Deanisms
Howard Dean stopped past Chris Matthews’ show yesterday and gave us another dose of outlandish statements. Here’s a list of my favorites:
MATTHEWS: So in this upcoming birth on partial-birth that’s coming, there’s going to be a verdict on that sometime after Thanksgiving. Do you think it’s important that the new justice be a person who supports abortion rights down the line, supports Roe v. Wade?
DEAN: I think it’s important that the justice is willing to grant individual freedom to all Americans, not just on the issue of abortion, but the individual freedoms that make up  for voting rights, for example. I think they ought to defend people’s ability to vote unharassed. I think this thing they’re doing down in Georgia where they’re going to charge people 20 bucks for an ID so they can vote, that’s going back to the days of Jim Crow.
Dean wastes no time in getting the facts wrong. Neal Boortz and Bill O’Reilly have reported often that the Georgia bill Dean refers to doesn’t require people to pay for the ID card if they’re unable to pay for them.
MATTHEWS: Dr. Dean, you’ve been very cautious here, and I think a lot of Democrats have, you’re not alone. Why are the right-wing people, the people on the radio all day, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, people like Bill Kristol, who was mentally important in knocking Hillary Clinton’s health care plan, he has a big power in this country. Why are they out there with the blunderbuss, going at this nomination, and you’re so cool about it?DEAN: Well, I don’t know. They can say whatever they want, that’s what they do. Sometimes the people who talk the most know the least.
Howard Dean. The gift that keeps on giving.
GOLDEN OLDIE TIME:
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about Iraq. One in six Democrats now tell pollsters that the war in Iraq was worth it. Are you one of those one in six, or one of the five in six  I should say, well, only one in six say it’s worth it. Are you one of the one in six or one of the five in six who don’t think it was worth it?
DEAN: Well, I think, Chris, one thing I am is consistent. I thought this was a bad idea in the first place because I believed we would get just in the kind of mess we have. It looks like, Chris, now the Iraqi government that George Bush is supporting to hard is trying to rig the vote on the constitution. Women appear to be worse off under this constitution than they were under Saddam Hussein. I think this president’s made a terrible mistake. Now we’re stuck, we’re in there. It’s not responsible to take our troops out tomorrow, but we need to get our troops out of there and we need to do it in a reasonable way and not lose any more lives.
This guy is permanently stuck on stupid to repeat this nonsense. He can’t seriously think that women had it better in Saddam’s Iraq, replete with the rape rooms & the mass graves, than today’s Iraq, where women can hold office, vote and get educated. Nobody’s that stupid. Right?
I can’t figure out what he’s saying here: “It’s not responsible to take our troops out tomorrow, but we need to get our troops out of there and we need to do it in a reasonable way and not lose any more lives.” I accept that it isn’t “responsible to take our troops out tomorrow”. How does that square with his statement that “we need to do it in a reasonable way and not lose any more lives.”? To not lose more lives would require an immediate withdrawal, wouldn’t it? Except that that isn’t responsible, right?
The only way to describe those ’statements’ is to say that they represent twisted logic on steroids.
MATTHEWS: Back that up, Dr. Dean. What other examples can you point to  or any examples can you point to where the Republicans in power right now, in the White House or in Congress, have gone after somebody and tried to discredit them?
DEAN: Oh, I think there are numbers of them, not just Valerie Plame, but look at what they did to John Kerry with the Swift Boat ads. Certainly they  certainly tried to marginalize me during the presidential campaign. I think they would have done that â€â€
MATTHEWS: Well, you helped a little, didn’t you?
DEAN: I don’t really think so. I think the press probably helped some. But â€â€
MATTHEWS: I mean, the Dean scream was good material, like the ride in the tank was good material for the Republicans when they went after Mike Dukakis.
Dr. Dean is tapdancing as fast as he can here. Matthews asks him which Republicans in the White House or in Congress went after somebody and Dean lists the Swift boat vets going after Kerry and someone up there went after Valerie Plame. Except that the Swift Boat Vets aren’t part of Congress or the White House and that it was conservative pundits that attacked Joe Wilson, though they didn’t attack Valerie Plame.
Finally, Matthews slams him by saying that the Republicans didn’t go after him as much as he self-destructed on his own with the scream.
Cross-posted at BoxerWatch
October 6th, 2005 at 9:25 am
The funny part is that Chris Matthews is as willing to give liberals a pass as anyone else in the MSM and not even Howard Dean’s line of insane B.S. gets past him. Matthews realizes he has his own credibility to protect and wastes no time refuting Dean’s paranoid fantasy about those evil Republicans. Not ’cause he loves Republicans by any stretch of the imagination, but that Dean’s statements are indeed really, really paranoid.
October 17th, 2005 at 3:23 pm
[...] S.F. Chronicle reports: “Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, labeling Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as just another Republican “right wing” politician, told hundreds of grassroots party activists Sunday they should send a message on Nov. 8 that will resonate nationwide by rejecting the governor’s special election measures.” “Gov. Schwarzenegger put these things on the ballot because he is, in fact, the captive of special interests,” Dean said to applause and cheers of the party’s faithful who packed a union hall in Hayward to hear his fiery address. “Arnold Schwarzenegger came in and then sold himself, and the state of California, to special interests.” As the old saying goes: consider the source. [...]