Category: Current Events

Salon.com News | My big fat mea culpa

This article is really making me reconsider Dean. I’ve been mostly ambivalent about him despite the fact that smart people I know have already endorsed him.

Add to that the fact that Dean has finally come up with a rejoinder to the thing that has bothered me the most over the years. The Republicans are expert at coming up with sound bites which skewer the opposition. “Al Gore Exaggerates” was one and the one I hated most was calling anyone a “tax and spend liberal.” Dean called Bush a “borrow and spend, credit-card Republican.”

So, I’m taking another look.

I said it before and I’ll say it again, when you get past all the bullshit that’s been thrown around about his wooden personality or his exaggerations (all of which were shown to be dead on) during the last election and all the rest, Al Gore is damned smart and would have made an excellent President. This speech is excellent.

Robust debate in a democracy will almost always involve occasional rhetorical excesses and leaps of faith, and we’re all used to that. I’ve even been guilty of it myself on occasion. But there is a big difference between that and a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty.

Unfortunately, I think it is no longer possible to avoid the conclusion that what the country is dealing with in the Bush Presidency is the latter. That is really the nub of the problem — the common source for most of the false impressions that have been frustrating the normal and healthy workings of our democracy.