Molly Ivins endorsement of Howard Dean in 2003. Blunt, to the point, so like her unique style..

[madfloridian]

You have to scroll down a bit to see it. I can't find her page on this, and the DFA archives don't have it. This is so typical of a Molly Ivins endorsement...blunt to the point. Moving. This is the last part, be sure to read the first as well. Get out your hankies.

It brought some tears tonight.

http://byrdsbrain.typepad.com/main/2003/12/dean_endorsemen.html

Meanwhile, there's old Dean, causin' excitement. I went up to Vermont and talked to a bunch of liberals there. They all said Howard Dean is no liberal. Funny, that's what Howard Dean says, too. And indeed, he isn't, but in politics, everything's relative. The conventional wisdom first dismissed Howard Dean (the man has never been to a Washington dinner party!), then condescended to him, then graciously offered him instruction on how he should be running his campaign -- which seemed to be going along quite well without their input.

I talked to some big money guys who assured me Dean Can't Win. But of course I'm noticing this interesting thing: Dean has so much money he actually turned down public campaign financing (since I'm a card-carrying liberal, I was naturally deeply unhappy over this. But since Dean's money comes from Real People instead of corporate special interests, I'm not that unhappy.) Let me second the notion that this year, the Internet is to politics what television was in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race.

For a while, I fretted over Dean being angry, or at least appealing to the political anger that is normally manipulated by right-wing radio jocks. Anger makes liberals uncomfortable: We prefer peace, reason and gentle persuasion. Beloveds, it is way past time for us to get mad -- social, economic and political justice are being perverted by the Bush administration.

Dean gives a hell of a speech -- even if you're Republican, you should go and hear him just for the experience. But I fretted about Dean on TV -- TV is so important. How could anyone poker up on Margaret Carlson of PBS, not one of the world's toughest interviewers? But then I saw Dean laugh his way through a Chris Matthews interview (which he should have done with Tim Russert, who was hell-bent on gotcha questions), and I know the guy can take care of himself. So he fights back if you get in his face -- that's not all bad.

I know, he's even less of a liberal than Bill Clinton was, but I don't think Dean is a moderate centrist. I think he's a fighting centrist. And folks, I think we have got ourselves a winner here.

[CPMaz]

1. I found a link on the Working For Change website

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=16096

Damn, she's going to be missed.

[madfloridian]

3. Yes, she is. Glad you found that link.

She endorsed while pointing out every thing she didn't like. She was never one for gushy words. It was a special statement.

[lligrd]

2. Any Anger Dean Displayed Was Righteous Anger

over an illegal war and the killing of innocent Iraqis and our soldiers for absolutely no reason. Of course, the portrayal of him as always angry was simply a falsehood brought to us by Faux News and sadly, proliferated by many Dems with ulterior motives. I will miss Molly's commentaries on the next presidential election campaigning nearly as much as I will miss Dean's participation in the campaigning. RIP Molly!

[madfloridian]

5. Amen to both.

:hi:

[madfloridian]

4. Molly Ivin's column the day after Dean dropped out in 04....amazingly sad and true.

She was sincerely sad and honest in that column.

Life without Dean

Meanwhile, the punditry is busy cranking out mostly pro forma hail-and-farewells to my man Howard Dean. I hate whining and life is not fair, but I still think a whole lot of people who should have known better freaked out over Dean, treating a mostly mild-mannered, perfectly sensible and quite cheerful fellow as some kind of anti-establishment antichrist. I mean, he was governor of Vermont for 10 years, not Lenin.

But he did tap into some real political anger, and look how many people turn out to be just scared to death of that. This is not the fake, pumped-up indignation of Rush Limbaugh's dittoheads over gay marriage -- now there's something that'll cost you your job -- but real anger about being lied to over war.

What was so scary about Howard Dean? Could it be because he (and some very bright young people who worked with him) found this way to raise real money in small amounts from regular people, and that just threatened the hell out of a lot of big corporate special interests? And out of an entire political establishment that is entirely too comfortable with the incestuous relationship between big money and politics? For just a moment in time, Dean was ahead of the pack -- and no one owned him. Go back and look at whom that scared.

...."I'm not crazy about anger as a motivating force in politics -- but didn't someone need to point out that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes? Didn't someone need to say that we were led into war under false pretences? Imagine an entire campaign in which all the candidates ignored that because they were all complicit in it.

I think we owe Howard Dean more than a, "Gee thanks for participating in our noble political system." Personally, I'd like to say, "Gee, thanks for helping keep democracy alive when it looked fairly dicey."

Thank you, Molly, for all you did for keeping Democracy alive.

And she links to Mark Fiore's flash video...The Bare Essentials of Leadership...or better known as the Emperor has no Clothes.

Bare Essentials

[mattfunel]

6. Dean was a straw man who pushed Kucinich out

I told DFAer's that Howard was not a progressive and that he was out to submarine Kucinich and anti-war Dems as soon as he decided to run. It seemed kind of obvious ....

Everyone knew that a Vermont Governor has no chance of winning so that meant he was running for a payoff (DNC Chair).

Everyone also knows that Joe Trippi, a career Dem campaigner and manager, would never have taken the job if he wasn't given permission by the corporate powers that be.

Everyone knows now that the "I Have A Scream" speech was just separated audio. Crowd noise makes Dean's scream seem relatively normal given that he was competing with said crowd. Removal of that noise makes the scream very pronounced and he sounds like a loon. Who removed the crowd noise and leaked it to Rush Windbag and why? And why was this person never discovered? Are we expected to believe that its normal in multi-million dollar presidential camapigns to allow just anybody to control your audio? I don't believe it. I think it was an intentional leak by his own people to derail him because he had already silenced Kucinch and co-opted the anti-war Dems.

Dean quit, got his payoff and is now tightly controlled by Pelosi and Reid et al. If he was truly a progressive, why would he be so happy to sell out his principles to work with pro-war, anti-impeachment weasels?

Molly Ivins was at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser in my neck of the woods when this Dean article came out. After the event, I went up to her to get a petition signed. Our local right-leaning faux newspaper had cancelled Ivins' column and I was collecting signatures to rectify the sitation. I thought that it would be very cool to have her own signature on the petition. I took the opportunity to ask her why she had changed her mind about supporting Nader since 2000. She graciously intimated to me that her mind change was simply a matter of survival. Like Phil Donahue, Michael Moore, Bill Maher, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Kevin Costner and many others she had been hurt and attacked by the Democrats' spoiler propaganda and by the same corporate interests who attacked Nader so aggressively after the election. She said that she had to act publicly as if she had cut off ties to prevent the total loss of her readership. She said they just didn't get it.

[madfloridian]

7. What does one say to all that?

Nothing.

:rofl: