1. DENIAL: A refusal to believe or accept what has happened.
2. ANGER: Blaming others for the loss. Blaming oneself for the loss.
3. BARGAINING: This can involve bargains with oneself, or with God.
4. DEPRESSION: Listlessness, tiredness, a feeling of being punished.
5. ACCEPTANCE: Realizing that life goes on, thereby allowing yourself to heal.
Above are Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief, as described by a funeral home company's Web site. Howard Dean's supporters are stuck in stage one, denial, and it looks like they'll come to stage five sometime after President Kerry has finished his two terms -- maybe.
Deanies need grief counseling
Reading the pro-Howard Dean weblogs (which is most weblogs), all I can think is: These people really need Dean-is-dead support groups. But maybe that's the purpose now of the pro-Dean blogs, which the bloggers seem to write primarily for each other.
I was accused not long ago by a pro-Dean Salon blogger (that's fairly redundant) of trying to eke out the best possible news from John Kerry's then-lackluster poll showings. That's funny, 'kos now that's what the pro-Dean bloggers, including the aforementioned Salon blogger, are doing with Dean's dwindling numbers. Maybe he'll turn it around, they're telling each other. (No, he won't.)
Of course, Dean supporters' attacks on Kerry -- whom I have nicknamed Lazarus, since he came back from the dead -- are mounting now that he is the front-runner. (Maybe this means that the Dean lemmings are moving into stage two, anger, "blaming others for the loss.")
The biggest criticism of Kerry that I've seen (over and over and over again) is that he's too -- gasp! -- boring.
Now, if I want to be entertained, I'll go to a movie, watch a DVD, listen to some music, look at Internet porn. I don't look to presidential candidates for enterfuckingtainment.
Should John Kerry eats some live maggots on national television? Would that make you ADD Dean zombies happy? Isn't the Democratic presidential primary season enough like "Survivor" for you? I mean, Dick Gephardt just got voted off the island and it looks like Joe Lieberman will be next.
The next-most-common Kerry slam I see is that -- horrors! -- he's rich! A variation of this theme is that -- brace yourself -- he has a rich wife!
Coming from the Dean lemmings, this is pretty hypocritical.
The Dec. 29, 2003 U.S. News & World Report reports on page 56: "Howard Brush Dean III, for his part, had grown up on New York's Park Avenue and in the Hamptons, the son of a third-generation Wall Street broker." The U.S. News & World Report also reports that Howard Brush Dean III -- Yale Class of '71 -- went to St. George's prep school.
Not exactly a Dickensian biography, is it?
And pointing out that Kerry's wife Theresa is rich is sexist. Why is it scandalous that a man should marry a rich woman? In a marriage only the man can be rich?
Yes, John Forbes Kerry is rich. Few candidates for the presidency of the United States aren't. But despite his wealthy background, Kerry volunteered to fight in Vietnam -- unlike those other two from wealthy families, Howard Brush Dean III, who during the Vietnam War chose to go skiing in Aspen (he admits that he could have fought in Vietnam but that he was happy to get out of it on a medical technicality), and George Walker Bush, who during the Vietnam War went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard, into which his daddy had gotten him in order to save his precious rich white ass from the draft.
While Howard Dean asks us to just believe that he's a populist, Kerry demonstrated that he didn't think that he was better than the poor and middle-class Americans who were forced to fight in Vietnam. John Forbes Kerry didn't go skiing in Aspen, although he probably could have.
I hear the Deanies moaning about Vietnam. It's not about Vietnam; it's about courage, strength and character. Kerry possesses those things; Dean and Bush lack them.
Curiously, the Kerry-bashing members of The Cult of Dean not long ago were asking all of us to withhold all criticism of Dean, in The Name of Democratic Unity. (Dean himself not long ago ran crying to Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, asking McAuliffe to make the big bad bullies -- his rivals for the presidential nomination -- stop picking on him.)
"Anybody but Bush" was the Dean lemmings' mantra. That mantra was fine when Dean was on top. Now that Kerry is on top, the mantra suddenly doesn't seem so useful to the Deanies, who are revealing their true colors now, just as Dean fatefully revealed his on Monday night in Iowa.
Anyway, my guess is that the diehard Deanies will remain in stage four, depression, for a long time. As Kerry continues to win primaries and caucuses, forcing Dean to drop out eventually, stage three, bargaining, won't remain an option. The hardcore Deanies, the ones beyond help, will believe that Only Dean Could Have Saved Us and will be unlikely to participate meaningfully, if at all, in the effort to remove George W. Bush from the White House in November, which, they have claimed, is their primary goal.
But Dean warned (threatened?) us about this last month when he said, "If I don't win the nomination, where do you think those million and a half people, half a million on the Internet, where do you think they're going to go? I don't know where they're going to go. They're certainly not going to vote for a conventional Washington politician."
Maybe, like the voters of Iowa and (I predict) New Hampshire, when the eleventh hour comes and it becomes very real, they'll do the right thing. But I suspect not.
9:36:02 PM 
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