National Security Expert Explains Why Howard Dean on Larry King Was Superb

[Larkspur]

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/030805/dctu061_1.html

"The American people need to understand what Howard Dean appears to grasp," Steele said. "The current national security system of heavy-metal military missiles, carriers, bombers and tanks is not only useless 90% of the time, it does not work as advertised, it is not sustainable in a 100-year war against non-state threats or non-traditional threats, and it is primarily a means of transferring wealth from individual taxpayers to corporations that avoid taxes and benefit from military welfare."...

"Today's world contains 32 "failed states", it has millions of refugees across 66 countries, millions starving across 33 countries, and millions dying from plagues and epidemics across 59 countries. Together with 18 genocides, water scarcity and resource scarcity around the world, these comprise the underlying metrics for evaluating national security in the context of global instability."

"From where I sit, Howard Dean is the only candidate who is serious about helping the American people understand that what we are doing now with a heavy-metal military and the failing efforts to reconstruct Afghanistan and Iraq are simply not working. We are over-invested in a complex and cumbersome "system of systems" and we have failed to empower the human capabilities -- civil affairs, disaster relief engineering, diplomacy, overt public relations and information -- that are urgently needed to actually come to grips with the most basic security threats to America. I would describe Dean as a cultural creative, a new progressive, and as beyond left or right -- he is the center because he is focused on America's center of gravity: all of the people, not some of the people some of the time."
<SNIP>

The bold line is my favorite part.

[liberalnurse]

1. Thank you for the post.....

I will share it at the Meet-Up tonight.

[Larkspur]

3. Your welcome!

I'm bringing it to my Meetup also tonight.

[mistertrickster]

2. This is great--We don't need the "common sense" candidates

(although in the current climate of Bush idiocy that would be a welcome change). We need someone with extraordinary sense, uncommon sense. Dean looks to be a politician who has the brainpower and imagination to understand a complex world.

[blm]

5. Gary Hart specifically stated

that Dean had NO grasp of foreign policy when he called him asking for help.

[killbotfactory]

7. Oh yeah, that's exactly what Hart said!

Word for word!

Oh wait, no... no it's not.

I think you might have memory problems.

[blm]

10. HAHAH...you wish.

Care to tell the TV audience what Gary Hart said about Howard Dean?

Hahah...I'm sure you don't.

"Gary, what do I do?"

[killbotfactory]

12. Hart said Dean lacked experience

not that Dean had no grasp of foreign policy.

[blm]

19. He was running for president

and had NO idea what to do.

If he had read policy papers and newspapers for years and put yourself in the position of running for president at such a crucial time of international crises and you are begging someone to tell you what to do...you have no grasp of foreign policy. Hart warned us that Dean does not have the JUICE for the job.

[killbotfactory]

20. Sure...

On planet-blm maybe... on Planet Earth it is recognized that presidential candidates get foriegn policy advice from other people.

[blm]

21. Advice is one thing...

panicked phone calls begging "Gary, what do I do?" is another.

You'd be hard pressed to convince me that Dean did not peek at Kerry's homework looking for help. Read Kerry's foreign policy speech and then read Dean's made many months earlier.

[killbotfactory]

22. Oh, it was a panicked call now..

I see. Even though there was no mention of that in the article.

[Andromeda]

17. Was this when Hart was ...

photographed partying on the "Monkey Business" with Donna Rice sitting on his lap?

Gary Hart is the same man who challenged the Washington journalists to "prove" that he was unfaithful to his wife by following him around day or night. Well, they did---and he was (unfaithful, that is).

[blm]

4. This part is especially good...

Dean on Larry King Live and his critique of military strategy.

Except Dean lifted it from John Kerry, who has been talking about this very problem for almost a year and a half. In fact, when Dean was asked last year on MTP about Kerry's criticisms of Bush's military strategy in Afghanistan, Dean supported Bush over Kerry and even Gore, who was also critical of Bush then.

Howard "Gary, what do I do?" Dean is trying to get away with stealing Kerry's stance.


>>>>
"From where I sit, Howard Dean is the only candidate who is serious about helping the American people understand that what we are doing now with a heavy-metal military and the failing efforts to reconstruct Afghanistan and Iraq are simply not working. We are over-invested in a complex and cumbersome "system of systems" and we have failed to empower the human capabilities -- civil affairs, disaster relief engineering, diplomacy, overt public relations and information -- that are urgently needed to actually come to grips with the most basic security threats to America. I would describe Dean as a cultural creative, a new progressive, and as beyond left or right -- he is the center because he is focused on America's center of gravity: all of the people, not some of the people some of the time."

"Howard Dean seems to understand that there are four distinct threats to America: conventional state militaries; unconventional non-state gangs -- both terrorist and criminal; non-traditional non-violent threats including migration, disease, and water scarcity; and ultra-modern electronic threats including economic espionage and attacks against our critical infrastructure. We cannot survive with a one size fits all national security regime that is obsessed with Star Wars systems that cannot find guerrillas in a cave."
>>>>

[killbotfactory]

8. Oh yes, exactly!

Oh wait, no. Kerry was talking about the battle of Tora Bora, not the reconstruction effort.

[blm]

9. It's all part of the same picture.

It's all connected. Ignore it if you wish. It would be no surprise.

[killbotfactory]

14. In other words: You lied.

Saying Bush bungled the Tora Bora battle, is not the same as saying Bush bungled the reconstruction efforts.

It doesn't now, it didn't back then, and it doesn't in bizzaro land.

[blm]

18. Wrong...on Larry King Live

Dean specifically referred to the warlords that Bush was depending on as part of the problem and yet, that's exactly what Kerry was saying last year. ALL the problems stem from that (Look at Joe Klein's Dec. New Yorker piece). Dean's reshaped his views to mimic Kerry's.

And you can hardly say that Dean doesn't rely on others for his foreign policy views. He doesn't really have any of his own. Gary Hart already laughed at that one.

[killbotfactory]

23. Dean is referring to relying on warlords...

In the reconstruction effort who are just as bad as the Taliban.

Kerry was referring to relying on warlords to help with the battle of Tora Bora, which is supposedly why OBL escaped.

[KoKo]

6. What a great review of Deans foreign policy from someone who seems

very credible. This is a suprise. Maybe his thoughts are catching on out there...

Many DU'ers seemed to feel Dean didn't do very well in the King appearance. I didn't agree....thought he did great..so I feel much better reading this article.

Thanks!

[DrFunkenstein]

11. TNR on Dean's King Performance

BTW - Glad to hear Dean is getting credible support for his internationalism.

Candidate: Howard Dean
Category: Intellectual Honesty
Grade: D

It's not often that Larry King subjects his guests to a rigorous grilling. But during his interview with Dean last night, King pressed the ex-governor for his precise personal view on gay marriage with surprising persistence. Dean, who moments earlier had joked about his dangerously blunt tongue, was suddenly unable to deliver his famous brand of troublemaking straight talk:

KING: All right. On your own state level, if it were a referendum, would you vote for gay marriage?

DEAN: If what were--we don't have a referendum in my state, and we have civil unions, and we deliberately chose civil unions, because we didn't think marriage was necessary in order to give equal rights to all people. Marriage is a religious institution, the way I see it. And we're not in the business of telling churches who they can and cannot marry. But in terms of civil rights and equal rights under the law for all Americans, that is the state's business, and that's why we started civil unions.

KING: So you would be opposed to a gay marriage?

DEAN: If other states want to do it, that's their business. We didn't choose to do that in our state.

KING: And you personally would oppose it?

DEAN: I don't know, I never thought about that very much, because we didn't do it in our state for that reason. The body politic agreed in our state that it wasn't the thing to do, so we didn't do it.

"Never thought about it very much"? Hogwash! Dean risked his entire political career over the issue in Vermont during the 1990s. And although he wound up backing a civil-unions bill that did not grant same-sex marriage rights, the question of marriage was at the very heart of the debate. (One Vermont legislator even proposed an explicit ban on gay marriage.) Dean's response makes no sense--it would be like saying you supported sanctions on Iraq but had never really formed an opinion on military action. And when Dean was asked his opinon about gay marriage back then, he didn't pretend not to have contemplated it--he simply refused to reveal his opinion. "The matter of what I personally think about gay marriage is my business," Dean said in January of 2000.

I don't want miss the forest for a tree here: In signing the civil-unions bill, Dean was braver than many other politicians would have been. It was the right thing to do. Even if he believes it's a decision that should be made on a state level, his absurd tap-dance around his personal view on gay marriage makes it pretty hard to take his straight-talk reputation seriously. And if Dean is afraid to tell it like it is on marriage, how much credibility do his attacks on other Democrats for being spineless really have?

[ProfessorPlum]

16. Doc

are those 2 graphs at the bottom yours, or from TNR?

Either way, of course it is hogwash that Dean never thought about it.

But King was just asking a "gotcha" question - trying to split hairs about something that doesn't actually matter that much, Dean's personal opinion, when his official position is so great compared to what has come before.

Dean did the right thing by treating King's question with the brush off it deserved. But an "it doesn't matter" would have been a more accurate answer. I don't think it would have shut Larry up. Dean deflected to a more salient point very smoothly.

[DrFunkenstein]

24. Sorry For The Confusion

My only comment was at the very top. The rest is all TNR. I didn't watch it, so all my info is second hand. All in all, I think TNR has been pretty even-handed with the candidates - or at least their "primary" has been.

[w4rma]

26. "Michael Steinhardt...part-owner of The New Republic, gave $2,000 to Bush"

TAPPED
Continuous commentary from The American Prospect Online.

July 31, 2003

WHEN YOU'VE LOST THE NEW REPUBLIC . . . Tapped's new favorite thing is the Federal Election Commission database where you can type in anyone's name and see if he or she has donated money to political candidates or parties. (Tapped's old favorite thing was The Washington Post's home buyer database, where you could learn how much your neighbors spent for their apartments.)…Michael Steinhardt, former Democratc Leadership Council stalwart and part-owner of The New Republic, gave $2,000 to Bush-Cheney '04 Inc. on June 20, 2003.

Now, we know that there's often little direct relationship between a magazine owner's politics and the views of its writers, but it is a notable thing when one of the more prominent New Democrats around starts financing the continuation of the Bush administration.
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2003/07/index.html#001288
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=127299&mesg_id=127299

[dsc]

25. It would be nice if they knew

what they were talking about. They said this.


"Never thought about it very much"? Hogwash! Dean risked his entire political career over the issue in Vermont during the 1990s. And although he wound up backing a civil-unions bill that did not grant same-sex marriage rights, the question of marriage was at the very heart of the debate. (One Vermont legislator even proposed an explicit ban on gay marriage.) Dean's response makes no sense--it would be like saying you supported sanctions on Iraq but had never really formed an opinion on military action. And when Dean was asked his opinon about gay marriage back then, he didn't pretend not to have contemplated it--he simply refused to reveal his opinion. "The matter of what I personally think about gay marriage is my business," Dean said in January of 2000.


It is flat our wrong to say civil unions didn't give the rights of same sex marriage. It gave every right that Vermont could give. DOMA both prevented any federal rights from flowing and permitted states (34 of them won't) to not recognize such marriages. The author of that passage is either ignorant of that fact or spinning. Neither is good. As to Dean's answer he should have said MYOB and left it at that.

[DrFunkenstein]

27. I Thought Was The Point

About intellectual honesty.

"Even if he believes it's a decision that should be made on a state level, his absurd tap-dance around his personal view on gay marriage makes it pretty hard to take his straight-talk reputation seriously."

I think the author was agreeing that Dean should have just said MYOB instead of tap dancing around.

[Name removed]

13. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[LuminousX]

15. Thanks for the substantive post.

With insight like this, we are sure to go far.