Reply #62: Dean is a centrist Democrat which is half-way to a Republican

[Tinoire]

we've agreed on that for a long time you and I, and we both have a distaste of Centrist Dems and of the DLC which was very happy with Dean's performance as Governor.

Don't get me wrong- I am not in love with Dean as a politician and will probably never be but we have got to wrest our power back from the DLC. Kerry is still officially part of the DLC (and the CFR) so I can't fully back him even though I have repeatedly stated that he is the most domestically socially liberal one up there and would vote for him in a heart-beat.

I still hope that Kucinich wins because he's the only one for whom I will want to vote and have a clear conscience about it. Kerry is definitely a Democrat. Clark... let's put it this way- I want more than campaign rhetoric, campaign issue papers and supporters' spin. Let Clark spend a few years as a lower-level politician to convince us that between March 2003 and today he saw the light and that we should entrust him with the Democratic nomination and the Presidency of the United States.

These times are too dangerous. I've been following Clark closely and there are too many disquieting issues. Everytime I rattle the closet on one of his associations, out come a bunch of MIC bones. The MIC is my enemy- even more so than the Republicans- many of whom are good decent people but whose party is being eaten away by the same PNAC cancer devouring ours.

I am not happy with Dean, really, really not happy and I am sure you remember the threads where there were just a couple of us trying to convince people that Dean is no progressive and no liberal. You know what- we didn't fail. There's not a Dean supporter out there who doesn't know this now but they have a point about him being the pit-bull we need to stop the MIC's advancement.

Clark can issue all the papers he wants. He can even go as far as saying that abortion should be no-limits and anything up to delivery. He can promise to personally perform gay marriages at the White House but that still doesn't make him a real Liberal in my book.

We're on the same sheet of music for Dean. And I'm saddened to say that most of the Progressive Dean supporters out here in California are too. They're not buying into Dean's campaign rhetoric- they just want to match Trippi against Rove & Dean against Bush.

I am not so sure it will work but I we may have no choice but to risk that, if he's the front-runner of the Progressives behind him, if we want Bush and his entire cabal out.

How do you feel about Kerry getting so beaten up for IWR and then Clark parading himself as an anti-Iraq-war General when he was in Davos with Powell campaigning for the war and telling our allies that Bush had decided and that they had best get on board? I don't like either Dean or Clark getting a free pass on this one but at least Dean wasn't campaigning for it and at least Dean has a record we can check.


If you reply, I won't be able to respond until tonight but please do. I value your perspective on things, your ability to look the truth straight in the eye, and the strength with which you've stuck to your convictions for months.

Thank you for those Dean links... I'm in little admiration of Dean the man- it's the movement that I find admirable and it will take a movement of progressives to change the path our country's on.

Still 100% Kucinich.