8 months ago today in San Antonio....the world nearly came to an end. [View All]

[madfloridian]

Howard Dean gave an interview at WOAI there, and it was picked up around the world over 200,000 times by the next day.

The whole country called him everything from A to Z. His fellow Democrats met behind closed doors to figure out what to do with him.

Several others were saying the same thing, Murtha for one. But the world caved in on Dean for that interview.

I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

He then proceeded to lay out a plan just about like the Democrats are urging today. I heard generals on TV this week saying Iraq is erupting into civil way, or likely to do so.

He was right, and he just kept doing what he had to do. It has just been 8 months today for people to start coming around in public to the position he laid out.

On this page is the complete interview in audio, a video of the station reporters talking about the uproar. And a partial transcript.

http://www.woai.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=C36A87B9-63A0-4CDE-AA91-B41571AFD3AF

Some more of what he said:

"The White House wants us to have a permanent commitment to Iraq. This is an Iraqi problem. President Bush got rid of Saddam Hussein and that was a great thing, but that could have been done in a very different way. But now that we're there we need to figure out how to leave. 80% of Iraqis want us to leave, and it's their country."

Dean also compared the controversy over pre-war intelligence to the Watergate scandal which brought down Richard Nixon's presidency in 1974.

"What we see today is very much like what was going in Watergate," Dean said. "It turns out there is a lot of good evidence that President Bush did not tell the truth when he was asking Congress for the power to go to war. The President said last week that Congress saw the same intelligence that he did in making the decision to go to war, and that is flat out wrong. The President withheld some intelligence from the Senate Intelligence Committee. He withheld the report from the CIA that in fact there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction (in Iraq), that they did not have a nuclear program. They (the White House) selectively gave intelligence to the United States Senate and the United States Congress and got them to give the go ahead to attack these people."

Here is the complete transcript.
http://www.seixon.com/blog/mt-tb.cgi/105.1310412593

I saw a write-up at Media Matters tonight about how we need to be on guard for their attacks on us.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200608050003

Here are the words they say to guard against. We are already using them again each other.

"Progressives -- particularly anti-war progressives -- are "fringe" and "extreme";

Progressives are angry and vitriolic.

Democrats are weak -- and politically vulnerable -- on national security."