DISGUISED BY FRIENDLY-SOUNDING MESSAGES, the infiltration spreads.  One by one, every accessed communication terminal is turned into a weapon.  To those who recognize the code, these infected messages pose a clear and present danger.  Their programmers’ aim and target is to turn the power of all these terminals against the White House, to overwhelm and shut it down.

Is this the “Code Red” worm that computer experts warn is flooding Internet emails, programmed to inundate the White House website again this week?

Yes, but even more so it is the Democratic Party, now bent on a rule-or-ruin strategy, a kind of coup d’etat.

Democrats – denied control of the House of Representatives, Senate, and White House by voters – have already used turncoat James Jeffords (I-Vermont), bribed with the first “Independent” committee chairmanship in our history, to steal power in the Senate.

Now Democrats are clearly scheming to gridlock the government, stall the economy into recession, cause unemployment and insecurity, and rely on their Leftist co-conspirators in the national media to blame all problems the Democrats cause on President George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress as America heads into the 2002 and 2004 elections.

Why a week ago did Minority Leader in the House Richard Gephardt of Missouri boast that the Democratic Party’s highest priority when it regains power there will be to raise taxes?  1984 Democratic Presidential nominee Walter Mondale committed political suicide by making a similarly-truthful statement.

But today’s Democratic Party is living proof that half the population has an I.Q. of 100 or below.  Its bedrock voters have no memories and pay little or no income tax anyway.  But business people heard Gephardt loud and clear, remember his boast, and feel less inclined to invest in new job-creating enterprises because of what he said.  Gephardt’s statement was part of the Democrats’ cynical effort to push America into recession.

Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Terry McAuliffe likewise seemed strange days ago when he criticized the words printed on millions of advance-on-2002-tax-refund checks being sent out.  That motto – “Tax Relief for America’s Workers” – was according to McAuliffe a “Republican campaign slogan.”

McAuliffe showed rare honesty in suggesting that Democrats want the opposite of tax relief for workers – and in fact always want taxes raised, never cut.  He thus reinforced Gephardt’s message calculated to demoralize productive Americans and weaken the economy.

And in one of the most surreal examples of what Sigmund Freud called “projection” – perceiving in others what you subconsciously know to be in yourself – the Democratic Chairman then said: “The Federal Government is not a toy, and checks from the U.S. Treasury should not be used as political props.”

McAuliffe, you will remember, was bag man in the Clinton Administration for dirty money from overseas, organized labor, White House “coffees,” and the hot-bunk renting of the Lincoln Bedroom.  Not since British Redcoats torched the White House during the War of 1812 has such contempt been shown for the foremost house of the American people.

McAuliffe now heads the DNC because Bill and Hillary Clinton shoved the party’s nominal leader, 2000 Presidential nominee Al Gore, aside to empower themselves by installing their personal sock puppet as DNC figurehead.

And Terry McAuliffe was on hand Monday in Harlem as Bill Clinton – with Hillary notably absent – was welcomed to the new office digs for which you, dear taxpayer, will be squeezed for about $354,000 per year.  (This is less than the $800,000+ he wanted taxpayers to pay each year for his preferred skyscraper penthouse in Manhattan.) Bill Clinton, meanwhile, gets $250,000 per speech from foreign interests, reportedly keeps $1 million in his no-interest checking account as petty cash, and is close to signing an expected $8+ million deal for a self-serving autobiography, probably with now-German-owned Random House.  Ponder this while trying to keep a straight face while you tell your children that cheaters never prosper and crime doesn’t pay.

A highly-placed source tells this reporter that during Monday’s ceremony the man author Toni Morrison called “America’s first black President….[exhibiting] virtually every trope of blackness,” was overhead whispering to a seatmate:  “Harlem?!  I thought I was moving into Harem!”

Clinton, now back on the public scene after his latest disgrace of being caught selling Presidential pardons, is expected to begin attacking President Bush to burnish his historic legacy.  The alternative is to follow the ex-presidential tradition of remaining silent, in which case Clinton’s will remain a third- or middle-legacy.

“The question of how to manage Clinton’s public image continues to absorb handlers just as it did in his White House days,” wrote the Washington Post’s John Harris last Sunday. This propaganda depicts Clinton as sleeping at night next to his dog Buddy, not as in the tabloids at risk of being sued by lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge for alienation of affection after his reported attempts to seduce her lover and co-mother of her children. 

At 54 Clinton is among the youngest ex-presidents, torn between making millions as a gaudy celebrity and making history as a statesman.  Thanks to Al Gore’s defeat and the lack of stature of today’s Democratic officeholders, Clinton has by default and guile retained the mantle of party leader and Fundraiser-in-Chief. 

He monopolizes the spotlight, but Clinton can never again be the Democratic standard bearer.  The Constitution prohibits him from again becoming President, and we cannot imagine him contented as First Gentleman in a Hillary Clinton White House or as a mere Senator.  Is his aim to become Secretary General of the United Nations?

Clinton might think this unfair because during the past eight years he never actually was President, choosing instead to remain in perpetual campaign mode attacking Republicans and piling up swag as if he were always a candidate for President. He loved the thrill and game of campaigning, not the sober grown-up job of governing well. The only bucks that stopped at his Oval Office desk came in brown paper bags, and his mode of governance was the war room smearing of opponents and symbolic-gesture seduction of friends.

Bill Clinton’s current temptation is to act out the role of shadow President, the more charismatic reverse image Yin to real President Bush’s Yang.  Past Presidents have been big enough to put the nation’s interest above their egos, but Clinton has no such moral stature or nobility of spirit.  Clinton will likely try to build himself up by tearing George W. Bush and the nation that elected Bush down.

“Clinton has told confidants,” writes Harris, “that the two most successful ex-presidents were John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter.  Both thrived…by working on a few major projects instead of imagining that they could exercise the broader influence of presidents.”

But even Jimmy Carter last week went out of his way to violate ex-presidential tradition, to undermine and attack President George W. Bush.  “I thought he would be a moderate leader.…,” said Mr. Carter.  “I have been disappointed in almost everything he has done.”

Let us recall a few things before seriously considering this condemnation by Jimmy Carter, a descendant of slave owners. Mr. Carter committed the biggest act of theft in our history, stoking an inflation that in only four years stole half the life savings of all Americans by cutting the purchasing power of your dollars in half.  Mr. Carter abandoned his Southern Baptist church when it refused to ordain women as ministers, but he hypocritically made no similar public condemnation of, e.g., the Roman Catholic Church which does likewise. 

And Jimmy Carter egoistically continues to campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize, much as Bill Clinton has. But as President, Carter withdrew support for America’s pillar of strength in the Persian Gulf, the Shah of Iran, for imprisoning about 3,000 Communists supported by the bordering Soviet Union. Carter ordered the CIA to cease small payments to the local Ayatollahs, a cutoff which ignited revolution.

Despite his flaws, the Shah defended Western interests, promoted equality for women and other modernization in Iran, and supplied Israel with oil during two Arab oil embargoes.  Carter’s smug stupidity and self-righteous abandonment of our ally gave Soviet agents and Moslem fundamentalists an opening to overthrow the Shah. 

What followed was a bloodbath, with the new ruling religious zealots executing at least 20,000 Iranians aligned with the West.  Without the Shah’s stabilizing influence, Iran and Iraq then plunged into a war that killed at least half a million people and continues to roil the region today. (Russia and China today are arming Iran with missiles and other weapons, contrary to American interests.) The blood of all these people, as well as those murdered since then and today by Iran-backed terrorists in Israel – all that blood is on the incompetent hands of Jimmy Carter.  A Nobel Peace Prize?  Jimmy Carter should be cursed by all decent human beings, and President Bush should wear Carter’s moronic criticism as a badge of honor.  Even the Democratic Party has tried to keep Carter invisible at its National Conventions since his disastrous presidency, in hopes America will forget that Jimmy Carter was a Democratic President.

In the weeks after the Democratic coup d’etat seized the Senate last May, its new Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota publicly has been urging campaign finance reform while privately his own political action committee DASHPAC has been twisting arms and sucking in $145,000 a week in “contributions” from lobbyists, interest groups, and others.

Similar hypocrisy by Daschle has been evident on almost every issue.  In violation of the Senate’s bi-partisan tradition concerning foreign policy, Daschle undermined the President at the start of the latest G-8 meeting in Europe by telling USA Today: “I think we are isolating….minimizing ourselves.  I don’t think we are taken as seriously today as we were a few years ago.  I’m increasingly troubled by the fragile relationship [between the U.S. and our allies] that is becoming more and more evident.”  In fact Mr. Bush showed exemplary leadership in Europe, gaining the admiration of traditional allies and praise from Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Senator Daschle and other Democrats condemn Mr. Bush for not cooperating with the United Nations more closely on issues such as rifle, shotgun, and handgun control.  But at the same time Daschle has been blocking confirmation of Bush designate and veteran diplomat John Negroponte as our U.N. Ambassador.  The reason is that Negroponte, when U.S. Ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s, supported the anti-Communist Contras in Nicaragua.  Democrats at the time, you might recall, were writing their famous “Dear Commandante” letter to Daniel Ortega, leader of the Castro-aligned Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua.  Senators such as Chris Dodd (D.-Connecticut) and Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) have had their ears pulled by strange political bedfellow Bianca Jagger, Rolling Stone Mick’s former wife and a passionate Sandinista supporter.  So-called Liberal Democrats, then as now, have been eager to do all in their power to undermine freedom fighters and support Marxists.  But how can President Bush be blamed for problems at the United Nations while Senator Daschle is preventing us from having an Ambassador there?

The long list of Daschle hypocrisies includes recent efforts to restrict Mexican trucks entering the U.S., in direct contravention of the North American Free Trade Agreement passed by a  Democrat-controlled congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton.  Daschle is now happy to engage in discrimination and racial profiling of Hispanics in exchange for 30 pieces of silver from the Teamsters Union and an issue with which to bash Mr. Bush.

Both Senator Daschle and Rep. Richard Gephardt have attacked what they call “bias” in President Bush’s Social Security Commission, while their allies in the press conveniently leave almost unmentioned that its chairman is recently-retired Democratic Senator from New York Daniel Patrick Moynihan and half its members are Democrats. 

As Donald Lambro of the Washington Times documented, Gephardt in 1998 assented to criticisms of Social Security by President Clinton that were remarkably similar to those of Mr. Bush’s Commission.  That same year Gephardt declared that Congress needed not only “to shore up the financial structure of Social Security” but also that individual, private Social Security investment accounts “can be part of the answer.”  But now, looking for any demagogic issue with which to win votes, Gephardt is braying for higher taxes and pretending that three years ago he never said the kind of things he now condemns President Bush for saying.

In simpler times, democracy was a way of selecting leaders and affecting compromise and cooperation.  Nowadays, sharpened by polls and focus groups, we have entered an era of perpetual negative campaigning in which every decision and gesture is calculated for maximum political advantage.  The good of the nation and the general welfare have been replaced by whatever short-sighted tactic yields a drop more power to one political party or a dollar more in gain for its partisans. Red worms now parasitize our system, devouring the public trust and confidence needed to keep us together. Statesmen are in short supply, and those who attempt to rise above cynical partisanship such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan are cannibalized by former allies. Unless this changes soon, the American people will be tempted to press “Control-Alt-Delete” and re-boot the whole machine.