Category: Politics

Speaking of Howard Dean, Jeff Miller posted a hilarious parody of a Billy Idol song based upon Dean’s primal scream. That being said, I’m gonna stand by my previous comments that Dean is the guy to beat in the dem. primaries. Clark is a close second.

Yeah, I know, conventional political pundits are counting these two out right now, and I think this is a mistake. Dean and Clark are the only two major candidates who realize that the traditional dem base is not gonna get them elected. So they’re trying to reach into other constituencies. There’s gonna be some rough sailing in so doing, as we’ve seen this past week, but given the media’s short attention span, it isn’t the end of the world.

Dean put a pretty good spin on things yesterday when he was on Letterman. His Arnie impersonation was excellent. His primal scream will likely make him a stronger candidate once this blows over since it, to a certain extent, immunizes him from future criticism for his over-the-top behavior much like the Gennifer Flowers situation immunized Slick Willie from the Monica Lew[d]insky affair. It is also the wakeup call the Dean people needed to tone their guy down. We’re now seeing Dean 2.0, namely, the balanced-budget and quasi-libertarian Dean.

Hopefully, Kerry and Edwards will stay in the game with Clark and Dean long enough to insure a badly damaged dem candidate in the fall election.

I haven’t seen too much about Hodean’s abortion views. I assumed he was as pro-abortion as the rest of the Democrat candidates — which is to say, he is in favor of any abortion at any time for any pregnant female, no matter how young or vulnerable she is. That assumption was correct.
Now it turns out that he is a liar about abortion, too. In a speech, he claimed he saw a 12-year-old female patient who was pregnant with her own father’s child. He left out the part that someone else was convicted for getting her pregnant. The invaluable Tim Russert confronted Hodean about leaving out that inconvenient fact. (By the way, conservatives should thank God that someone as intellectually honest as Russert is NBC’s main political analyst. He’s a liberal Democrat, but he asks tough questions of everyone he interviews.)
Not that anyone should be surprised by this revelation — after all, if you believe in unrestricted abortion on demand, you have to believe in all kinds of untruths: that the state has no business intervening to protect a helpless child, that an 8-month-old fetus doesn’t experience pain and isn’t really alive, that most abortions are performed by the free choice of the mother and not out of male coersion or sheer terror…et cetera, et cetera.
I have a lot of empathy for a scared girl who is pregnant long before she can handle it. I have not even the feeblest amount of compassion for politicians who think it’s all right to get rid of her child and call it a good social policy.

Looks like Hodean is going to have a rocky road on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination, if indeed he makes it at all. His third-place showing in Iowa will be hard to recover from, especially since he’d been camped out there for two years and was the odds-on favorite as recently as three weeks ago.
Senator Kerry is a better candidate for the general election, but his nomination will doom the Democrats anyway. Why? Because Hodean’s supporters aren’t going to campaign for a regular, boring, “establishment” guy. They wanted moxie, spunk, fire — all of the things that Kerry does not have. The Deanie babies will be disillusioned with the election, and possibly with politics in general. That’s fine by me — I hope they’re so mentally scarred by the experience that they never vote again. If they do vote, they’ll probably latch onto whomever the Green Party nominates this year, which is the next-best thing.
Let me be the first one to tag Hodean as “Dot-com Dean.” His candidacy has had the feel of a dot-com company circa 1997. Hodean attracted a ton of venture capital in the form of Internet donations, and his “user base” of college students and graying hippies were excited about the novelty. Yet when it came time to deliver the product, it didn’t quite live up to the hype — the rollout was fraught with gaffes, and the target market didn’t embrace it wholeheartedly. The established “brick and mortar” candidates learned from his mistakes and swept him from the field.
Howard Dean: the Pets.com of Election 2004.

In November, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-Wellesley) she said we needed a different mix of troops in Iraq, with more MPs, civil affairs, and special operations forces, and less heavy infantry and armor. Rush and Hannity and all the rest were all over her, saying she was “anti-military” and was using this to attack Bush, etc.
Thing is, she’s right: tanks require a huge amount of logistical support, and they aren’t great for patrolling. As a civil affairs Marine who served with an infantry battalion in Iraq, I agree with her, and I’m pro-military and anti-Clinton (any Clinton, even George. Sorry, P-Funk.) Why disagree with someone just because their other opinions and actions are repulsive? When someone is right, they’re right. If they’re wrong, don’t resort to sloppy ad hominem attacks. Tell her why we need artillery to fight small groups of insurgents, instead of deploying sniper teams to ambush them.
So now she’s in trouble because she made some comment about Indians running gas stations. The outrage is over the top. (Had she ever shown any inclination to tweak the noses of the P.C. police, she might have gotten away with it — but can you recall any other comment she’s ever made that was the least bit un-P.C.?) It’s part of the strain of liberalism that holds manual labor to be inherently demeaning. I wonder how well that goes down with the unions. Wait — modern unions are all about avoiding labor of any kind. My fault.
Let the record show that I have now defended Hillary Clinton for two different things. I will now go lie down for a while so I can recover.

Hodean, the heir apparent to Algore, continues to blather about his religious “views.” The primary mission of Christianity is “to reach out to people who’ve been left behind.” You thought it was to get sinners to repent and go to heaven. Silly you. Don’t point out that this definition is equivalent to secular political liberalism, because that would be hurtful.
Dean’s decision to sign the Vermont civil unions bill was part of this “reaching out” process, he said. Compared to the rest of the population, self-identified gays are better educated, hold professional jobs with substantially more pay, and live in nicer neighborhoods. Exactly how are they “left behind”? Oh, yes: there are still people who think that a marriage needs a man and a woman, the way it’s been since before Abraham. They must be overridden by the courts and browbeaten until they learn to love gay sex. Traditional Christians don’t need to be “reached,” they need to be corrected, with the force of the state if necessary.
I also like his comment about his wife’s medical practice: “There’s not that element of self-sacrifice of her career that there is in some political families.” God forbid! Some think marriage is all about self-sacrifice — like St. Paul and the Holy Father and the One on whose behalf they speak — but what do celebate men know about personal fulfullment?