Uday and Qusai's Democratic mourners
It's difficult to write satire today, because so much of the real world is so ridiculous. Take last week's comments by Rep. Charles Rangel, for example. After the news broke that U.S. troops had killed Saddam Hussein's two sadistic sons, Uday and Qusai, in a firefight, the liberal New York Democrat was outraged, telling Fox's Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes that: "When you personalize a war and are saying that you're killing someone's kids, then they, in turn, think they can kill somebody. . . . I personally don't get any satisfaction that it takes 200,000 troops, 250,000 troops, to knock off two bums." This is what passes for constructive criticism in today's Democratic Party.
It's hardly necessary to recount the countless atrocities of Saddam's sons, or the joy that Uday and Qusai took in torturing Iraqis, or the murders they ordered. What's worth recounting are the words of Democrats who have criticized getting rid of the monsters. Exhibit number two is presidential candidate Howard Dean, with this two cents' worth: "The ends do not justify the means." The McGovernesque former governor of Vermont, who is running for president, repeatedly says on the stump: "What I want to know is why so many Democrats in Washington aren't standing up against Bush's unilateral war against Iraq."
Mr. Dean must not be paying very close attention, because Democratic doves flutter everywhere. A handful of liberal congressmen, who call themselves the "Iraq Watch," hit the House floor regularly to attack President Bush and the war he led to free Iraq from Saddam's brutal grip. On the day that Saddam's sons were killed, Rep. Richard Gephardt, running uphill for president, chimed in that President Bush's "momentary machismo" has "left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago." That this was said by a Democratic politician as experienced and occasionally sensible as Mr. Gephardt, who voted in support of the war, demonstrates how the party is following Mr. Dean's lead to the far left.
On Friday, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay observed that, "No responsible leader could have permitted Saddam Hussein to remain in Baghdad, yet the Democrats now spew more rhetoric about President Bush than they ever did about Saddam Hussein." In doing so, especially after the killing of Saddam's brutal sons, Democrats not only ignore the millions of Iraqis celebrating the Husseins' demise, but also miss the necessity of exhibiting photographs of the bodies. Seeing is believing. The proof that key officials are dead helps put the evil past to rest. Photographs of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, strung upside down from lamp posts in Milan, reassured Italians in 1945, just as proof of the deaths of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife in Bucharest reassured Romanians in 1989. The closure represented by the deaths of Uday and Qusai marks dramatic progress in the reconstruction of Iraq — which is why prominent Democrats are so frustrated.
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