Rodent Regatta

IF ONLY THE MEANING OF THE WORD ”TREASON” WERE MORE EXPANSIVE
Like we’ve done with ’harrassment’ or ’discrimination’ or ’right-&-wrong’

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT THE BONIOR/MCDERMOTT STORY was going to be eclipsed by the shenanigans in New Jersey, George Will hits them again:

Hitler found ”Lord Haw Haw”—William Joyce, who broadcast German propaganda to Britain during the Second World War—in the dregs of British extremism. But Saddam Hussein finds American collaborators among senior congressional Democrats.
Not since Jane Fonda posed for photographers at a Hanoi antiaircraft gun has there been anything like Rep. Jim McDermott, speaking to ABC’s ”This Week” from Baghdad, saying Americans should take Saddam Hussein at his word but should not take President Bush at his. . . .
Bonior, until recently second-ranking in the House Democratic leadership, said sources no less reliable than Hussein’s minions told them that inspectors would have an ”unrestricted ability to go where they want.” McDermott said: ”I think you have to take the Iraqis on their value—at their face value.” And: ”I think the president would mislead the American people.”
McDermott and Bonior are two specimens of what Lenin, referring to Westerners who denied the existence of Lenin’s police-state terror, called ”useful idiots.”

Yes. And in their idiocy, as useful to the Republican Party as to the Republican Guard.
UPDATE: Michael Crowley thinks the same thing:

You can be sure some Democratic Party leaders were choking on their coffee this morning. At a time when Democrats are trying to raise questions about a war with Iraq without appearing unpatriotic or pacifistic, ABC’s ”This Week” featured an interview with two liberal congressmen who probably convinced plenty of viewers they are both. . . .
Both Bonior and McDermott seem genuinely moved by the human toll of economic sanctions against the Iraqi people, and there’s nothing wrong with their efforts to remind us about the real human suffering in that country. But trusting Saddam Hussein to be a nice guy is not the way to end it. And so when the conservative Republican Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma later suggested that Bonior and McDermott had sounded ”somewhat like spokespersons for the Iraqi government,” he wasn’t entirely out of line. And chances are, some surely dismayed senior Democrats would privately agree.

Privately, yes. But I was hoping for a bit more public repudiation from the Democrats. They may just be hoping that this issue will go away, but by not speaking out they’re making it easier—and fairer—for Republicans to paint the entire Party as matching Bonior and McDermott. [InstaPundit]