Posted on 12/22/2003 8:22:16 AM PST by Billthedrill
The congressman from Seattle has finally done it.
"Baghdad Jim" McDermott has lost his mind. Gone bonkers. Fallen from the cuckoo's nest and broken his left wing.
No other reason could possibly explain why he would hit the talk-radio circuit last week and suggest President Bush timed the capture of Iraqi henchman Saddam Hussein for political gain.
The U.S. military, McDermott cynically huffed to KIRO-AM talk show host Dave Ross, could have found Saddam "a long time ago if they wanted."
The good congressman wasn't done.
Asked to elaborate about whether he thought the timing of the capture was scripted to benefit Bush, McDermott said: "Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's too much by happenstance for it to be just a coincidental thing ...
"I know they've been in contact with people all along who knew basically where he was ...
"It's funny," McDermott blasted, "when they were having all this trouble, suddenly they have to roll out something."
By "they" he means Bush & Co.
Well, it's one thing to think such thoughts privately. Many Americans -- myself included -- have had similar, fleeting questions flash through our minds.
It's something else entirely to pass off such thinking as fact -- or, at the very least, informed opinion -- especially when one is an elected official with such a lofty public soapbox.
Lacking proof, McDermott's comments are irresponsible verbal diarrhea. And they are an unadulterated embarrassment to any card-carrying Democrat.
Can you blame fellow Washington Democrat Rep. Norm Dicks, who pinched his nose and held the commentary at arm's length. "Fantasy," Dicks said in characterizing Baghdad Jim's hallucinations.
"It's one thing to criticize this administration for having done this war. I mean, that's a fair question," Dicks told The Associated Press. "But to criticize them on the capture of Saddam, when it's such a big thing to our troops, is just ridiculous."
McDermott's bout of foot-in-mouth is troubling on several grounds.
It is an unfounded knock on the president of the United States, regardless of what one might think of Bush's politics or policies.
It also became fodder for contrarian elements that are only too willing to seize upon flimsy sophistry to further their anti-American agenda.
No sooner had McDermott spoken than the Washington, D.C., correspondent for al-Jazeera, the Arab world's communications leader, fired off this line:
"Arabs are not alone in believing U.S. conspiracy theories ... ."
Most disturbingly, McDermott's tirade undermines McDermott -- a man who recently gave voice to thoughtful criticisms about the Bush administration's ever-shifting reasons for barreling into the sovereign nation of Iraq.
This war was about finding weapons of mass destruction, the Bush brigade said early on. Nope, it was about getting bad man Saddam who had a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration said, switching directions.
Oops. It was really about removing a mustachioed menace who brutalized his own people. Think again. It was America's way of helping the Iraqis learn about freedom and democracy.
Oil -- a real justification for this war -- never gushed much from the president's lips.
In any case, these points McDermott meticulously pointed out before and after war broke out, even if he did act dubiously by going to Baghdad and launching a crusade against Bush.
His message was fine. His method was less than desirable, which is why some people likened what he did to an act of treason.
That criticism notwithstanding, I called McDermott "a hero" in a July column for his willingness to yell into the "hurricane of presidential spin ...for having the courage to say it like it is."
He was offering an important and appropriate voice of dissent at the time.
But here's the trouble with heroes: They can disappoint you by doing or saying something boneheaded.
Last week, Congressman McDermott morphed into Congressman McDuhmott.
Here he had a fine opportunity to go on radio and speak about any of many things -- about the president's scattershot reasons for going to war, about how ill-prepared the United States was for a post-Saddam Iraq.
He even could have offered a Democratic counterpoint to how Bush's go-it-alone global strategy and doctrine of military preemption in Iraq has scared other countries such as Libya into giving up their weapons.
No, it appears that would have taken up too many of the congressman's brain cells.
So McDermott said something stupid -- something debunked by the facts as we know them.
In nabbing Saddam, U.S. military leaders had to overcome Iraqi tradition that values tribal loyalties above all else; a fellow Iraqi had to narc on the ex-dictator. That takes time -- not, as Baghdad Jim suggests, political timing.
These days McDermott isn't alone in his embarrassing shows of intellectual flatulence.
Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean not long ago asserted that Bush might have had advance warning of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Dean's words -- unsubstantiated, inflammatory and hurtful -- are unbecoming of a man who would be president.
McDermott and Dean come from the medical field. McDermott was a psychiatrist. Dean was a family physician.
If politics were medicine, they both would deserve to be sued for malpractice.
LMAO!! I can identify with that - living in Madison Park, I drive through the "enemy lines" every day.
Would love to do it in a "Stryker" with guns blazing sometime. Its a "target rich environment".
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