Would it be a confused metaphor to call his mouth his Achilles heel?
On yesterday's "Hardball," Dean was asked by Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, what he would do about Iran. Here's what he said:
The key, I believe, to Iran, is pressure through the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is supplying much of the equipment that Iran I believe mostly likely is using to set itself along the path of developing nuclear weapons. We need to use that leverage with the Soviet Union, and it may require us buying the equipment the Soviet Union was ultimately going to sell to Iran, to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
That's four times Dean mentioned the Soviet Union--a country that hasn't existed for almost 12 years.
Dean has also been trafficking in crackpot conspiracy theories. On yesterday's "Diane Rehm Show" on WAMU radio (link in RealAudio format, exchange begins at 42:39), the erstwhile Vermont governor had this to say:
Caller: Once we get you in the White House, would you please make sure that there is a thorough investigation of 9/11, and not stonewall it?
Dean: Yes. There is a report, which the president is suppressing evidence for, which is a thorough investigation of 9/11.
Rehm: Why do you think he's suppressing that report?
Dean: I don't know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I've heard so far--which is nothing more than a theory, it can't be proved--is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis. Now who knows what the real situation is? But the trouble is, by suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kinds of theories, whether they have any truth to them or not. And eventually they get repeated as fact. So I think the president is taking a great risk by suppressing the key information that should go to the Kean commission.
Now, it's true that the Bush administration sought to withhold some classified documents from the Kean commission, which is investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. Such disputes are nothing unusual; both the Nixon and Clinton administrations sought (unsuccessfully) to use executive privilege to withhold information from prosecutors investigating possible presidential crimes. In this case, there are no serious allegations of wrongdoing, and the information in question is sensitive for reasons of national security, not just protecting the office of the president.
Besides, as the Daily Record of Parsippany, N.J., noted last month, the White House and the commission reached a compromise that will allow some access to such information. Dean is out of bounds to cite this "suppression" as an excuse to raise nutty conspiracy theories. If a Republican candidate had said of Bill Clinton, "The Clintons may have murdered Vince Foster--but it's only a theory," he would have been pilloried in the media, and rightly so. Will Dean get the same treatment?
Speaking of Withholding Information . . .
"What's in Howard Dean's Secret Vermont Files," asks a headline in Newsweek. "A large chunk of Dean's records as governor are locked in a remote state warehouse--the result of an aggressive legal strategy designed in part to protect Dean from political attacks":
Dean--who has blasted the Bush administration for excessive secrecy--candidly acknowledged that politics was a major reason for locking up his own files when he left office last January. He told Vermont Public Radio he was putting a 10-year seal on many of his official papers--four years longer than previous Vermont governors--because of "future political considerations. . . . We didn't want anything embarrassing appearing in the papers at a critical time."
Dean's defense, which he offered on "Good Morning America" yesterday, is that Bush did the same thing, the San Jose Mercury News reports:
Dean told the ABC program: "You don't actually get to seal the majority of records, just those sensitive parts that apply to other people. President Bush sort of takes the cake for his sealing. He actually had his sent, as I understand it, to his father's presidential library, where there's a 50-year seal."
Dean said: "I'll unseal mine if he'll unseal his."
Just one problem: It's not true. As the Mercury News reports, "Bush's gubernatorial documents are in the custody of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission and are open under Texas public record laws."
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