Howard Dean IS

It seems odd that there would be a website called "HowardDeanWasRight.Com", largely for its verb tense: Dean was right. Of course, it behooves each of us to ask when it was, exactly, in the grand scheme of things, that Mr. Dean was ever right.

But if there ever was a dim moment when Mr. Dean was right in the past, there was a very clear moment when Mr. Dean became quite wrong in the present. In fact, Dean is so thoroughly wrong at this moment that one wonders whether he could possibly have started out right at all: sort of like navigating with a faulty compass, off by just two degrees. After all, two degrees is hardly worth considering when traveling around one's backyard or through one's political party. But two degrees off course is death to one's crew when journeying great distances.

Not that Howard Dean is leading any one very far, irrespective of his being a progressive. Progress is determined by two things: whether one knows where one is going, and whether one knows from whence one came. The man who leads without knowing either the past or the point from which he embarked on his journey, may end up leading promptly backwards. The man who has no idea where he is going, who has no set goal before him, can never know whether he is closer or farther from achieving any end at all. Neither type of man is a leader, and that is why Mr. Dean should be wary of calling himself a progressive: he has neither aim nor bearings.

Let's look at just two of his statements from this year. First, at a gathering of like-minded souls, Mr. Dean commented about the Democratic Party's pluralism by comparing those in attendance to a Republican gathering. Mr. Dean "doubted" that Republicans had ever had so many people of color gathered in one place, unless they brought in "the hotel staff." Second, Mr. Dean commented in San Francisco (that bunker of pluralism), that the Republican Party was basically a "white-Christian party." [It is interesting to note that no quote I've read punctuates this quote as two separate adjectives - a white, Christian, party. That Mr. Dean has subsequently suggested that this is what he meant is hard to believe when one actually hears Mr. Dean run "white-Christian" together as one adjectival phrase.] He added that the GOP was monolithic, where everyone thinks the same, looks the same, acts the same, allegedly in the pure blandness of conformity.

I am not opposed to Dean being a divider in his rhetoric, nor am I opposed to his using religion, or race, or both, to separate people one from another. It is entirely within his right to place people in separate groups: the one wherein everyone should be proud; the other wherein everyone should be ashamed. Let Mr. Dean divide. He is good at it.

But let us not be silent about hypocrisy. That Mr. Dean, for example, has been given a pass by the media and minority groups regarding his gross stereotyping, not of the Republican Party, but of hotel service staffs, is a pass no Republican would ever receive.

And let us not be silent about deception. For there is not a more monolithic party than the Democratic Party. I have no doubt that there are more pro-choice Republicans in this country than there are pro-life Democrats. I have no doubt that there are more pro-gay rights Republicans than there are anti-gay rights Democrats. I have no doubt there are more Republicans who do not steer their children into signing up for military duty than there are Democrats who steer their children toward those esteemed services. And there are more Republicans in America who do not like NASCAR than there are Democrats who do.

Indeed, HowardDeanIsWrong.now.

Nancy Pelosi had this to say about Mr. Dean's "white-Christian" statement, as quoted in the press: '"I don't think that the statement the governor [Dean] made was a helpful statement," she said. But Pelosi said she thought that Dean was "doing a good job."'

Yes, of course, Dean is doing a good job, because his statement was not wrong, it was just not "helpful," at least to Ms. Pelosi who, as a California Democrat, is not herself known to speak sweetly of Republicans. But don't you think her diminutive and passive "I don't think the statement ... was helpful ..." smacks of so much day-care lingo? You know: "Johnny-use-your-inside-voice-and-stop-throwing-crayons-at-Carly-it's-not-helpful" kind of speech? I am surprised Pelosi didn't recommend giving Dean a time-out. But Ms. Pelosi would countenance Mr. Dean's speech if it were helpful. She is unable to see anything intrinsically wrong with Dean's rhetoric. She only sees its utilitarian failure to help her party's cause.

The reality of Dean hyperbole is rooted in an oft-ignored statement of Jesus': "Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks." And the mouth of the Democratic Party is Howard Dean, and he's speaking like an inebriated, black-sheep son late to his father's funeral: He is saying and thinking what everyone is thinking but is afraid to say. Howard Dean has nothing to lose by being brash, because everyone in his party knows that he is being honest to the family's real history, a history in which Republicans are hated.

"I hate Republicans and everything they stand for," Dean said early this year.

Yes, indeed. The Democratic Party has WELCOME written all over it.

But the bottom line is one of projection, you know, that psychological malady observed in people who foist their own gross motives on others. My family has dealt with a woman who has called our home a dozen times to tell us our one phone call was harassment. I have been called hateful by people I love, even though they "wish" I "were dead." You know, THOSE sorts of people are the projectionists.

Well, Howard Dean is the projectionist par-excellence. For whatever he claims the sinful GOP does or is doing or is going to do; trust that it comes from a man who knows such sins, and such sinful motives, intimately. And if not from the man, then from the party he leads. Dean projects in order to conceal and obfuscate, like a movie projector projects an image on a screen, concealing the fact that you are staring at a blank slate in a very dark place.

It's time for every American to look for the glowing red exit signs and escape the theatrics to the three-dimensional real world which transcends Howard Dean. But alas, there is no exodus apparently planned in the Democratic Theater of the Hyperbolic. And that's the real shame. For if Mr. Dean is permitted to remain at the top of the DNC, then we can safely conclude that the abundance of the heart is indeed speaking. And what a heart it is.

Contratimes

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