Okay, so we know THE VILLAGE VOICE is gaa-gaa over Dean in a big wet liberal way. All the liberals are (except me). Here's more evidence of how deluded they are by that raging shill for the right (just kidding), Ted Rall. So who really IS more honest?

John Kerry. More honest. More experienced. More humble by a moral standard forged on the battlefields of Viet Nam.



LOVE ME, I'M (NOT REALLY) A LIBERAL
Wed Aug 13, 8:03 PM ET
By Ted Rall

Liberal Democrats Project Their Desires onto Howard Dean


MONTPELIER, VERMONT--Howard Dean, media-anointed Lord of the Left and Prince Protector of Progressivism, is surfing a tsunami of Democratic discontent that could carry him to the White House. But as Vermonters tell anyone who's willing to listen, the former governor they call "Ho-Ho" is at best a leftie-come-lately. "The Howard Dean you are seeing on the national scene is not the Dean that we saw around here for the last decade. He's moved sharply left," says John McClaughry of the Ethan Allen Institute, a rightie think tank, of Dean's campaign rhetoric.

Vermont created proto-gay marriage "civil unions" during Dean's term--but that was the state Supreme Court's doing, not his. Even though Vermont's constitution didn't require him to balance the budget, he was a fierce deficit hawk who vetoed proposed Democratic spending. He sided with ski resort owners over environmentalists. And when big business called, he always picked up the phone. "We would meet privately with him three to four times a year to discuss our issues, and his secretary of commerce would call me once a week just to see how things were going," gushes IBM's John O'Kane.

According to Vermonters, Dean is a shrewd operator who saw millions of anti-Iraq (news - web sites) war demonstrators last spring for what they were: untapped Democratic primary voters. A few well-placed verbal broadsides spread his reputation as the only presidential contender willing to go after Bush while other Democrats remained silent or supported his war. His opportunistic Bush-bashing attracted liberal voters tired of being taken for granted and disgusted by do-nothing "Republican Lite" Dems.

Liberals are driving Dean's come-from-nowhere campaign, but they don't share his take on most issues. "If he gets the nomination, he'll run back to the center and be more mainstream," predicts Republican resort owner Bill Stenger. "He was not a left-wing wacko."

Even as Joe Lieberman (news - web sites) berates Dean for pulling the Democratic Party too far left, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich attacks him from the left, as nothing more than another Clinton--a Democrat in name only. "If someone wants to be a fiscal conservative, a good place to start is the Pentagon (news - web sites) budget and he's already taken it off the table," rages Kucinich. (Dean on the military: "I don't think you can cut the defense budget.") "How in the world can you be for peace when you won't touch a Pentagon budget that needs war to expand, that needs war in order to justify itself?"

Dean's supporters don't believe what they're told. They hear what they want to believe, and Dean provides the strident vagaries that fuel their self-delusion. "We need to know what the president knew and when he knew it," he spat when Bush got caught lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in his State of the Union address. That reference to the 1974 Nixon impeachment hearings affirmed many Democrats' belief that Bush deserves serious punishment for lying about Iraq, but will President Dean turn over Bush to the International War Crimes Tribunal? Not bloody likely. And how can antiwar types reconcile Dean's support for Bush's invasion of Afghanistan (news - web sites)?

Clinton played libbies the same way in 1992. The pro-business Arkansas governor promised to stand up for workers--without naming specifics. But when he moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Clinton approved pro-corporate, GOP-authored "free trade" agreements that robbed Americans of millions of high-paying jobs, trashed the environment and did almost zilch to improve employee rights.

There's plenty of ideological self-delusion to go around. On the Republican side, George W. Bush transformed a $4 trillion federal budget surplus (over 10 years) into a $6 trillion deficit. He created an extravagantly wasteful cabinet-level bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, whose sole function is the issuance of color-coded press releases. How do fiscal conservatives justify a guy who argues that wasting $10,000,000,000,000 doesn't matter?

Political projection.

Never mind that Bush is the biggest tax and spender of any nation that has ever existed in human history; in their wacko fantasy world, he's still a "conservative."

If elected, Dean says, he plans "to do what Clinton did in 1993. We need to make a genuine effort to start to balance the budget to restore investor confidence. The second thing I would do is to support the small-business community." Some leftie! Like Clinton, he'll clean up the Republican deficit, making it impossible to fund Democratic social programs. He's pro-defense and pro-business. He's committed to the environment but he'll likely disappoint liberals on health care, taxes and trade.

Dean doesn't lie about his intentions. "I'll govern the same way I did in Vermont," he promises. So he's not the Great Left Hope. But anybody-but-Bush Democrats desperately need a hero, and Dean's elected.

(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. It is now available in a revised and updated paperback edition containing new material. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)





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