It's all the fault of 'cosiness with Halliburton', says Howard Dean. When it was pointed out, after one attack on Halliburton, that Senator Graham in fact owned shares in Halliburton, he explained that he wasn't attacking the company's shareholders or employees hut 'war-profiteering' in general.

Question: Which Democratic candidate damned the Iraq reconstruction contracts as Bush 'sweetheart deals'? Was it Dennis Kucinich? Al Sharpton? Carol Moseley Braun? John Edwards? John Kerry?

Answer: All of them, and sometimes in the same debate.

If you'd gone to all the candidates' debates and campaign stops, and listened to the big-time Dem senators, congressmen, governors and party officials, the only thing you'd have heard about Iraqi reconstruction for the last year was 'sweetheart deals' and 'war-profiteering' for 'Bush's friends'. So when four of the 'warprofiteers' get whacked in Fallujah, why wouldn't you think to hell with 'ern?

As readers may recall, I'm a big fan of what the private contractors are doing in Iraq. The NGO fellows — the humanitarian lobby mostly pulled out of Iraq six months ago, and since then it's been the private sector reconstructing the country's education system, health care, utilities and other infrastructure. The corpses left hanging off that bridge were part of the security for food and supply con voys in the Sunni Triangle, and they were murdered for their pains. If you have a revulsion against 'sweetheart deals' and 'profiteering', the place to start is Kofi Annan's Oil-forFraud programme. But if you've followed what John Kerry and his fellow presidential candidates have been saying about the reconstruction contractors for the last year, 'screw them' is a more accurate summation of the Democratic position than Kerry's 'Americans know that all who serve in Iraq — soldier and civilian alike — do so in an effort to build a better future for Iraqis.'

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the most visible faces of the Democratic party on TV were the foreign-policy grandees like Senator Joe Biden, who were eager to sound supportive and bipartisan, except for disagreements with the President over the insufficiently large font size of the Uzbek labelling on the emergency food packages dropped in Afghanistan. That kind of Democrat has all but vanished from view. In the past two and a half years, a virus has advanced through the party. It's easy to dismiss the fellows at Democratic Underground (another site linked to by John Keny), where the desecrated bodies had the loony Left high-flying: Death to ALL mercenaries. The beer is on me.' But then you go back to the senator's page and below the announcement deploring Mr Zuniga's 'unacceptable statement' are hundreds of comments from Kerrysupporters denouncing their man for being such a gutless wimp as to distance himself from the Screw-The-DeadMercenaries approach. 'Greed is Irak's most vicious enemy, and sensorship is America's most vicious anemy at this hour in history,' warns Barbara Curbelo Cusack, who writes like a middle-school teacher. `Go home and wash the piss out of your trousers,' sneers Meyer from St Pete. 'Howard Dean helped you get a spine.' More pertinently, KM. Thurman asks Kerry what he's going to do with the S48,500 he raised through the Daily Kos site.

If you take a walk on the wilder side with the cyber crazies. you realise that the real liability for the Democratic party is not the loonies but the leadership: though they're more tonally savvy and use fewer four-letter words, the party's most prominent figures have signed on to the same worldview as the nutters — the war in Iraq was a crock cooked up by Cheney to enrich his oil buddies. etc. Somewhere between Afghanistan and Iowa, a bunch of hitherto dull, unremarkable senators bought into the central tenet of the deranged Left — that hatred for the Bushitler trumps all other considerations. Or as Al Gore recently howled, trying out his latest new accent, 'Heee-aaaah be-aaah-tray-ud us!' The degrees of separation between the fringe and the mainstream have vanished: Ted Kennedy quotes approvingly Karen Kwiatkowski, who calls the US a 'maturing Fascist state' and predicts senior administration officials will wind up 'sitting beside Hussein in the war crimes tribunal'.

Richard Clarke, for his part, has been embraced by the Democrats because he supports the general 'BUSH LIED!!!!' thesis on Iraq and WMD. That's not quite what he says, but it's close enough. In reality, until two weeks ago, when Clarke came out against Bush, he frequently sounded more Bush-like than Bush. 'We should have a very low barrier in terms of acting when there is a threat of weapons of mass destruction being used against American citizens,' Clarke told the Washington Post in 2000. 'We should not have a barrier of evidence that can be used in a court of law.'

But the Washington Post doesn't want to reprint quotes from the old Clarke, because they like the new Clarke much better. Last Thursday, their front page ran the headline (and not as an April Fool gag) 'Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn't On Terrorism'. You don't say. On 11 September 2001, the Post's top focus was its lead story on spending surplus social security funds; the Los Angeles Times front page ran with complaints from advocates from the learning disabled about a Mitsubishi commercial allegedly insensitive to dyslexics.

The whole Democratic backwards worldview is insensitive to dyslexics. By the time you read this, Condi Rice will have testified before the 9/11 Commission and, if there's an infelicitous formulation or two, the Post will no doubt cry `Gotchar But Clarke barely made it to a nine-day wonder, and, by the time the press had piled in, Bush's poll numbers actually went up. It will be the same with Condi. If you want to argue that the Clinton team had a better policy on gay marriage or the environment, that's one thing. But when you suggest they were stronger on terrorism, and you put Gore, Albright, Cohen and Berger on one side of the screen and Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice on the other, it's no contest.

It looks now as if November will be a referendum on 'the Bush war'. So be it. The Democrats can't win on this turf, even with George Soros showering them with cash and the Saudis allegedly leaning on Opec to bump up the oil price and bring down the President. Hugh Hewitt, on whose radio show I appear, recently did his own variation on John Edwards's 'two Americas' speech. Hugh says there's 'serious America' and 'silly America'. Democratic Senator Zell Miller, a Bush supporter, divides them into 'warrior America' and 'wimp America'. I'd feel better if wimp America could be held below 40 per cent of the vote this November. But between the media and Soros, even John Kerry should be able to do better than that.

Nonetheless, there's a kind of airbrushed Chinese whispers going on: out on some website, some fellow makes a ludicrous charge. An opportunist senator removes the profanities and starts using it at rallies. A newspaper reporter glosses over the more obviously paranoid aspects and frames it as a questions-are-being-raised issue that Bush needs to address. It's fun while it lasts. But after November's election has come and gone, the damage to the Democratic party will linger a long time. Oh, well. As the Dems themselves would say, screw 'em.