Roger L. Simon weighs in on Markos Zuniga (Daily Kos) and his repellent “Screw them” remark about the Americans ripped apart in Fallujah.

When I read yesterday on Little Green Footballs and this morning on Instapundit of the comments of Markos Zuniga of Daily Kos, seemingly gloating (at least to some extent) over the slaughter of Americans in Fallujah, I felt literally sick to my stomach. Zuniga is a young man of the left, still in his twenties, justifiably applauded for his pioneering use of the Internet in political organizing. In the old days not long ago (August 2001), he would have been among our best and brightest, our most idealistic.

But something happened in the cataclysm of 9/11, a fracture that, instead of repairing in the normal way, has just grown worse. In the intervening relatively short period, a great portion of the left has almost unthinkingly placed itself in a classical Laingian double-bind—its hatred of Bush unable to co-exist with its natural idealism. Back in the Early Paleolithic Period, when I first joined the left, it was this idealism that motivated all of us. I assume it did for Zuniga et al. But some kind of cognitive dissonance set in after those planes came crashing into the World Trade Center. They refused to accept that anything good could happen under another name (Republicanism, conservatism, Bush, etc.). Good only comes from the names they traditionally associate with it. So heinous and barbaric acts are excused by people who under other circumstance would never do that. It’s depressing and it’s frightening.

I couldn’t agree more. A Laingian double-bind indeed; reading the comments at Daily Kos is very much like trying to interpret and understand the world of a schizophrenic.