Roger L. Simon:
“At the present moment, the Democratic Party seems to be headed over a cliff at ninety miles an hour. With Bush already sitting on extremely high poll numbers and the domestic and foreign situations breaking his way, the Democrats have two of their worst candidates in recent memory in the frontrunner positions—Howard Dean and Wesley Clark. They are particularly bad in the Internet Age.
What, you say, Howard Dean is bad on the Internet? He was and is the master of online fundraising and the first to recognize the power of blogs. Yes, indeed! But that’s only part of the story. And it’s not the more important part. The Internet is the greatest memory device we have ever had. It stores virtually everything for instant access—it’s very difficult to hide what you have said. Bloggers and others will dig it out and force the media to publicize it.
This is exceptionally dangerous for Dean who has defined himself and staked his nomination on being the Most Antiwar Candidate, when, among other things, quite a short time ago he was not. Today we see via Instapundit that Dean wrote a letter to Clinton advocating Milosevic be forcibly removed for humanitarian reasons, something he appears to have rejected for Saddam, even though the Iraqi leader was vastly more awful. Dean even advocated, in the case of Milosevic, going it alone without the United Nations.”
This is the flip side of the issue I discussed in my post below about the liberal hawks’ reconsiderations of their support for the Iraqi invasion. One and all, as the other rationales they supported evaporate, console themselves with the rote line about how we eliminated a heinous genocidal dictator without examining the moral ambiguities of that stance — which genocidal regimes are worst? where does one draw the line between those we are compelled to depose and those we tolerate? how much failure of diplomatic efforts, containment, and international cooperation is enough? how preemptive, as opposed to reactive, can an effort to remove a dictator be and be justified? how unilateral? who gets to decide? Can Dean bring coherent focus and intelligent discussion to these questions, now that he has been ‘outed’ on the issue (if you accept Reynolds’ take on it), and in so doing definitively articulate the differences between his foreign policy and the Bush regime’s?
