HOWARD DEAN, DEFEATIST
NEW YORK POST
Editorials
December 7, 2005
Not all the surrender monkeys live in France.
Take Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean — the sedition-mongering former governor of Vermont who once presumed to the presidency and who now is working overtime for a terrorist victory in Iraq.
Once the Democratic Party was led by men of vision and courage — men like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S Truman and John F. Kennedy. All were partisan pols to the core, but they knew the dangers of totalitarianism and reflexively rose above petty place-seeking to inspire America in times of peril.
Today, the party has Dean — as petty a place-seeker as can be found on the planet, and devoid of anything even approaching vision and courage.
"[The] idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an
idea which is just plain wrong," he said Monday. "Bring
the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home
immediately. They don't belong in a conflict like this
anyway."
Dean doesn't know what he's talking about, on several levels.
The National Guard and Reserves have been an integral part of the Army's "total force" for a generation — there's no bringing them home without collapsing the entire effort in Iraq.
Such an outcome, of course, would be much to Dr. Dean's liking — because, again, it "is just plain wrong" to think "we're going to win the war in Iraq."
(Dean, of course, has never even been to Iraq — in stark contrast to Sen. Joe Lieberman, who's been there four times in the last 17 months, most recently at Thanksgiving. Lieberman spoke on the subject yesterday, and excerpts of his remarks can be found on the preceding page.)
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman quite properly castigated Dean's defeatist attitude — terming his prediction "outrageous."
It "sends the wrong message to our troops, the enemy and
the Iraqi people just 10 days before historic elections."
That's one way to put it.
We would have preferred a little less varnish on Mehlman's message.
For what Dean did was send an unambiguous message of encouragement to America's mortal enemies both in Iraq and elsewhere around the world.
Hang tough, Dean was telling al Qaeda: You may not be able to defeat the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, but we're doing your work for you right here at home.
For sure, Dean's words will be rattling around the Mideast for days — courtesy of al-Jazeera.
"Give' em Hell" Harry Truman, for one, must be spinning in his grave, to see his party in the hands of the spiritual heir to George McGovern.
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