Obama, Clinton and Edwards all spoke before ASFCME today — and one thing they all appeared to agree upon was that we’ll be staying in Iraq in some capacity for some time to come.
Somebody please explain to me why today, while polls punish the Democratic party for blank-checking Bush’s war, we don’t have a single Democratic candidate with the balls to say what Howard Dean said in 2004. Dean hardly got punished for his sentiments, except by the media, back when the war and our smirking war chief still had a majority following. And as it turns out practically everything that Howard Dean said about Iraq proved right on the money. The war is a hopeless crusade, run by rank nincompoops, that damages American interests every day that it goes on. These aren’t even debatable points anymore, just baseline assumptions that even the surgin’ Kagans recognized when they promoted their policy change.
Dean’s message resonated back when he sounded “crazy.” Now imagine the response when the 90% of America smarter than John Hinderaker more or less takes his position as a given. Americans hate the president and his crappy war. It doesn’t take “balls” to stand forcefully against sending more kids to die in Iraq, it takes balls not to. And yet when our Dem candidates look for inspiration in 2007, four years after Howard Dean’s grassroots phenomenon, every single one reaches for Joementum. Try to grasp how depressing that is.