Also that month, Senator Ted Kennedy issued the most irresponsible, jaw-dropping allegation of the war period, claiming that Bush, who had 90 percent approval ratings before the war, had launched the war with a bunch of yahoos in Texas for political purposes. The Bush White House, charged Kennedy, was “mean-spirited.”
The rage now flowed. An unhinged Al Gore emerged to endorse Dean; the father of Nick Berg blamed Bush for his son’s beheading by Islamic terrorists; Ralph Nader denounced the “messianic militarist” in the White House.
Some people seriously argued that Bush fabricated claims of Iraqi WMD, after everyone in the world, from left to right, from Bill Clinton to Madeleine Albright, from the French to the Russians, had argued since the early 1990s that Saddam was hiding WMD.
I believe Howard Dean was the one who broke this mold.
Alas, the anger worked. Dean may not have taken down George W. Bush in 2004, but he played a major role in doing so four years later.
Now Howard Dean can return to Vermont where, if he can find a hill high enough, he will not see a single Republican congressman from Maine to Massachusetts. Thanks in large part to his hand, they’re all gone, annihilated along with George W. Bush, who is most assuredly not Howard Dean’s neighbor.