For Democrats, it’s good vs. evil

The Democrats are talking trash these days, lobbing the left wing’s frantic and often melodramatic insults at the Bush administration while Iraqi prisoner abuse is still leading the news.

“There is no longer a distinction between the rhetoric used by people on the left fringe of the Democratic Party and the rhetoric used by the leaders of the Democratic Party,” Christine Iverson of the Republican National Committee said yesterday.

“This is the same vitriolic stream of political hate speech we’ve seen since the Democrat primary began. Anger is not an agenda, but anger is the only thing Democrats have been offering the American people. And it’s going to backfire,” she said.

But the Democrats are forging ahead.

“How sweet it’s going to be on June 2 when the Taliban wing of the Republican Party finds out what’s happening in South Dakota,” said Sen. Tim Johnson during a voter rally Sunday in Sioux Falls for an upcoming special election there for a vacant at-large House seat.

He initially refused to apologize, but finally issued a guarded mea culpa yesterday.

In a Senate speech on May 10, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts noted, “Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management — U.S. management.”

Such talk is “anti-American slander,” according to Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby yesterday — ignored by the mainstream press and Democratic establishment.

Perennial presidential candidate Ralph Nader also got in on the act, calling President Bush a “messianic militarist” and “an out-of-control West Texas sheriff” during a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Monday. Mr. Nader also suggested the president be impeached for purportedly lying about the Iraq war.

Other Democrats have joined the chorus.

In an e-mailed fund-raising appeal for presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York declared that Mr. Bush’s re-election would “create an America we won’t recognize.”

In his own appeal, Mr. Kerry solicited donations but criticized “the slow and inept response by President Bush, which has further undermined America’s credibility in the world and created new dangers for Americans.”

Even Mr. Kerry’s wife, Teresa, chimed in, calling Vice President Dick Cheney “unpatriotic” in a May 7 interview with Telemundo, NBC’s Spanish-language network.

Democratic Reps. Bill Delahunt and Barney Frank of Massachusetts recently called the prisoner abuse in Iraq “disgusting and disturbing” and “heartbreaking,” respectively — though Mr. Frank also categorized the abuse as “sadomasochistic sexual degradation.”

Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington state said abuse images “depict an America I don’t know,” while Rep. John W. Olver, Massachusetts Democrat, said the situation had created “an unaccountable regime.”

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