AN ARMY OF ONE - LITERALLY

Back to the font today and the lead editorial in the New York Times is complaining (“No!!”) that “…the Bush administration is pushing America's peacetime armed forces toward their limits.”

It seems our friends at the Old Gray Lady have discovered that our Armed Forces are understaffed. Of course, they don’t come right out and blame the Bush Administration for it, but they do hint at it:

“Washington will not be able to sustain the mismatch between unrealistic White House ambitions and finite Pentagon means much longer without long-term damage to our military strength.”

The Times, being a reasonable paper with the good of America foremost in it’s mind has called on the Administration to increase defense spending and create incentives to recruit more personnel.

Oh, and Howard Dean has come out calling for a ban on elective abortions, too.

The Times solution is exactly what you would expect it to be:

“The only solution is for the Bush administration to return to foreign policy sanity, starting with a more cooperative, less vindictive approach to European allies who could help share America's military burdens. “

Whatever. But, lets look at the underlying problem – not enough troops. The Times itself says the United States will need another 100,000 troops. And why is that? Could it be eight years of gutting America’s armed forces under the eye of draft-dodger Clinton? A study by the Heritage Foundation found:

“Between 1992 and 2000, the Clinton administration cut national defense by more than 500,000 personnel and $50 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars, notes defense policy analyst Jack Spencer. A just-released Congressional Budget Office report finds that military funding would need to increase by $50 billion a year simply to maintain the size of today’s forces.

Since 1992, Spencer notes, the Army has lost four active divisions and two reserve divisions—30 percent of its staff. The Air Force is down by five tactical squadrons, 178 bombers and 30 percent of its active personnel. The naval fleet has gone from 393 ships in 1992 to 316, and the Navy has decreased its active duty personnel by 30 percent. Even the Marines have lost personnel—22,000 since 1992.”

What’s that I read? The army is down six divisions? That’s 60,000 to 90,000 troops, just the number we need. And it’s all George Bush’s fault? So, instead of putting the blame where it belongs, the Times wants us to beg the French to save us. I hate the Times.

TRUE PATRIOTS

I said I wouldn’t be posting much this week and, true to my word, my lazy butt hasn’t been in Mel’s Diner hardly at all. But, I felt I’d drop a little note about something close to my heart – patriotism.

I just switched the channel to TNN, I mean Spike! TV, and caught the very end of WWE Velocity. Now, for all of you who have no idea who the WWE is, they are World Wrestling Entertainment, formerly World Wrestling Federation, you know, professional wrestling? The allegedly “fake” wrestling?

Fake or not, wrestling is considered VERY low-brow. It is probably considered even lower class than NASCAR; at least by the upper-Manhattan, Paris Hilton, Barbra Streisand ilk.

Wrestling, like it’s counter-part NASCAR, is also very patriotic. The very end of the Velocity I mentioned above was following the WWE to Baghdad. And it wasn’t just a few of the wrestlers who went to Iraq in some sort of PR move, it was about fifteen of the wrestlers, including the chairman, an honest to goodness BILLIONARE (depending on the stock market), Vince McMahon. These entertainers are true patriots – you could see it in their faces that they love the military, they appreciate the military – they understand what the military is doing for us. These bumpkins, these hicks, these red-state half-wits, they understand so much more, so much better than the elites that speak down to us everyday in big media. The same elites who refuse to where American flag pins, the same ones who can’t say if the Pentagon was a valid military target because they must remain neutral, these same elites who don’t know if the world is safer without Saddam or if Osama is guilty.

So, as we go into the next election cycle, remember who really care about America. Is it the Democrats and their elite, ivy league, Rhodes scholar friends or is it the party of NASCAR, the WWE and patriotic Americans?

To quote Scrappleface, I report, you decipher.

TERRI SCHIAVO

I know it’s been a long time since I posted, but this past week has been absolutely crazy!!! That’s not to say I haven’t been keeping up with what’s going on (Saddam caught, Libya bowing to the superb statesmanship and diplomacy of Kofi Annan – I mean, scared poop-less that he’s next on the receiving end of all those coalition troops), etc. I will start to post on a more regular basis, but maybe not until after the New Year.

Anyway, I wanted to give you another Terry Schiavo update. As we know, Michael sued immediately after Gov. Bush signed “Terri’s law” and the forces of good have been handed some setbacks. Circuit Court Judge W. Douglas Baird denied Gov. Bush’s request for a jury trial to determine what Terri’s wishes would have been regarding life support. That means that Michael’s wishes will be Terri’s wishes if the law is found to be unconstitutional, which it probably will be.

What to think? Well, the last time we were here, I was voicing my doubts about how I felt about the whole case. My guess is the law will be struck down and Terri will be starved to death. The positive side of this case, and it is a big positive, is that Terri brought to the country’s attention matters of life and death, literally. We as a country are way to cavalier about the death of people we don’t know, namely abortion and Terri helped bring a consciousness to a lot of people who didn’t have it before. That is a very good thing.

Still, we need to keep Terri in our prayers, especially today. While we remember Terri as she comes to the end of her life, we should also remember 2003 years ago tonight when a family was ready to bring a new life into this world.

THIS IS A GOOD THING?

A dark, dark day on the path to respect of human life. The New Jersey Assembly yesterday passed a bill specifically permitting stem cell research and manufacture. Now, when I say manufacture, I mean a human being is created to specifically harvest stem cells and cloned body parts from.

Yeah, harvesting.

The bill specifically prohibits a clone from being made, but would allow a cloned baby to be implanted in a womb as long at it’s life was terminated before it was born. I can’t believe I’m writing stuff like this and I’m not doing satire.

For the love of God, when will this people learn!!!!!!

Check this out:

“But to harvest stem cells, researchers must destroy days-old embryos – a procedure condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, abortion foes and others.”

Hello!!! The destruction of days-old embryos are condemned by all people with a brain!!!!! What is wrong with these people!!!!

Aside from this abortion (pun fully intended) of this bill, the story in Newsday inadvertently hints at another problem:

“The bill would require doctors treating patients for infertility to provide enough information for them to make educated choices regarding use of human embryos after infertility treatments. Most stem cell researchers get unwanted embryos donated by fertility clinics.”

“Unwanted embryos”? Yeah, fertility clinics in this country don’t come under enough scrutiny, if you ask me. Fertility clinics regularly create embryos (“test-tube babies”) and handily discard this babies. They also implant several embryos into wombs of women trying to get pregnant, as kind of an insurance policy, only to go in and “remove” the “extras” later. What people don’t talk about is all of the “extras”, implanted or not, ARE CHILDREN!!!!!!!!

The reason this clinics don’t get the scorn, abuse and picketing the deserve is the public perception of fertility clinics is a very friendly one. After all, they’re just helping poor families who want to have children, right? So, the pro-life crowd, of which I am a PROUD member still, choose not to fight that battle, it’s a battle we will surely lose. But, if we can shut down regular gas chambers, I mean abortion clinics, we will be default start to close some of the fertility clinic’s operations.

Look, if for some reason you can’t get pregnant on your own, like you waited too long to try because you wanted a career and a baby just would “fit your lifestyle” right then, then how about adopting a child from a mother who decided NOT to kill her child?

THAT would make the world a little better place.

SADDAM AND GEORGE

Well, the obvious story is Saddam Hussein. What a wonderful sight!! The tyrant of the mid-East, caught in a rat-infested hole. And it certainly was a telling day for John Kerry. Did you see what he had to say?

“If we had done this with a sufficient number of troops, if we had done this in a globalized way, if we had brought more people to the table, we might have caught Saddam Hussein sooner. We might have had less loss of life. We would be in a stronger position today with respect to what we're doing.”

Is this man trying to lose? It sure looks like it. In direct contrast, it was a great day for President Bush. His stay-the-course, full resolve, do-what-it-takes-to-protect the United States attitude made the capture of Saddam possible.

During the 2000 election, George Bush was the candidate with little foreign policy experience, the candidate that wanted to keep the U.S. out of policing the world. He was elected on his domestic policy experience, along with his strong character. In an ironic twist worthy of Sherlock Holmes. The foreign policy of George Bush has been positively stellar, he is one of those people who has an innate gift to do the right thing to make us safer and his domestic policies really stink. Signing a campaign finance reform bill he thought was unconstitutional, signing the Medicare debacle, steel tariffs, etc. One of the few good things I can say about him, and it’s a very good thing, he is staunchly pro life. He understands the holocaust, and I don’t use that word flippantly or lightly, we are in the midst of with abortion on demand.

So, is George Bush a great president? He’s pretty good. His foreign policy has been wonderful and just what I wanted from him. His domestic policy smells like old socks. If he was President during times like Clintoon had, free of foreign policy landmines (for the most part), I would call him fairly poor as a President. But because foreign problems rule the times today, I’m pretty happy with our President.

THE REAL ENEMIES LIST

ABC News has an interesting story about conservative students at the University of Texas who have posted a list of who they consider liberal radical professors. Of course, this has led to all kinds of hubbubs amongst those pinkos who made the list. Concerning this list and the rise of vocal conservatives on campus, we get the dreaded M-word:

"It's a trend which, if it got completely out of hand, could lead us to another McCarthy kind of situation," said Edmund Gordon, a UT associate professor who is on the Young Conservatives of Texas list. "I certainly hope it doesn't go that far."

Another “McCarthy kind of situation”? Does the fine professor mean that Communists and spies will be exposed in higher education? I hope so.

The funniest line in the whole story comes from the Professor who is so radical, his actions led to the whole list:

"Nobody with power is telling me I can't say something," Jensen said. "It's only going to become censorship if university administrators, who have the power to hire and fire and the power to punish faculty, start requiring a kind of ideological conformity for advancement in the profession. If that happens, then higher education is dead."

Uh, dude, there already IS a “kind of ideological conformity for advancement in the profession.”, it’s a liberal ideological conformity and you're right, higher education is dead Higher education is so populated with liberalism, it rivals the New York Times. That’s why sending your children to college is like sending them in to battle, except this is a battle for their ideological souls.

Speaking of liberal media bias, check out this from the story:

“The very idea of making lists of members of opposing groups has a long and checkered history in America. Hollywood once had its black list, an unwritten understanding of those who would be denied work because of their suspected affiliation or sympathy with communism. President Nixon had an infamous enemies list, and his political opponents had their own scoreboard of so-called war criminals in his Cabinet. The National Rifle Association recently put out its own listing of adversaries. Some of them said they were proud to be on it.”

The lists mentioned were all lists by Conservatives, but no mention of any liberal lists. Clinton had his own lists and acted on them. Remember the 350 FBI files stolen on Republicans? Those were from a list. How about the IRS auditing everyone who ever said anything against the Clintons? There’s another list.

PRO-CHOICE AMERICA

Our good friends over at NARAL, I mean Pro-Choice America, have a new, fun thing to do. You can play a game that shows you how evil the Great Satan, I mean George Bush, is and how your “right to choose” is slipping away. Some of the “anti-choice” facts are that some states don’t require sex education in the schools and some don’t require insurance companies to subsidize contraceptives. Oh, to have choice, we need to require it. “You will have a choice, whether you like it or not!”

I went to their store and they don’t have the fun stuff they had last year. Last year they offered such family oriented gifts as chocolate contraceptive pills for the stockings and a the conscience-free gift, a pro-choice baby undershirt. Ah, you can’t make this stuff up!

EARL WARREN'S CURSE

This morning on the way to work, I was listening to NPR and their came upon their fair minded, non-partisan legal reporter, Nina Totenberg, who we remember was one of the people who pushed Anita Hill into the limelight. This is the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and Nina had a fawning piece on the new Chief Justice, Earl Warren. Chief Justice Warren was such a liberal, judicial activist, he introduced to the world the whole theory of judicial activism, the same activism that brought us the latest assault on free speech this week.

Of course, Warren’s activism wasn’t seen in a poor light by Totenberg, she didn’t even mention it. Well, that’s not exactly true; she mentioned it without even realizing it. She mentioned Warren was Governor of California and brought to the state, “progressive enlightenment”. Is this the same “progressive enlightenment” that led to California’s current liberal train wreck? In the most telling quote that shows Warren’s activism, Nina said he was, “attuned to public consensus”. A Supreme Court Chief Justice should be anything but “attuned to public consensus”; he should be a Constitutional scholar with no regard to public consensus and current fads.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE AND ME

I’ll be honest, I don’t know much of the campaign finance law that was upheld by the Supreme Court yesterday. I haven’t given it much thought over the past year other to put it in the “Bush – Bad Stuff” column because I knew the Court would strike down some parts of it and uphold others. From what I’ve been hearing, it sounds like most of it has been upheld, including the “3rd party advertising is a no-no” part of it. So, I have a few questions I need answered:

- Exactly who can endorse or slam a candidate?

- When is this allowed?

- What about blogs? My blog is open to the public and I routinely slam politicians who I think are bad for the country (“Howard Dean, check your email!”) Will I fall under the law?

- What about organizations like MoveOn? And those 529’s like George Soros is starting, where do they fall under this?

- And what the Hell happened to my First Amendment?

OUR TROOPS

Like most everyone of my generation, I have NO IDEA what war is like. I can’t imagine being in uniform, I can’t understand what it’s like to kill another man, even if he is trying to kill me, I can’t understand anything about battle. So, when I speak of the war in Iraq and the sacrifice the armed forces are making, I am speaking only of theory. That’s not to say the theory is wrong, but to be sure, it’s only from theory and NOT from experience.

Also, like people of my generation, I have family members who know exactly what battle and what being a soldier is like. And like many of my generation, I have mostly ignored these stories. It’s not to say I haven’t listened to them, it’s to say I have not THOUGHT about them. And that’s sad. I mean, really sad.

My grandfather was shot down over Germany in 1944. My dad’s dad was a B-17 pilot and had to bail out on a bombing run and was taken prisoner. Fortunately, he was treated well and was rescued by the WESTERN allies in 1945. My great-uncle, that being my mom’s mom’s brother, lost the bottom ¼ of his leg in the Black Forest of Germany. Uncle Fred was in a ½ track when it hit a landmine (calling Senator No, I mean Senator Gasbag, I mean Senator Patrick Leahy(D-VT)) and he lost the bottom part of his leg. I never gave it a thought as a child and by the time I would, he had died. My dad was in Vietnam. He was in the Air Force and was in Saigon during the 1968 Tet offensive, you know, the American victory that the liberal press spun into a defeat? He jokes about his time there, but, I’m sure he’s skimming over the real stuff he did there.

Why do I say this? Because the people reporting to us and commenting on the war in Iraq have no idea what our troops are going through. We need to remember that when people like Howard talk about the war in Iraq, when they pontificate about how poorly the United States is doing in Iraq, they are uninformed maroons. Even when I talk about the troops, I have no idea what they are doing or what it is like to be in Iraq.

So, ignore us all. Talk to someone, like my grandfather or my dad, ask them what it was like and what they went through. This will tell you how are troops are doing and what it is like. And remember what our troops are going through. They are going through this for YOU. They are going through this for ME. That’s something people Howard don’t even like to think about.

OUTRAGEOUS

I have become so used to the insanity and craziness that comes from the Democratic Presidential nominees, that I am now missing the important sanity indicators. Last week, I had heard that Howard had said the most interesting theory on 9/11 was that President Bush had been warned before the attack by the Saudi’s, but didn't give it any thought.

Howard, what in the Hell is that?

No, seriously, let’s sit back, take a deep breath and think about that. The Democratic Presidential front runner has given credence to the thought that President Bush allowed the murder of 3,000 people to happen. He, for some reason, abdicated his responsibility to the people of the United States and allowed thousands of civilians to be killed. Probably for Halliburton.

Now, of course, the Dean campaign won’t comment further upon the incident. Neither will the rest of the Democrats running for President. The head of the New Hampshire Democratic Party says,

“It doesn’t sound like really that much to talk about. He said this was ‘one of the theories.’ He didn’t say it was a good theory, or a legitimate theory or that the theory had any credence to it.”

Oh. He was just discussing a theory, so that makes it OK. As long as you don’t explicitly endorse a theory, you’re safe from criticism. Imagine if we had an exchange like this:

Chris Mathews: Why do you think we see nothing of Howard Dean’s wife? Wouldn’t you think if your husband was the front runner for the Presidential nomination, you would want to be with him to help him deal with the campaign, stress, etc?

President Bush: Well, I can’t say why she chooses to remain so far in the background as to be anonymous, I know I was sure happy to have Laura with me. One of the most interesting theories I have heard – and is no proof that this is true – is that Howard dean is a wife beater.

I’m sure the Democrats wouldn’t be phased by it because he was only discussing a theory, he wasn’t saying it was true.

And Barbra Streisand would leave her estate to the RNC, too.

IRAQ

Lets talk about the war in Iraq. Let’s talk to all of you who think it’s a bad thing. Why? Why is it such a bad thing? Let me opine on the whole thing instead of trying to answer each question one by one.

Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United States and had not attacked us. So what? Iraq was a terrorist threat to the whole world. They acted just like a country that was hiding weapons of mass destruction. It threw out UN inspection teams, when given chance after chance to allow open inspections to let the world see they NO LONGER had WMD’s, Iraq refused. So, everyone knew, even most of the Democrats running for President and even France, that WMD’s were in Iraq, just waiting for use by terrorist groups unconcerned about human life. So, they needed attackin’

Iraq was a tyrannical nightmare of biblical proportions. They had rape rooms, torture chambers, mass graves, chemical attacks, summary executions and a leader who enjoyed watching his “enemies” being eaten alive by dogs. The Hussein boys were as twisted and evil as anyone could ever imagine and heartless to their countryman’s plight. There were no free elections, no political dissent and no personal freedom. Nothing about the leadership of this country had anything good about it. The world is better off without it.

But what about the rest of the dictatorships in the world? What about the accusation that we went in just because they had oil and our country needs oil to feed it’s military-industrial complex, not to mention all of the Jeep Grand Cherokees we see at all of the kids soccer games? We attacked Iraq unprovoked for our own selfish wants and desires!!!

Yeah, so what? Are you saying that just because we are unable or unwilling to fix all of the world's problems, we should fix none? Or are you saying we should only fix those problems of which we have NO strategic interest, like Haiti, Liberia and Kosovo? Hello, get your head out of your butt!! The President promises to protect the people of the US, not all of the other people of the world. So, if we do need to fix a problem outside of our borders, it better well have a strategic interest for the United States, if it doesn’t, it’s an abdication to an oath sworn on the Bible. It better be over oil, the Panama canal, etc. it better not be to protect the interests of France or Uganda.

Somewhere along the line, the motive of the action became much more important than the result. If the cops bust a meth lab in town and find a kiddie porn studio but no crystal, it was not a failure. Just because the reasons we attacked Iraq don’t make the Sierra Club all warm and fuzzy doesn’t mean making 34 million people free is a bad thing. Just because we got into a war with Japan over steel exports doesn’t make stopping the people who perpetrated the rape of Nanking an unjust war.

Iraq was scum and deserved to be replaced with anything but Iraq. Just because they didn’t have nuclear (pronounced NUKE-u-lar) weapons doesn’t mean the war was unjust. The mass grave of children and the “re-education” prison for kids were enough reasons for attacking. Oh and a free, open oil supply, the same oil used by even NARAL, NAACP, the Sierra Club, MoveOn, Barbra Streisand and Lisa’s mom, not to mention General Motors, The US Marines and me, was good, too.

The bonus to this whole thing is if Iraq actually becomes a democracy. A democracy is always a good thing, even if people like Michael Moore come from them and having a democracy in the Middle East will only make the region and the world a safer place. That's justification enough right there.

So, all of you and your ilk who think this whole thing was bad, then you need to sit down a think it all over. If you still come to the conclusion that Saddam was a better alternative, please move to North Korea. There at least you won't to be part of the Yankee imperialist aggression, you can be with your own kind that think the United States is terrible and should be despised. Come to think of it, you could move to France or London and have the same experience. Wherever, please leave here, the thought that your vote counts as much as the fine people in our military or even bums like me is sickening.

I'M SO CLEVER...

Clarence Page in today’s Chicago Tribune has an Op-Ed piece on gay marriage. What got me was his smarmy little introduction:

“I used to have a neighbor who put a refreshingly blunt bumper sticker on her car: "Don't like abortion? Don't have one."

When I heard President Bush's response to the recent Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts decision that said same-sex couples were entitled to "the protections, benefits and obligations of civil marriage," I thought of how that bumper sticker could be updated into a modest proposal for the president: "Don't like gay marriage? Don't have one."

Aww, isn’t that clever? Well, if like using that abortion thing so much, what do you think of this one?

“If you don’t like blacks, don’t hire one”

Oh wait, that’s not right, you say? We should have laws against things that aren’t right?

Exactly.

DEAN=CLINTON

Howard’s at it again; he’s looking more and more like Bill Clinton. In today’s New York Times, we have an article about his sealed records in Vermont. It seems now Howard is trying to deflect criticism by saying:

“…he was now considering unsealing some of the records.”

What this means in Clinton code-speak is he isn’t really going to release any papers or very few, all the while hoping the promise of considering will put the fires of controversy out.

Dean made a terrible mistake with his big mouth this week when he said he would release his papers when President Bush releases his papers from his term as Governor of Texas. What Ho-Ho didn’t know was that Bush’s papers are already available, so now he has a promise to keep.

Yeah. Like that will happen with a congenital liar.

The most telling Clintonism comes at the end of the article:

“While citing transparency and accommodation to public inquiries as his goals, Dr. Dean said on Tuesday that he had told Mr. Rocchio [Dean’s lawyer at the time] "to get as long as possible" in negotiating the seal with the archivist. "Every governor that I know," he said, "tries to get their records put aside as long as reasonably possible."

A survey by Charles Schultz, a professor at Texas A&M, showed that 29 of 42 responding states require departing governors to place their records into archives and that many must make them publicly available immediately. Others keep records sealed for as little as five years or as much as 30.

On Tuesday, Dr. Dean said the 10-year seal was Mr. Rocchio's doing. "I didn't have anything to do with those negotiations other than him coming back and reporting to me," he said. "David's a very aggressive attorney. Let me suggest that you talk to David. All I'm going to do is say things that I'm going to be sorry I said later because I wasn't involved in the negotiations. David was."

Dean blames his lawyer!!!! It’s reminiscent of the Clintoons when nobody seemed to know who hired Craig Livingstone, of the FBI Filegate scandal. Dean is Clinton, except Dean’s wife doesn’t want anything to do with him and doesn’t pretend she does.

DEAN AT IT AGAIN...

Howard Dean was on “Hardball with Chris Mathews” from Harvard last night and lied and obfuscated through the whole thing. I’m not going to hit all of his, um… “distortions”, but let’s check out some of the better ones:

“Kerry, Gephardt, Lieberman, Edwards and Wes Clark at first, all were in favor of this resolution that was a preemptive unilateral attacks on Iraq. I was not…”

Howard, please define “unilateral”. Does this mean that you consider countries like Great Britain, Poland, Australia, etc. as so unimportant that they are not worth mentioning so our action was unilateral? What does this say about your foreign policy that you would consider these countries not worthy of mention? Or do you not understand what unilateral means? If so, how many patients died under your care because of your lack of understanding of basic English words? Or, do you fully understand what unilateral means and you are just a liar?

“UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Governor Dean, you said you would-you would bypass federal matching funds to compete financially with President Bush. But doing also frees you from spending caps in several key primary states. Will you still respect state spending limits? And, if not, how can you say you are committed to public financing, when you abandon the system because you can afford it, while others still abide by its limits?

DEAN: Well, actually, I abandoned the system not because we could afford it, but because we could beat George Bush that way. We planned the — look, our campaign is campaign finance reform. We raised three times as much money as everybody else in the last quarter, average donation, $77 from 200,000 people. That is campaign finance reform.
Interestingly enough, one-quarter of all our donors are under 30 years old. This campaign is about taking back this country and giving it to the generation who’s going to have to live with all the horrendous policies that George Bush is inflicting on us.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)”

Howard, how come you didn’t answer the question about respecting state spending limits? What happened to that “non-political, straight shooter kind of guy”? The whole, “our campaign is campaign finance reform” thing is rich.

“MATTHEWS: Well, let me ask it-let me ask it totally open. Do you think a person has a right to work somewhere if they don’t want to join a union?
DEAN: I do.
No, wait a minute. I don’t.
(LAUGHTER)”

I’ll let that piece of moral certitude speak for itself. This exchange, too:

“MATTHEWS: So you wouldn’t repeal 14B?
DEAN: No, I would not, but...
MATTHEWS: So you are different than Gephardt. He is with the unions.
You are not.
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: I’m serious.
DEAN: All right...
MATTHEWS: I hate it. It’s called HARDBALL. This isn’t “Success” magazine, OK?
(APPLAUSE)
DEAN: Let me tell you what-I actually believe in card check. I believe you shouldn’t have to have an election, that people who want to join a union should just be able to sign a card and join it. Let me tell you where I am on...
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: You are against-you do not believe in repealing 14B?
You’re not going to accept the challenge from Gephardt to do that?
DEAN: If I got a bill on my desk that repealed 14B, I’d sign it in an instant. I’m just not going to push it hard...
MATTHEWS: OK.”

Well, in a matter of 30 seconds, Howard managed to come down on both sides of repealing rule 14B (whatever that is), from “No, I would not” to “…in an instant”.

“UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Governor Dean, you often criticize the Bush administration for its secrecy.
How do you reconcile this with the steps you have taken to seal away documents from your time in Vermont?”

After twenty seconds of Mathews trying to find out if the questioner worked for George Bush (he doesn’t) we get this answer from Dean:

“DEAN: Yes. Every governor in Vermont and most governors around the country, maybe every governor for all I know, has a process by which certain records are sealed and certain records are left open. The vast majority of my records are open. You are welcome to go, as ever opposing campaign has done, and rummage through them for the next six months. There are some that are left private, and I don’t exactly know all the things that are in those because those are attorney to secretary of state negotiated. But some of the kinds of things might be a letter from a constituent saying, dear governor, I am an HIV, AIDS victim, can you please help me?
Now, those kinds of letters do not belong in the public, and they’re not. That’s why some records are sealed, and governor’s offices throughout the country.”

Vast majority? According to Judicial Watch, the group suing for their release, 40% of his records are sealed. 60% is hardly a “vast majority”.

Those are just a few of his whoppers. Dean is Clinton’s successor, he can’t stop lying.