Kerry, Post Kos

Mark Steyn notes the problem for Kerry buried behind last week's Markos "Screw 'Em" Zuniga's outburst last week; trying to gauge exactly how far off the deep end the mainstream of the Democratic Party has slipped:

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 Kerry), where the desecrated bodies had the loony Left high-fiving: ‘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 Kerry supporters denouncing their man for being such a gutless wimp as to distance himself from the Screw-The-Dead-Mercenaries 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, K.M. Thurman asks Kerry what he’s going to do with the $48,500 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’.

And that's the problem; the Democrat mainstream is saying and doing things that responsible adults would have shaken their heads and clucked at ten years ago.

And this is a very bad thing; it's impossible to have a civil society with those who can't be bothered to be civil; you can't have a free association of equals with people who don't believe their opposition is equal.

Posted by Mitch at April 9, 2004 06:29 AM