Monday, August 11, 2003

Howard Dean: the man of a thousand faces

MSNBC's opinion page is one I haven't visited in a little while, but I have checked in recently. They posted a story the end of last week sometime on "The Many Faces of Howard Dean." Of course what it is really about is the many faces assigned to Howard Dean by columnists and writers.

Dean has, apparently, been compared to Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, John McCain, George McGovern, Bill Bradley, Walter Mondale, as well as many others.

But of course, entitling an article the many faces of Howard Dean doesn't give the impression that these comments are coming from the media; it implies that Dean is changing his face so as to provoke different responses. As if Mr. Dean were spending one day on the campaign trail pretending to be Bill Clinton, and the next day pretending to be John McCain. The "liberal" MSNBC website also chooses exactly one quote to highlight along side the article, from Jonathen Chait of the New Republic.

"Dean’s opposition to the Patriot Act could be politically lethal… Witness George H.W. Bush’s 1988 attack on Michael Dukakis as a ‘card carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union."

Luckily, MSNBC is also able to print lousy articles about Republicans. Case in point; Timothy Noah's article on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Nazi problem. The short version of the story is that Schwarzenegger invited Kurt Waldheim, then running for President of Austria to attend his wedding and expressed support for him even though Mr. Waldheim was at the time accused of having been a Nazi. At the time the information was just coming out.

Mr. Noah states, "Rather than confront his Waldheim problem head-on, Schwarzenegger has proclaimed his disgust for Nazism, raised money for education about the Holocaust, traveled to Israel (where he met with then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin), and given generously to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which in 1997 bestowed on him its National Leadership Award. . . .

Clearly, though, that won’t be enough. If Schwarzenegger doesn’t renounce Waldheim in a highly public way, he can forget about ever becoming governor of California.
"

This is one of those hoops that political enemies put in front of you to humiliate you. If Mr. Schwarzenegger condemns Waldheim, Mr. Noah will find something else to attack him on. Perhaps Mr. Noah really does consider Schwarzenegger a Nazi (he is, after all, Conservative (maybe)). His last statement is questionable as well--why does he think that without renounce Waldheim, he can't win? Is Mr. Noah's vote the only one being counted?

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