The more I see and hear “Baghdad Jim” McDermott strut and bluster as the Jane Fonda of the War on Terror, the more I wonder whether he’s “overstating” more than just his shocker that we can trust what Saddam Hussein says but not our president.

I’ve known McDermott since he first came to Olympia as a freshman legislator in 1971, written some 60 columns about him in that time. In all those years I never heard a peep about him counseling returned Vietnam veterans while he was in the Navy stationed at Long Beach.

He’s a child psychiatrist. Even during the seven years he spent on personal service contracts with the state, his work was counseling youthful offenders in state institutions. If he did indeed counsel Vietnam vets, he never saw fit to mention it until now.

I always liked McDermott, although I called him a political George Armstrong Custer, handsome, headstrong, ambitious, his way or no way. Like Custer, he was idolized by the media and bitter over his inability to achieve the higher office he thirsted for.

Two of McDermott’s earliest and best friends after he came here from Chicago in the late 1960s were political reporters for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. They became his press agents after his election to the state House in 1970, where he did nothing noteworthy for two years, deciding in 1972 that he was ready to become governor.

He lost in the Democratic primary to Martin J. Durkan, who lost to Republican Gov. Dan Evans. He was soon back in Olympia, this time in the Senate in 1975, where he had a recurrence of gubernatorial fever. He set out after the state’s first woman governor, Dixy Lee Ray, in 1980, and got her in the primary, only to lose in November to John Spellman.

It didn’t help McDermott when Sen. Hubert Donohue, D-Dayton, chair of Ways and Means, in an October public statement, denounced his vice chair, McDermott, for double dipping from the state. For years, child psychiatrist McDermott had set Mondays aside for his weekly visits to Cascadia Juvenile Diagnostic center, which paid him $200, later $240 a day. He also collected his legislative per diem pay of $40, later $44 a day.

But he was not always in attendance in the Senate on Mondays or came late, and he had collected $83,000 in the past three years on state personal service contracts, said Donohue, “while continuing to partially perform his legislative duties and fully collect travel and per diem from his Senate job. While this conduct is not illegal, it seems morally wrong and certainly indicates more concern for personal benefit than responsibility for public trust and monies.”

Records showed McDermott rarely turned down a chance to collect a public buck. On some occasions when the Legislature was not in session, he attended committee meetings on the same day as his state contract work and collected for both. In 1981, he looked forward to being the new chair of Ways and Means, but Democrat Peter von Reichbauer, a Spellman pal, switched to the Republicans, giving them the majority and the committee chairmanships. Foiled again, an embittered McDermott adopted that mocking, arrogant air that is so familiar on him now.

But wait! He wasn’t through giving us another chance to make him governor. He challenged Booth Gardner in 1984, and was tubed again, later resigning from the Senate in 1987 to take a foreign service traveling job in Africa — after a bill slipped through his committee allowing him to transfer to a more lucrative pension plan than the one he was on.

In 1988, he jumped ship on the Africa job to run for the vacated 7th district congressional seat and won. You know the rest. McDermott told me once that he had the same philosophy as I do, that everything happens for a reason. I wonder if his “overstating” himself in Baghdad, and subsequent denunciation and ridicule of Bush will prove to be his Little Big Horn.

Naw, for the 7th district libs, double-dipping, president-goosing Baghdad Jim is their kind of guy.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.).