Will wingnut Steve Beren apologize for calling our troops bloodthirsty homicidal maniacs?

Steve Beren is a low-rent David Horowitz wannabe; he was an anti-war activist during the Vietnam war, he organized for the Socialist Workers' Party until 1990 and then he became a born again Christian in the mid-1990s and started moving rightward. The September 11 attacks then pushed him into the fringes of the eliminationist set, where he now enjoys life as a raving Islamophobic wingnut with no regard whatsoever for reality.

He's running as a Republican -- of course -- to represent Washington state's 7th Congressional District. Next Tuesday he'll be toasted by Jim McDermott, who's never won less than 70 percent of the vote in any of his nine previous House races. Next Wednesday, Beren will go back to his work for an Internet marketing firm and hopefully we won't be hearing anything more from him.

In the meantime, he appears to have worked a snippet from an article of mine, in which I quoted McDermott, into his latest stump speech.

Of the GOP's latest attempt to distract, he bloviates:

[John] Kerry's comments come as no surprise, but they do reflect an antagonism, arrogance, and elitism to those who protect our freedoms.

Of course, in the campaign of my opponent, Jim McDermott, the same negative attitude to our troops has been evident... Late last year, antiwar blogger Joshua Holland quotes Congressman McDermott as saying:

"As long as our troops are there they're going to be a continued irritant in the situation, partly because, and this is a very important point, the troops are just kids put into a foreign land where they don't know who the enemy is and they don't know the language. So they protect themselves and innocent Iraqis get killed, and that fans the fires of the insurgency."

I have quite a different view. My campaign platform states: "Support our troops and their mission. Remain firm in the war against international terrorism. Combat terrorism at its roots by spreading democracy through the Middle East..."

There's a lot I can say about this. First, there's just the sheer gall of such a light-weight -- a guy who's never held public office and certainly has no foreign policy experience -- criticizing McDermott, who's been right about Iraq at every turn. Don't forget that it was Jim McDermott who said in 2002 that there were absolutely no WMDs to be found in Iraq, and that Bush was intent on "mislead[ing] the American public" into war. It was McDermott who tried desperately in the early months of 2003 to convince Saddam Hussein to document the destruction of his WMD programs in order to head off the war, only to be told by Iraq's ambassador to the UN that it was no use because "the decision to attack us has already been made."

Then there's this nonsense about how Beren wants to "remain firm in the war against international terrorism" and "combat terrorism at its roots by spreading democracy through the Middle East." Of course, the only terrorists in Iraq before the invasion were in the Kurdish-controlled Northern territories and they were ideological allies of the Bush administration, as dedicated as Paul Wolfowitz was to Hussein's overthrow.

I could also discuss Beren's sadly persistent delusion that we have a snowball's chance in hell of "spreading democracy" in Iraq, where Shiite militias have infiltrated the security forces, Sunni insurgents have Baghdad surrounded and even the Pentagon knows full well that the country is sliding into chaos. In an attempt to gain a little legitimacy, Prime Minister Maliki this week "ordered" the Americans to lift roadblocks around Sadr City and abandon the search for one of our troops, and then he "ordered" us to release a top aid of anti-American cleric Muqtada al Sadr. Yesterday, the Parliament was scheduled to meet but not enough lawmakers showed up for the session to form a quorum.