The Democrats and the Loony Left

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION is curtailing democracy in America. President Bush himself, in case you hadn't noticed, is like Hitler. By the way, he knew about 9/11 beforehand. On top of that, he let Osama bin Laden's relatives sneak out of America shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The war in Iraq? It's a war for oil. And while we're on the subject of the war, Vice President Cheney intervened to assure contracts in postwar Iraq for Halliburton, the company he once headed.

These flights of paranoia, far-out analogies, conspiracy theories, and wild charges devoid of evidence are the stock in trade of the Loony Left. Normally such ideas are ridiculed or ignored by those in the political mainstream. But these days the fantasies of the Loony Left are increasingly embraced and nearly always tolerated by the Democratic party and its auxiliary groups. The result? The Loony Left now has a toehold on the Democratic party.

A toehold, but not a foothold. The work product of the Loonies is only beginning to become mainstream among Democrats. You won't find many of the wild ideas in the party platform, nor are they routinely voiced by party leaders. But they have been treated with tolerance, rather than active disapproval, by most Democrats. So far at least, this phenomenon has cost Democrats nothing politically. Certainly they haven't been tarred in the way Republicans were in the 1990s when a few of them flirted with lunatic notions about President Clinton. Ultimately, however, identifying with the far-fetched and the eccentric is bound to harm Democrats.

The classic tactic of the Loony Left is to liken a target to Hitler. So it's not surprising that placards with Bush's face made to look like Hitler's are now commonplace at left-wing demonstrations. But who would have thought former vice president Al Gore would link, none-too-subtly, the president to Hitler? In a speech at Georgetown University in June, Gore said this: "The [Bush] administration works closely with a network of rapid responders, a group of digital brownshirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors and publishers and advertisers, and are quick to accuse them of undermining support for our troops." The brownshirts, as most people know, were Nazis working for Hitler. If any Democrats chastised Gore for this slur, I missed it.

Gore is not alone. Billionaire George Soros, a lavish Democratic donor who was recently introduced at a political event by Senator Hillary Clinton, said late last year, "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans." He wasn't referring to the Germans today. And there was Judge Guido Calabresi of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He told a lawyers' group in June that Bush came to power through "illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution," the U.S. Supreme Court. "The king of Italy had the right to put Mussolini in, though he had not won an election, and make him prime minister. That is what happened when Hindenburg put Hitler in." Calabresi said he wasn't "suggesting for a moment that Bush is Hitler," and he later apologized for his remarks altogether. Nonetheless, he had publicly analogized Bush's situation to Hitler's.

Michael Moore, whose anti-Bush movie Fahrenheit 9/11 has made him a favorite of Democrats, has explicitly argued Bush is moving the nation toward a Hitler-like dictatorship. "The Patriot Act is as un-American as Mein Kampf," he wrote in his book Dude, Where's My Country? Later on CNN, he said, "The Patriot Act is the first step. . . . If people don't speak up against this, you end up with something like they had in Germany." Moore was also a judge in a contest by MoveOn.org, a group closely allied with the Democratic party, to choose the best anti-Bush TV ad. Two entries, posted for a time on the MoveOn website, likened Bush to Hitler. However, MoveOn founder Wes Boyd said his organization doesn't share that sentiment.

Democrats in Washington turned out in droves for a special screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 in June. "There might be half of the Democratic Senate here," said Florida senator Bob Graham. His Florida colleague, Senator Bill Nelson, gave the film a thumbs-up as he left the theater. The film pushes numerous conspiracy theories about the president and his administration, and Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe latched onto one of them after viewing the movie. It involved Unocal's bid to build a natural gas pipeline in Afghanistan, which Moore suggests was the reason behind the American attack on that country. Asked by Byron York of National Review if he bought that theory, McAuliffe said he did. The Unocal deal, which the Clinton administration backed, collapsed in 1998, three years before the invasion of Afghanistan.