Reply #22: This is the first time I've ever disagreed with something you wrote! [View All]

[RichM]

And I don't disagree that much, either. But: you're quite right in terms of Dean's POLICY statements. He had little to offer there that wasn't entirely conventional. Where I disagree, however, is at the level of public pronouncements. Sometimes Dean blurted out remarks that contained a dangerous amount of truth in them.

For example, his famous "We're no safer with Saddam captured" remark. This was dangerous to the rulers, because it cut against an important central theme of US propaganda: that our state enemies must be publicly portrayed as limitlessly evil. Dean's comment implicitly challenged that principle. He was saying Saddam was evil, but not LIMITLESSLY so. Our rulers didn't like that. They want to be able to always justify anything they do, on grounds that our enemies are so evil that our acting against them can only be viewed as "moral."