When will the idiot fucking Democrats put together an ad throwing all the fucking GOP lies right back in their faces? Shit if Jon Stewart can do that on the Daily show surely the Dems have somebody talented enough to put together such an ad. C'mom you morons, get with it!!
Posted by Vinnie at December 10, 2005 12:45 PMeriposte, this is a very, very, important post. The democrats should always use "bush and the GOP" when they are discussing failure, corruption, death and disaster and they should only use the phrase "we" and "america" when they are talking about sucess, life, joy, and little kittens. This is the way to make the GOP and Bush rhetorically own their failures--come to stand for those failures in the minds of the public.
excellent, excellent point.
aimai
I agree this is an excellent post. My problem with Dean is he is a bit of a lose canon who comes of sounding bad even when he's not. He gives fodder to the Republican slime machine, not a good idea. You stated very well what he should have said.
Posted by Ron In Portland at December 10, 2005 01:49 PMAh yes, juxtapose "the war on terror" with the "war in Iraq" and conflate the two. Brilliant. Bravo! Bravo!
Dean was very candid: he thinks that we have already lost this war, and that we should cut our losses and get out of there. He brang up Vietnam as an example of a war where we had already lost, and that we took to long to realize it and suffered many unneccessary deaths. Then he said that Iraq was the same mistake.
If only Dean would open his eyes enough to realize that Vietnam and Iraq are incomparable.
For those who want some debunking of Dean's lying, check on over here. The rest of you can keep riding the Groove Train.
Posted by Seixon at December 10, 2005 01:50 PMHe gives fodder to the Republican slime machine ...
I suspect that if John Murtha's military record and support for the Pentagon don't protect him from the slings and arrows of outrageous Republican freepers, no one's would.
When King George said 'with us or against us', he wasn't kidding. There is no quarter being given by his minions, so keep this in mind when it is asked.
Posted by pessimist at December 10, 2005 02:18 PMRon, you know you may be right. Dean provides fodder for Republicans. Well, why don't we give them fodder if it sounds like this:
"I hate Republicans and everything they stand for." — Howard Dean
"As Commander in Chief of the United States Military, I will never send our sons and daughters and our brothers and sisters to die in a foreign land without telling the truth about why they're going there." — Howard Dean
"The fact is that we wouldn't be in Iraq if it weren't for Democrats like Senator Kerry." — Howard Dean
"We won't always have the strongest military." — Howard Dean
"We've not had one Republican president in 34 years balance the budget. You can't trust right-wing Republicans with your money. You ought to hire somebody who has balanced a budget. I'm much more conservative with money than George Bush is." — Howard Dean
"People have said I'm the candidate of anger. Well, we have a right to be angry. We lost 3 million jobs. We lost our place as the moral leader of the world." — Howard Dean
Yet, somehow some Democrats find this sort of talk embarrassing. Like listening to your mother talk about orgasms or something. The tone is, you know, "wrong" or something and dems start to wince and fidget and lose elections.
Of course, I am a Deaniac from wayback. I remember when he was quietly asked to leave the grownups table back when he was getting a head of steam ["RRRRRAAAAWWWWGGGGHHHHH!]. The real reason was he was getting people (a sizable number of them young, first-time voters) donating in large enough numbers that corporate contributions could be considered irrelevant at some point. The moneyed interests thought they were seeing the beginning of the end of their control over the mechanism of campaigns. Phone calls were placed and soon the media were all chanting "Dean is Done, Dean is Done..." That is what we call Democracy these days.
The only thing is: Dean is rarely strident...or wrong.
Posted by obelus at December 10, 2005 02:38 PMDean doesn't do himself in, I don't think. He says what he believes and means what he says. I like that in a leader.
The GOP Attack and Destroy Machine is far more effective in destroying political opponents than it ever will be in the "war on terror." They mean it when they say they are fighting a "war of ideas" because they have little to no military experience themselves.
Posted by ann at December 10, 2005 02:51 PMAh yes, juxtapose "the war on terror" with the "war in Iraq" and conflate the two. Brilliant. Bravo! Bravo! Posted by SeixonIt is a lesson learned from George W. Bush and his minions. Turn about is fair play.
Dean … thinks that we have already lost this war, and that we should cut our losses and get out of there. He brang up Vietnam as an example of a war where we had already lost, and that we took to long to realize it and suffered many unneccessary deaths…. Posted by SeixonThere is no such word as "brang." You mean, "brought." It's spelled u-n-n-e-c-e-s-s-a-r-y. There are others like Scott Ritter who also say the war is lost. It is. It would have been winnable with more troops to keep the peace. The ratio is well known, about 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants or roughly, 500,000 on the ground. That number would have prevented the looting and initial chaos and would have been sufficient to guard weapon storage sites. Bush was never interested in doing things the hard way. They though they could install Chalabi as leader and then use the army to intimidate Iran and Syria. Sistani made it clear that the Shi'a would only accept an elected government. Since they have the majority, they expect to have the government. Iraq and Vietnam are comparable in that they are both quagmires in which, the more we fight, the more enemies we make. In Vietnam, the United States entered a civil war of national unity; Iraq is a war of naked aggression.
For those who want some debunking of Dean's lying,….Posted by SeixonWhen Dean tells the truth, Republican propagandists go into overdrive. Here's one article on Bush rewriting history. Here's another. Check on your blogwhore? I think not. "Brang," indeed. Posted by Mike at December 10, 2005 03:19 PM
Howard Dean is killing us. We have to get om off the stage if the dems are ever going to win another national election. Murtha waaaaay over-stepped. What over-the-horizon nation did he think was going to welcome 150,000 US troops? ANd no matter what he meant, the impression he left was that he was for immediate withdrawal. Moving 150,000 troops would take 6 months, that IS immediate withdrawal. And Murtha had been complaining about the war for 18 months, we cannot present him as a pro-war representative. It won't sell. Now the repubs get to run ads with white flags waving over the heads of democratic candidates. Really nice going there guys. Have any OTHER tricks up your sleeves to prevent a democratic win in 2008?
Posted by avaroo at December 10, 2005 03:55 PMHave any OTHER tricks up your sleeves to prevent a democratic win in 2008?
The Dems are not going to win by co-opting the Republican Party. Moving to the center is going to drive away people like me who voted for Nader in 2000 because of the stupid choice of Leiberman. The Dems are anti-war and we should be proud to say that. I know I am.
Posted by ann at December 10, 2005 04:10 PMBart (yes, bartcop) has a counter-proposal up: Bush doing his friendly finger thing down Texas way with a Jolly Roger roughly where the white flag is in the Dean thing.
Posted by Thomas Ware at December 10, 2005 04:36 PM"The Dems are not going to win by co-opting the Republican party"
But they cannot win AT ALL by appealing only to the far left. The far left have no place else to go. Centrists do. That's how you get Reagan democrats and Clinton republicans. The dems have to appeal to people in the center or we can kiss it good-bye in 2008.
Posted by avaroo at December 10, 2005 04:48 PMCalm down, it isn't even 2006 yet. Bush and other Republicans have "flip-floped" enough that skillful counter attacks can be launched. Getting rid of Dean just before the midterm campaign gets underway is just the kind of panic move the goppers want to see.
Posted by rlp at December 10, 2005 06:39 PMIt would be nice to be able to pin a flip-flopper tag on Bush, but I'm a democrat and even I wouldn't swallow that one, much less anyone in the republican party.
It's not a panic move to get rid of Dean, it's simple recognition that while all political parties have their kooks, most don't put em out front and center. Other dems are distancing themselves from Dean. Kerry just ended his political ambitions but tagging our troops "terrorists". You CANNOT do that and win an election.
Posted by at December 10, 2005 06:50 PMAvaroo,
Bush has gone from a 90 percent approval rating to a 35-40 percent approval rating while, according to you, the dems have kept fucking up and the republicans are appealing to them sucessfully? The numbers are simply against you. If we learned anything from Bush's swinging poll numbers its that "the center cannot hold" or doesn't even exist in the way you pretend to think it does. The democrats, and Dean,s hould continue to speak truth to power every damn chance they get--they should hammer on the everyday reality taht americans are starting to glimpse and let the people who voted for bush do what such people do best--change their minds and pretend that they never liked the guy anyway.
aimai
Posted by aimai at December 10, 2005 08:39 PMI don't know that Bush ever had a 90% approval rating but his current rating is due largely to huge amounts of negative press. You'll notice that as soon as he started defending himself, it started going back up.
You're entitled to your opinion about what the dems should do, but I am interested in actually winning some elections. Polls are not elections, remember polls just prior to the 2004 election gave Kerry the win.
Posted by avaroo at December 10, 2005 08:50 PMAcutally, check out pollingreport.com. Almost all of the polls at the end had Bush winning, so the writing was there on the wall. I'm not too worried now about our chances. For all the MSM talk about Bush's "comeback" he's at 40 percent still. Congress is even lower. Bush was able to skate by with an approval rating at 50 percent. He'd lose today. We're going to pick up seats next year. If the DC Dems screw up, we'll pick up a few seats but fall short of the majority.
Posted by bushsucks at December 10, 2005 10:36 PMYou're absolutely correct, bushsucks. Few, if any, polls gave the victory to Kerry.
Posted by sf at December 10, 2005 10:46 PMSorry, but that simply isn't so. Exit polls erroneously gave Kerry the victory. In fact, MSM had some "splainin" to do after the election.
Posted by avaroo at December 10, 2005 11:01 PMAnd here they are. Zogby, ARG, Galup, Survey US, they all picked Kerry.
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/002977.php
Posted by avaroo at December 10, 2005 11:04 PMOhio, Pennsylvania and Florida were the big 3 states in contention. Here's a round up of polls right before the election in each state. Results? Kerry.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2004/10/26/14138/403
Posted by at December 10, 2005 11:51 PMDean in context.
The reliably lilly-livered Dems always scram for cover every time the RNC says "boo" after Dean makes a truthful comment that violates the Washington establishment systems of doctrine. As usual, the RNC spins Dean's words out of context, and the establishment media dutifully catapults the Repiglican propaganda. In this case, Dean was clearly referring to the occupation's "war" against the insurgency -- not some nebulous war on a tactic -- the type of futile war the French, British, Americans, Russians and other emperial occupiers all have historical experience.
An excerpt of Dean's interview in context is typed below. You can download/listen to the entire (short) interview here. The question and Dean's response begins at about 6:49 into the audio:
Host-2: Govenor Dean, the key to -- I guess -- eventually getting the U.S. forces out of Iraq is going to have the Iraqis doing a better job of defending themselves and taking a greater role. Are we on the right track to achieve that goal?
Dean: Well, I think our military is working very hard to do that, but lets not forget this is ultimately what America had to do in Vietnam. Ultimately, they said we're going to turn this over to the Vietnamese, and of course the South Vietnamese couldn't manage to take care of their own country. And, as I've said, I supported President Bush -- the first President Bush's -- war in Iraq. I supported this president's war in Afghanistan, but I do not believe in making the same mistake twice, and America appears to have made the same mistake twice. I wish the president had payed more attention to the history of Iraq before we'd gotten in there. The idea that we're going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong. And, I've seen this before in my life. It cost us 25,000 brave American soldiers in Vietnam, and I don't want to go down that road again.
Host-1: Alright, governor listen we're...
Dean: We need to get out of there and take the targets off our troop's back; we need to maintain the presence in the area so we can deal with terrorism. but not in Iraq.
Mehlman had to sniff pretty hard to find this benign morsel for his diversionary tempest in a teapot.
Instead of criticizing Dean, the Dems on the Hill and prominent voices on the Left must catapult the truth and not the Repiglican propaganda.
Posted by fafnir at December 11, 2005 04:08 AMMike,
Thanks for keeping me on my toes as far as English goes. Living in Norway does take a toll on my English from time to time, but bringing up typos in your rebuttal is just petty.
Of course Scott Ritter thinks we have lost, you might as well ask Osama bin Laden if we have lost. Scott Ritter is a shill for the anti-Americans. Putting 500,000 Americans into Iraq, look, I'm not a military strategist, but that seems like overkill to me. Not even General Shinseki advocated that many.
Did you know that the death rate in Afghanistan and Iraq are the same? 5 per 1000 per year? I bet you didn't. Does that mean that Afghanistan is a "quagmire" too? Of course not, because that's not the war you are seeking to defame for partisan purposes.
Iraq and Vietnam are like comparing a water melon to a grape, sure they are both fruits and taste delicious, but that's about it.
You say that Dean tells the truth. Alright, so why has Dean been claiming that he was taken out of context then? I'm not a Republican, yet I merely pointed out exactly what Dean was saying, something he disingenously claims he didn't say afterwards.
I have no doubt that Dean was speaking candidly when he said that the USA has lost the war in Iraq and that we need to pull out and cut our losses. My question to you folks is: why is he pretending that that's not what he said?
You give two articles which talk about Bush rewriting history. I read them, and I agree. Bush didn't keep in line with history on those few points. However, was it material?
Such as him saying that 100 senators and congressman saw the "same intelligence". Well, OK, that's not quite true, but many senators did see the same intelligence. The fact of the matter is, all of those people saw intelligence coming from the same source. Regardless, it wasn't the White House who created the intelligence assessments, it was the Intelligence Community. Dick Durbin said in his additional views in the SSCI report that the President's Summary of the NIE did not contain any intelligence other than what the NIE contained. Ergo, the "same intelligence".
So in other words, the president exaggerated, even though you could argue (but I won't) that those senators did see the same intelligence.
With Dean, he didn't exaggerate, he just said things that were plain wrong, things he must have known were wrong. In one part of the interview, you hear him just trying to make up something after he screwed himself over by starting out with a lie. He starts mumbling for words just trying to come up with something that will fit in his lie.
All in the name of calling the president a liar, of course.
He claimed that the 9/11 Commission Republicans said that Bush was wrong when he said that members of Congress got the same intelligence. One problem: that never happened. Dean lied. He didn't exaggerate or mislead, he outright lied.
As he has been doing ever since his interview when he keeps claiming he was taken out of context. He wasn't, he is just lying because he knows his candid statements on the war will bring him down because the mainstream of America doesn't agree with him.
Americans don't want to be losers. Americans don't want our men and women to surrender. Americans want to win.
Unfortunately, Dean doesn't want to. He wants to surrender to the insurgents and withdraw completely out of Iraq without any relevance to events on the ground.
Not only that, he wants to send 20,000 more troops to Afghanistan, a place where our soldiers are dying at the same exact rate as they are in Iraq!
Posted by Seixon at December 11, 2005 05:19 AMLiving in Norway made you type "brang"? Really? Admit it, either English isn't your first language (i.e. you're using an electronic dictionary) or you have a poor grip on the language as a native speaker. Don't make me laugh with my orange juice, please.
As for the rest of your post -- I hope no one takes your bait to prove what you typed is wrong. You've got to come up with reliable sources. You can't just type that tripe and expect that you will be taken seriously. I mena really, seriously. (that typo was for you :)
***fafnir -- big fan here ****
Seixon, you are just another blogger looking for traffic. There's a name . . . . but it cannot be typed here :)
This made me laugh:
It's not a panic move to get rid of Dean, it's simple recognition that while all political parties have their kooks, most don't put em out front and center.
Unless, of course, by "front and center" you don't mean the Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, Secretary of Defense or the Vice President.
Otherwise, yeah, I'd agree with you.
Posted by Bailey at December 12, 2005 01:05 AMThank you, dorita! :)
Posted by fafnir at December 12, 2005 04:03 AM"Unless, of course, by "front and center" you don't mean the Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, Secretary of Defense or the Vice President."
The Vice President got elected. Dean didn't. See the difference? Hey, you don't want the dems to win anymore elections? Fine, keep Dean. Personally, I'd like to see a dem win the presidency again in my lifetime. So keep laughing and keep losing elections.
Posted by avaroo at December 12, 2005 11:35 AMLet's not promise what we can't deliver. The Democratic Party can no more win the "war on terror" than the GOP can. They will continue to accept the proposition that such a war exists and will be way to quick to use our military to seek solutions.
Posted by Marie at December 13, 2005 10:49 AM