Not Credible
The "Does Dean Love Terrorists or Just Hate Israel" issue is back with his election as DNC Chair. For those of you who don't remember Dean's tragicomedic flailings during the primary season:
[Dean] alienated some pro-Israel Democrats when he said he would pursue an "evenhanded approach" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... Asked if he would oppose the Israeli policy of selectively killing leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, Dean referred to members of Hamas as "soldiers" in the Israeli-Palestinian "war," but then gave a lukewarm endorsement of the practice.
In fairness, I think that Dean was just ignorant about Israel. Odds are, he really just didn't realize that "even-handed" is a euphemism in Middle Eastern politics for moral equivalence and anti-Israel agitation. That said, the ideological community that he emerges from - the confused, politics-as-personal therapy Nation/MoveOn fog - is unable to come to grips with the dynamics of the Arab war against the Jewish state (one of the reasons that he was so out of touch is because things that seem reasonable in that community are way, way out of line for anyone who believes in Israeli self-defense).
The degree to which the magazines that Dean has been reading every day of his political life have permanently inclined him to anti-Israel bias is an open question. But even if he did understand the dynamics of the conflict, all of Dean's sensibilities - his discomfort with ever using force, his belief that rational discussion can cure irrational hatred, and his aversion to any approach advocated by the Bush White House - disable him from being an effective protector of Israeli interests. Absurdly, the best defense that pro-Dean Democrats could come up with is literally a symptom of all of these problems:
DNC Vice Chair Susan Turnbull, speaking on behalf of the DNC, said, "Howard Dean has a strong record, as does the Democratic Party, of working to support peace in the Middle East."..."The negative propaganda won't stick," she added.
That strong record is called "Oslo."
[Dean] alienated some pro-Israel Democrats when he said he would pursue an "evenhanded approach" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... Asked if he would oppose the Israeli policy of selectively killing leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups, Dean referred to members of Hamas as "soldiers" in the Israeli-Palestinian "war," but then gave a lukewarm endorsement of the practice.
In fairness, I think that Dean was just ignorant about Israel. Odds are, he really just didn't realize that "even-handed" is a euphemism in Middle Eastern politics for moral equivalence and anti-Israel agitation. That said, the ideological community that he emerges from - the confused, politics-as-personal therapy Nation/MoveOn fog - is unable to come to grips with the dynamics of the Arab war against the Jewish state (one of the reasons that he was so out of touch is because things that seem reasonable in that community are way, way out of line for anyone who believes in Israeli self-defense).
The degree to which the magazines that Dean has been reading every day of his political life have permanently inclined him to anti-Israel bias is an open question. But even if he did understand the dynamics of the conflict, all of Dean's sensibilities - his discomfort with ever using force, his belief that rational discussion can cure irrational hatred, and his aversion to any approach advocated by the Bush White House - disable him from being an effective protector of Israeli interests. Absurdly, the best defense that pro-Dean Democrats could come up with is literally a symptom of all of these problems:
DNC Vice Chair Susan Turnbull, speaking on behalf of the DNC, said, "Howard Dean has a strong record, as does the Democratic Party, of working to support peace in the Middle East."..."The negative propaganda won't stick," she added.
That strong record is called "Oslo."
