The Associated Press story on Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean’s intemperate weekend statement about Republicans featured emphatic negative responses from Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del, and former Sen. John Edwards. CNN hopped on this first thing Monday and has been flogging it ever since.
From the AP story:
While discussing the hardship of working Americans standing in long lines to vote, Dean said Thursday, “Republicans, I guess, can do that because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives.” Dean said later his comments did not refer to hard-working Americans, but rather to the failure of Republican leadership to address working-class concerns.
Dean is passionate, gets fired up and sometimes goes too far in what he says. Going too far is not helpful and we hope he’ll exhibit more discipline.
Dean’s Republican counterpart, Ken Mehlman issued a remarkably temperate response, to the effect that what Dean said is no way to try and win friends among non-Democrats. We’ll credit Mehlman with an astute and even classy comeback.
Problem is, Mehlman himself exhibited something much worse than Dean’s foot-in-mouth gaffe over the weekend. Mehlman lied like a champ on “Meet the Press.” Media Matters for America nailed it down tight:
On the June 5 edition of NBC’s Meet the Press, moderator Tim Russert questioned but failed to correct Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman’s claim that the “findings” of the Downing Street Memo, a secret British intelligence memo suggesting that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to support its case for war in Iraq, “have been totally discredited by everyone who’s looked at it,” including the 9-11 Commission and the Senate.
In fact, neither the 9-11 Commission nor the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence addressed the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence.
Duh, say what?! Russert ineffectually mumbled a weak protest into his shirt collar. Mehlman pounded away, insisting what he’d said was right. We clearly recall Mehlman getting away with just this kind of lying on CNN twice last year. In those instances, pliable hosts Judy Woodruff and Wolf Blitzer just let his lies sail right on by. Both should’ve known better and done better.
Today, CNN did report that Edwards, on his One America Committee blog, posted a statement intended to balance the impression created by the AP story. Here’s an excerpt of that blog entry:
From John Edwards:
What a flap has arisen over a disagreement about the way something is said! I was in Nashville over the weekend, thanking the good people of Tennessee who supported the Democratic presidential ticket this year, when I was asked whether I thought that it was fair to say that people who were Republican hadn’t done a good day’s work. Of course, I didn’t think so, and I said that.
I don’t think our DNC chair, Howard Dean, would put it that way again if asked either. I disagreed with him, and I said so. And, I want to be clear, I would have to say so again if I were asked again. I said a lot of good things about Howard’s outreach program and invigoration of the Internet as a communication and fundraising tool, but no one wrote about that. Instead the headlines blared that I disagreed with Howard. And then the flap arose: A chasm! A split! A revolt!
Instead, how about: Nonsense!
Two wrongs don’t make a right, certainly, and we’re not suggesting Mehlman’s lie negates the foolishness of Dean’s insult. We just wish we could arrange a deal in which Dean agrees to eliminate hotheaded excess in his statements and Mehlman makes it his business to know and stick to the truth in his statements.
This manipulation of intelligence
amounted to administration officials pushing for all the information they could get about Iraq and WMD. The bureaucracratic tendency to supply your superiors with what they want was at work here, and it is something our intelligence services need to resist, but from what I hear they (CIA, NSA, and Pentagon intel) are full of political infighting, so I think we could be served better by our intelligence services.
Those of us with the Karl Rove chip in our heads can sit back and let Howard Dean administer self inflicted wounds. But, he also brings the political dialogue to a lower level, which distresses those of us who claim to be nice people.
At this point it’s clear Bush intended to go to war in Iraq from the moment he set foot in the White House. It’s no coincidence Andy Card talked of “rolling out a new product” in the July preceding the big PR push for war.
You can try to apply all the whitewash you want. The facts are out and they are utterly damning.
With polls showing nearly 60 percent of Americans joining the rest of the world in adjudging the war a mistake and not worth the cost, and with Bush’s numbers running 48 percent to 52 percent, Dean’s uncalled for bashing comes off as penny ante. At least he hasn’t gotten a lot of people killed, crippled and disfigured for life on a pack of lies, distortions and COYA excuses.
When you defend Democrat activities, can I call it whitewash?
There were strategic reasons for going into Iraq even absent WMDs. We may end up making it a bigger mess, but there are still signs it might be a valid sacrifice.
I notice you refer to my defending “Democratic activities” without offering a single example. Further, it’s especially ironic you make this charge in response to a post where I specifically took the Democrats’ party chairman to task.
For all that I typically side with Democrats, you’ll find I don’t hold them as being above reproach.
As for “strategic reasons” for going into Iraq, please. I think we’ve been down this path before.
Iraq was a backward, ineptly led and nearly undefended Third-World country the size of California. As we learned, its military was so ill-trained, equipped and led that it represented a greater threat to itself than to an invader.
Since I’m on this, let me point out an additional myth Bush & Co. peddles: that Saddam failed to comply with requests for evidence he had complied with U.N. disarmament protocols. In fact, his people handed over CD ROMs listing voluminous, albeit apparently poorly organized, data indicating Iraq actually had disposed of the WMD that hadn’t been destroyed in the previous invasion.
The same U.S. security wizards who considered finding huge troves of WMD here, there and everywhere in Iraq a “slam dunk” blew off the CD ROMs as so much nonsense. It now appears they were the best Saddam’s people could do to try and prove a negative with some sort of documentation.
I never could summon any patriotic pride about Ronald Reagan’s vainglorious “liberation” of Granada. It seemed more like a pathetic comic-opera excercise that was dangerously close to bullying.
Considering the underlying stupidity and dishonesty of our misleadership in getting us mired there in the first place, I don’t see Bush’s deadly blunder war in Iraq as our finest hour either.
Yes, you do take Democrats to task on
many occasions, but your criticisms are
softened and muted. The wider theme in your
posts is, crudely put, “Democrats good,
Republicans bad.”
From what vantage point should we
examine the war in Iraq? We have to engage
Middle East terrorists somehow. The policies
of Clinton only made things worse. We had
to do something differently. Iraq provided
a route to start building some democratic
states in the region as a balance to Wahabi
theocracy. It may work, it may fail, but we
are in the middle of a project that still
has a chance of success. Carping about
the details just weakens those chances.
You might say Clinton’s policy failed to take sufficient action to suit you, but I’m at a loss as to how it made things worse.
You apparently accept the assumption Iraq was a hotbed of terrorist activity, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
You also seem to believe we can build democratic states in the Mideast  and do so with people in charge so incompetent they invaded a sovereign nation on trumped up, exagerrated grounds, ignoring the protests of the U.N. and traditional allies alike, then toppled the existing regime without any realistic plan for what to do in the aftermath.
Call this carping if you like. In an orderly democracy it’s what we do when we can’t do anything else. The hope is that some minds will be changed, making for a new political majority and new direction.
Sorry, a “Do something, even if it’s wrong” approach may work for you. It doesn’t for me. Current polling indicates lots of other people have about had enough of it as well.