Not Insulting, Just Incoherent

There are certain guarantees in life; the sun will come up every morning; the kiss of a beautiful woman will always be sweet; the IRS will never, and I mean never, die; and the combination of a microphone and Howard Dean will never be boring.

Addressing a DNC fundraiser Monday night, Chairman How managed to avoid insulting Republicans for a change, but that didn't make what he did have to say any more profound:

"What the propagandists on the right have done is make people afraid to say they are Democrats," Dean told a gathering of Vermont Democrats.

Eh? Since when? Maybe the people to whom he refers are afraid to say they're liberals, but either way, to the extent this reticence is true, I would suggest that it's loons like Dr. Demented (and pretty much the entire upper echelon of the Democrat Party) that are responsible for it.

Heck, if you were a (sane) rank & file Dem, wouldn't you be embarrassed?

"We have to be out there. We have to be vocal. We have to be pushing our version of the facts because their version of the facts is very unfactual."

If a professional speechwriter produced syntax this mangled, they'd be taken outside and summarily shot. But the moral relativism, as if facts aren't manifestations of objective reality, is par for the course.

The first two sentences can only produce rolled eyes and a shaking of the head.

After visiting 30 states in the first six months as chairman of the Democratic
National Committee, Dean said Monday he has found "There are Democrats everywhere."

There are? You mean they haven't all been rounded up by George Bush's neocon secret police? Boy, how inefficient can a "dictatorship" get?

Love how Dean makes the distribution of his party's members across the country sound like an infestation of termites or something. I would have suggested a contagion motif, myself - "The Sorosian Strain" or something equivalently and cleverly appropo.

The key to success is making those Democrats proud of their party, Dean said, by taking the offensive and fighting on Democratic turf.

"We need a message. It has to be clear," he said. "The framing of the debate determines who wins the debate.

He's almost right. What the Democrats need is a new message that excommunicates the extreme, Menshevik, Bush-hating Left. Which is a little like Teddy Kennedy spending happy hour at a fundamentalist church picnic.

"Running away from issues is how you lose elections," said Dean, a former Vermont governor.

Ditto pretending that issues don't exist and just saying "no" to everything the opposition proposes.

"We need to position ourselves as the party of change," he said. "I think we have learned that when big changes happen in the House and Senate, they happen because one party nationalizes the race and becomes the change agent."

Bill Clinton already used that gimmick in 1992. Only problem was the people didn't like his "change," as the Dems found out two years later. And had he been honest about the change he intended to effect during the 1992 campaign, he never would have gotten elected in the first place.

In the 2006 election cycle there's no equivalent issue liability for the GOP that the Dems precipitated with Clinton's tax increase and health care putsch. (No, not even the war....)

Hillary 2008 will answer the question of whether political lightning can strike twice.

Dean detailed his 50-state strategy to hire and finance from national coffers organizers in every state, saying that the party is on track to have organizers in every state by the end of the year.

"Vote by vote, precinct by precinct, door by door, year by year and election by election, we will take this country back for the people who built it," he said.

The people who built the country are dead white European Christian males, remember?

Personally, I'd concentrate on holding the "blue" states they've got and devoting any extra resources to, say, Ohio. Given the financial disadvantage the DNC has to deal with, and the (for now) drying up of the so-called "independent" funding from 527 groups, Dr. Demented can hardly afford to so dissipate his limited resources.

Not that he isn't welcome, and encouraged, to do so....

In his speech Dean talked about the growing diversity in America and how well that diversity meshes with the message and membership of the Democratic Party.

"The face of the Democratic Party is such that it looks like all of America will look in 2050," said Dean.

Majority-minority, dirt-poor (following the Social Security-induced economic collapse), and under either Islamist or ChiComm rule?

Feh. Elitist limousine liberal snobs like him would never stand for it.

But that's no more fantasist than anything else he said.

And he didn't insult the majority party.

For once.

But that'll change.

You can practically set your clock by it.