America: Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois was a speaker at a Democratic Party fund-raiser held in a Washington museum on Tuesday evening. As people queued to get in, a Republican protester held up a picture of skulls from Pol Pot's killing fields with the words: "Not Gitmo."
Another displayed a placard saying: "Help me! Tortured with lemon chicken and pilaf", a reference to the official menu in Guantanamo camp.
In a Senate speech on June 14th Durbin had compared the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo to things "done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime (like) Pol Pot". No one took much note at the time. Durbin spoke in an empty chamber at 7.20pm when most Republican watchdogs were at the annual President's Dinner across town.
But a producer of the conservative Laura Ingraham radio talk show was watching the debate on C-Span while minding a baby at home, according to the Chicago Tribune. Next day Ingraham replayed the remarks and over the course of a week it became a hot topic on the airwaves and on the internet.
"The Nazis gassed people, the Nazis mass-murdered people," fumed Rush Limbaugh, "we have nothing in common with them." The liberal Daily Kos protested that Durbin was being attacked because he had "the unmitigated gall to call it like it is".
The senator's remark boomeranged back to Capitol Hill, where Republican House majority leader Tom DeLay accused Durbin of a "premeditated and monstrous attack against America's military", and Senate majority leader Bill Frist said he was guilty of a "heinous slander against our country".
Durbin apologised somewhat tearfully on Tuesday and had come to the fund-raiser to try to recover lost ground, with a speech praising the "best and bravest Americans" who were risking their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Actually the 500 Democrats crowded into the pink-marbled hall of the National Museum of Women in the Arts had come not to hear Durbin, but the featured speaker, Howard Dean. The outspokenness of the former presidential candidate has sometimes dismayed fellow-Democrats, but partisans like to hear Dean "tell it as it is". A supporter in Hawaiian shirt, Paul Mazzuca of Alexandria, Virginia, told me, as he waved a placard saying "Give 'em hell, Howard", that "we should not apologise for speaking truth to power".
Dean has been giving Republicans hell since he was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee nearly six months ago. In the past few days he has said alternatively that Republicans offered a "dark, difficult and dishonest vision" of America, that many Republicans had "never done an honest day's work," and that the Republican Party was "pretty much a white, Christian party".
Such comments - some picked up by microphones as he mingled with supporters - have become typical of the current rancorous political discourse.
Every day brings new insults. On Monday Republican congressman John Hostettler of Indiana charged that "like moths to a flame, Democrats can't help themselves when it comes to denigrating and demonising Christians". He later withdrew the comment but Tom DeLay backed Hostettler, accusing Democrats of "constantly attacking people of faith".
When House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called the war in Iraq a "grotesque mistake", House Speaker Dennis Hastert accused her and the Democratic leadership of not supporting the troops and "spreading inflammatory statements". This in turn provoked Democratic congressman Henry Waxman to accuse Republican leaders of "a form of McCarthyism".
The cords of collegiality that used to bind the members of Congress to one another "haven't just frayed, they've snapped", wrote Jack Valenti, former special assistant to president Lyndon Johnson, in the New York Times.
On Wednesday Karl Rove jumped into the fight and really stirred it up.
The political adviser to President Bush told a conservative gathering in Manhattan: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."
Democrats, he went on, had made the mistake of calling for "moderation and restraint".
Democrats reacted with fury, protesting that they had overwhelmingly supported the invasion of Afghanistan (98-0 in the Senate). Senator Hillary Clinton called the remarks "appalling". Senate Minority leader Harry Reid and Senator John Kerry called on Rove to resign. The White House responded that Rove was simply telling it as it was.
What Bush's adviser succeeding in doing - with the inadvertent help of Senator Durbin - was to make Democrats the issue at a time when Americans are turning against the war. Telling it as it is has become the rationale of both sides as the political stakes are raised.
"Howard Dean has backbone, he tells it as it is," said Durbin at the event in the museum.
Up in the balcony local government official Jeremy Kilborn told me they were tired of deception from the administration. "Speak the truth and run like hell," he said.
Dean's speech was standard fare, though he could not resist adding to his jibe about white Christians, remarking that he had never seen on a Republican Party platform a quote from the Bible saying it was easier for a rich man to get to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
Then he more or less ran like hell, rushing out past reporters with a hasty "no comment", before any roving microphone could pick up another unscripted remark.
*