The New York Times runs a story today on a campaign by anti-Bush protestors to infiltrate the Republican Convention in New York by signing up as volunteers, and then doing their best to disrupt the event -- a clear sign of both desperation and of a lack of respect for the political process:

"Really?" said Kevin Sheekey, president of the New York City Host Committee, when told that protesters were talking about flooding the ranks of volunteers to disrupt convention operations.

The city is obligated to find a total of 8,000 New Yorkers to volunteer to help things run smoothly, and would-be protesters are hoping that by signing up, they can work from the inside during the convention, scheduled Aug. 30 through Sept. 2.

For some reason, the Times headlines this article "G.O.P. Protesters Plan to Infiltrate Convention as Volunteers," leaving the impression that the protestors are Republicans. However, even though the Times notes that a similar effort supposedly targets the Boston Democratic convention, those volunteer slots have already been filled, while more than three-quarters of the New York positions remain open. Filling those positions with Democratic or Green Trojan horses not only creates a potentially large security problem within the convention itself, it also creates a way for disaffected little twerps to keep people who really would like to volunteer out of the convention, as well as irresponsibly and illegally block Republicans from exercising their freedom to pursue their politics.

Imagine, if you will, if little Republican twerps had infiltrated the 2000 Democratic convention and turned it into a mess, refusing to perform the necessary tasks they were assigned in good faith and shouting anti-Democratic slogans from all over the floor. Even a fraction of 8,000 people makes for a very large and difficult-to-subdue group, especially in a crowded convention. They would have been compared to Nazi brownshirts, and while the analogy would have been overwrought, it would have some truth in it.

And Al Gore would be President.

If they manage to pull this off, they may not understand the impact it will have on the center. Such a left-inspired debacle would wind up making the Paul Wellstone memorial look like a bipartisan tea party. They'll be big heroes to the Deaniac/Naderite crowd, but the stench of hypocrisy may plow under Democratic hopes all the way down the ticket in November. It will expose the hard left as not a democratic force in politics but a neo-Stalinist polemic, which tolerates no dissent and sabotages any exercise of democracy and free speech which does not serve its own purposes, and any politician who trucks with that lot will pay the price.

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