"Oh, shit! I'm not getting a second term!"
'President' Bush is toasty
Most recent nationwide polls in which John Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, is matched up against "President" Bush have Kerry beating Bush. Only two recent polls have Bush beating Kerry, by only 2 percent to 4 percent. (FOX News' latest poll has Bush beating Kerry by 4 percent, but is the only poll to show such results; FOX News -- go figure.)
In all of the polls matching the candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination against Bush, however, Kerry outperforms his chief rivals for the nomination, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and retired Gen. Wesley Clark.
Kerry, who is the overwhelming favorite of Democrats nationwide, is the people's choice.
Yet you still get some interesting comments from Team Dean.
Take uber-leftist columnist Ted Rall, who not long ago advised us in one of his nuttier columns to just cancel the primaries and crown Dean the Democratic presidential nominee already. Seriously: In a December column titled "Cancel the Primaries: Time for Democrats to Rally Around Dean," Rall wrote:
Barring some unforeseeable misstep, Gov. Howard Dean will be the Democratic nominee.... Dean is the only contender with the cash, charisma and cajones to expel Generalissimo El Busho from the White House -- but he needs a unified party to pull it off.
...What if the other Democratic candidates came together at a joint press conference to announce that they were dropping out of the race to endorse Dean? If nothing else, cash-starved states would love it -- the average primary costs taxpayers $7 million. More to the point, it would save Dean roughly $75 million -- enough to close the money gap with Bush....
The outcome of the Democratic primaries is now a foregone conclusion. Why should Dean and his fellow Democrats waste more than $100 million between them -- some estimates rise as high as $150 million -- to beat each other up over relatively minor differences of policy and tone? The DNC ought to read the business pages. Ours is an age of monopoly and amalgamation. Bigger wins over better except when better happens to also be big. Divided Democrats can't beat unified Republicans.
So much for Rall's "foregone conclusion." The voters in Arizona, Delaware, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota and Washington state, all of whom thus far have made Kerry their No. 1 choice in their primaries and caucuses -- which were not canceled, to Rall's chagrin -- apparently differ.
Maybe Rall will concede that Dean's barbaric yawp, which he let loose after he got third place in Iowa, was that "unforeseeable misstep" he wrote about, but most Deaniacs, quite in their own little world that frightens me, won't even acknowledge that Dean's caveman act (which I don't think was all that "unforeseeable") was a faux paus, much more the campaign-ending blunder that it was.
Note that Rall was foaming at the mouth for Democratic unity when his candidate was the front-runner. Now that Dean is dead in the water, now how does Rall feel about Democratic unity?
In his latest column, titled "Stupidity Is All Around," Rall snidely remarks that "Democrats, falling for Karl Rove's silly 'we'd love nothing more than to run against Howard Dean' baiting, are about to hand him the November opponent nominee Republicans wanted all along: John Kerry."
So much for Democratic unity.
Of course, Rall -- who is just pissed off that we didn't cancel the primaries like he'd so wisely advised us to -- doesn't back up, anywhere in his column, his snarky assertion that (1) he somehow knows the mind of Karl Rove better than the rest of us do and (2) thus he knows that Rove really wanted us to pick Kerry all along, and we fell right into Rove's diabolical trap -- muwahahahaha!
In fact, in not one poll that I've ever seen has Dean ever beaten Bush even once -- so it seems quite logical to me that Rove would prefer Dean to be the Democratic presidential candidate. But the Deaniacs have their own "logic," and those of us who support Anybody But Dean, you see, are just stupid.
Poor lonely Ted, being the only intelligent life on this planet.
I used to like Ted Rall, but more and more his columns are reading like Ann Coulter's. They say that the more you extreme you become, the more you become like your opposite. (Or something like that.) Soon, Rall's and Coulter's columns will be indistinguishable.
The Deaniacs -- typified by Rall and by my fellow Salon blogger Dave Cullen -- are still blaming, in Dave's words, the "media whores," those "fucking bastards," for Dean's downfall. They blame just about anyone and everything except for Dean himself.
And Dave, in that spirit of Democratic unity that the Deaniacs are so great at when things are going their way, writes, "All Kerry has to do now is avoid a major screwup and he's our next nominee. Ugh. Nine months to learn to live with that windbag. There's still a little hope he'll screw up, though. Maybe Edwards can still grab the thing from him if he does. We can only hope."
Hmmm. I prefer a "windbag" to a powder keg, and apparently so do the voters of the 10 of 12 states that so far have picked the windbag over the powder keg.
Then there's The Man Himself, whose feet remain lodged so firmly in his mouth that he needs the Jaws of Life. The Associated Press quoted Dean as having said today on CNN, "Real voters are going to decide who the nominee is."
I'm not sure what he meant by that.
Does Dean feel that voters who reside in the 10 of 12 states that thus far have rejected him as their No. 1 choice for the Democratic presidential nomination are not "real voters"? Or was he slamming the "media whores," as in "Real voters, not you media whores, are going to decide who the nominee is?"
Whatever he meant, the line sounds like the typical defensive -- and thus offensive -- Dean rhetoric. The man still just doesn't get it: His arrogant, confrontational style turns people, including this registered Democrat and millions of other registered Democrats, off in droves.
The thing that Rall, Dave and Dean all seem to have in common is the belief that democracy really sucks ass when the "real voters" not only don't cancel the primaries like you advise them to, but don't vote the way that you want them to, the way they surely would vote if it weren't for those media whores, those fucking bastards.
But Dean is dead and soon I won't have to write about him anymore.
Maybe the Deaniacs will get over his death and maybe they won't. With or without their help, there are millions of us who very soon will focus exclusively on helping John Kerry defeat George W. Bush on Nov. 2.
And George is looking like toast.
12:02:35 PM 
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