DEAN, THE ANGRY CANDIDATE?
(with all apologies to Dennis Miller)

It seems to me that painting Dean as the angry candidate is going to be the strategy of the Republican and conservative pundits over the next several months, and you can surely count on more than a few Democrats doing the same thing. (Are you listening, Joe Lieberman, and all you whining Clark supporters?)

Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but if Howard Dean is going to be portrayed by the DLC as the "Angry Candidate," then we damn well ought to see if there is something for him to be angry about. You know, we live in a country that has been handed over to The Great Miscommunicator by the Five Grand Poobahs, where, before that, we were essentially at peace and gaining on the ground where violence was flashing--Ireland and Israel. We were in solid enough shape financially that Tom DeLay was literally salivating over the idea of having enough federal funds come to his district that he'd have a few bucks left over to get fitted for a new hairpiece. And all of that occurred while basking under the glow of the president, Bill Clinton, who was so "bad" that peace and prosperity, for some, have since become opportunities to spend ourselves as drunk as our current prep-boy president used to get at a Skull & Bones mixer for the incoming class of neo-con stormtroopers.

Now as a country we're engrossed in this rags-to-riches-to-rags story that has only recently, with the inauguration of the current credit card commander-in-chief, allowed us to give to the federal government permission to give up on the great middle class and involve us two costly and mismanaged wars.  The economy is hemorrhaging so many jobs that the unemployment lines look like the queue to get into an Ann Coulter/Arnold Schwarzenegger Jell-O Wrestling Smackdown. Overseas, after deciding that 12 years of containment was enough, Donald Rumsfeld's plan of whispering in Bush's ear every night "He tried to kill your daddy. He tried to kill your daddy." finally paid off, and Bush decided to bomb the living crap out of Iraq quicker than Ralph Reed leaving an Al Sharpton Meetup. We know, Ralph, it was the "Rev." thing-ie that threw ya', right?

Back at home, John Ashcroft has decided that he needed to fill the recent Taliban vacuum created by Bush's spring training victory--you know, where the largest army ever assembled took on a bunch of fellas with RPGs mounted in the beds of Toyota Land Cruisers--and in a bold move sure to have raised even the tweezed eyebrows of a begowned and begone J. Edgar Hoover, ordered a burkah to be installed over the solid brass bosom of Lady Justice. If that weren't enough, old Peeping John figured that the Bill of Rights had simply become a bit too cumbersome to manage so he reduced it by about half, leaving only a single clause of the First Amendment (I won't tell you which one, but I will say that Jerry Falwell got to choose), half of the Second Amendment, the Ninth Amendment, and the Tenth. Oh, and he was going to leave in the Third, too, but some fella named Poindexter told him that it had to go.

In spite of all this, the country is still stupefied by whether Friends will be picked up for just one more year and who the Bachelor will kiss off next. All the while, they're keeping the other eye on a color-coded national alert system that seems to elevate with every ten-point slippage in Bush's Approval Rating. We find ourselves back into election season, which is roughly defined by four years, less the average length of Joe Biden's opening statements to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Assembled for the Quadrennial Clusterfuck are the usual panoply of serious candidates, seriously boring candidates, and seriously out in left field candidates. Now in the interest of party unity I'm not going to go off on these folks, but I do have to say that if Joe Lieberman doesn't move back to the left, Bush is going to find that he really will have a primary candidate to run against. I hear that his speeches now begin, "Hi, I'm Joe Lieberman, and I represent the Pat Buchanan wing of the Democratic Party." (Around here we just like to call him Bush v43.1.) And if Dennis Kucinich doesn't stop yelling at me, I'm going to have Nurse Ratchet pay him a visit and make sure that there's nothing left in that little paper cup by the time she leaves to give John Edwards' campaign some much needed electro-shock therapy.

I know.  I said that I wasn't going to do this, but I can't leave without a word about Wes "I'm a Democrat. Really." Clark. Poor Wes just can't get anywhere with more than a small band of rabidly naive voters now that the sun has come up on the campaign and a little light shows that he doesn't even cast a shadow. I'm not saying that his campaign doesn't have any traction, but when I hear his name I immediately think of someone in army boots and a sleeveless undershirt trying to gain on a run-away Zamboni.  Talk about Not Ready for Prime Time; Clark's got all the substance Brittany Spears after snorting a tank of helium.

I mean, really, this guy doesn't even have the cajones to frag the guy running point; he's content to just sit back and let the other candidates and the little rabid dog soldiers of his campaign take their shots at the Dean's ankles.  Clark just wants to be seen as a gentleman general, all smiles and lightness.  Well, he's half-way there.  Wes Clark is not a man weighted down by original ideas.  

Which, I suppose, brings me to Carol Mosely-Braun. I like this woman. I really do. No knocks on her at all. I just hope that she, no matter who wins, is appointed to a meaningful job. We could do a whole lot worse than having her in a job where she is inspired to succeed.

But speaking of a whole lot worse, we have to turn on...er, I mean to...Rep. Gephardt and Sen. Kerry. To say that Gephardt is dynamic is about as believable as saying that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks of September 11, which is to say that about 55% of the DNC believes that the congressman from Missouri will energize enough of the apathetic Democratic base to actually get off their bon-bon enhanced butts and get out and vote for the senator from Massachusetts.  Well, I've got news for you, Al & Bruce, but Kerry's campaign is falling faster than the add rates for Martha Stewart Living. I mean, two more months of these poll numbers from his backyard of New Hampshire, and they'll be holding his campaign meetings at 1:00am in the portrait-festooned Bob Dornan Suite at the D.C. EconoLodge.

But back to "Mr. Angry": Howard Dean has no right to be angry, not in this Walden Pond we're all swimming in. Everything is just fine. Yeah....right!

While Adm. Bush pilots the S.S. Condoleeza Rice into the rocks of the next Prince Edward Sound with such abandon that even Dick Cheney's smirk shifts from one side of his face to the other, this "little teapot"--thanks, that was cute, Peggy Noonan--may well have awakened that great untapped nerve in the American electorate and fired it up enough to take an active role in returning this old warship with the Ken Lay Steering Cabin to dry-dock, giving us back a country that doesn't meet every international challenge with the angry force of arms, every national security crisis with angry black boot of the Justice Dep't., and every fiscal emergency with the angry sword of more and deeper tax cuts for the Pioneers and the Rangers who are surely scheming to float his presidency on the waves of more and more money and deeper and deeper deceptions.

Hell, I'm damn proud of the fact that Howard Dean's angry. And if you're not angry, well, you're just not paying attention.

Of course, it's not just my opinion that the DLC sure as hell is wrong.