The brouhaha over Howard Dean’s overexuberent speech after the Iowa caucus continues to grow to absurd lengths. The question I want to know is why this story has so many legs? From the right side of the political spectrum I think their is a lot of schadenfrude. Drudge and others are just happy to see Dean self-destruct. But the “mainstream media” has other motives, none of them particularly sinister but crucial to the continuation of the story.
I just listened to Howard Dean’s Iowa speech from last night and was reminded of one of my favorite politicians, the late Paul Wellstone. Dean’s fire was eerily similar to the one caucus I attended in 1990. Back then the conventional wisdom gave Wellstone little chance against the incumbent, Rudy Boschwitz. Wellstone stormed into the caucus hall and gave one of the most insipiring political speeches I’ve ever seen. But it appears that everyone in the media echo chamber thinks this kind of passion isn’t presidential.
Found a few interesting political columns yesterday:
Bill McClellan, If Bill Clinton were an addict, here’s how Rush might spin it
Molly Ivins, A few rotten apples: Keep your eye on the business section, where scandals are boring, buried, but big
James P. Pinkerton, Bush & Co. Use the Orwell Sales Strategy
Some of my favorite comments on the California recall.
From the Christian Science Monitor.
“The angry voter is back,” says independent pollster John Zogby. “Angry voters were on sabbatical for almost a decade. Now they want results, they want a fix.”
Christopher Scheer at Alternet
John Scalzi unleashes the contempt.
I fell into reading some more of the National Review Online as I perused John Derbyshire’s columns. One of them led me to this piece by Jed Babbin on “The American Mood.” His basic argument is that our enemies and our friends have misjudged us, as they so often do, and if another terrorist attack should happen our reaction will make the war on terrorism to date look like a pleasent negotiating round at some safe location where diplomats meet.
In my continuing effort to read across the spectrum of politics I’d like to commend two pieces and the routes I found to them. The first comes from Erin O’Connor, the author of Critical Mass, a weblog I should probably read more often. If there is a political tendency to the posts it is more conservative than liberal. Recently she pointed out a piece by Eric Raymond about a contemporary ‘Treson of the Intellectuals’.
OpenDemocracy carries an intriguing essay about the different ways the left press treats fundamentalism in Christianity and Islam. After 9-11 the press has gone out of its way to present a positive portrait of Islam. In the past they’ve been less kind to moralistic Christians.
Multiculturalism is good but can go too far. It mustn’t be allowed to trump universal human rights. All cultures are not as good as each other: some are racist, some preach death to homosexuals or Jews, some believe the weak should go to the wall, or all non-Christians to hell.