Carville gets petty in his new book. Says party won in spite of Dean, calls him Rumsfeldian again.

madfloridian

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Sat May-16-09 07:21 PM
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Carville gets petty in his new book. Says party won in spite of Dean, calls him Rumsfeldian again.

These are ways of someone who is harboring a real deep and lasting grudge. The fact that he felt the need to say such things in his book after saying them in 2006 when we were on the high of a congressional win....shows a really childish and petty side to his nature.

First off to compare any Democrat to Donald Rumsfeld is just plain sick. Rumsfeld is one of the main guys developing the torture memos and insisting on involving doctors in the infliction of the pain and cruelty.

Andrew Sullivan's words:

Soldiers are trained to kill and doctors to heal. At least that's how we usually understand those two professions. But wars can often distort reality, and the war on terrorism has turned into a test case. An inspiring example is that of Colonel Kelly Faucette, M.D. He recently wrote about caring for a new patient at the intensive-care unit of the 47th Combat Support Hospital in Mosul, Iraq. The patient was a terrorist insurgent, a man who planted hidden roadside bombs to murder civilians and Faucette's fellow soldiers. Faucette wrote in his local paper: "Something inside me wants to walk up to this guy ... and just clobber him." But Faucette didn't. Instead he healed him before sending him to a jail, and by that act of healing he helped heal Iraq.

That's the America I know and love. But it is not, alas, the only face of America in this war. One of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's first instructions for military interrogations outside the Geneva Conventions was that military doctors should be involved in monitoring torture. It was a fateful decision � and we learn much more about its consequences in a new book based on 35,000 pages of government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The book is called Oath Betrayed (to be published June 27) by medical ethicist Dr. Stephen Miles, and it is a harrowing documentation of how the military medical profession has been corrupted by the Bush-Rumsfeld interrogation rules.

Rumsfeld was a harsh and uncaring person who took this country into deep depths of evil doing. How dare any Democrat compare another Democrat to him.

Here are a couple of blogs that reference Carville's continued "jihad" against Howard Dean.

Creative Loafing discusses Carville's book

Though I haven�t read Carville�s new tome, excerpts were made available online last week.

Let�s just say that the message is compelling, even if the messenger ain�t.

Among the tidbits I gathered is that Carville keeps up his jihad against former Democratic National Convention Chairman Howard Dean. No doubt Dean�s 50-state strategy was controversial as late as the summer of 2006, when some high level Democrats (none more vocal than Rahm Emmanuel) seriously questioned the former Vermont Governor�s idea of how to expand the party, in the wake of John Kerry�s meltdown in 2004. Though a lot of people deserve credit, Howard Dean changed the course of the party , both during his aborted 2003-2004 presidential campaign, and during his tenure at the DNC, despite what Carville says.

Though I hate to quote NewsMax, I will, because they carry the reference in more detail.

�Obama created a new party,� Carville writes. �He brought new people in all across the country, and in 2008 those new people were donating, registering, and voting alongside the existing base of Democratic voters.�

As a brutal aside, Carville notes that he believes the revitalization of the Democratic Party has occurred despite � not because of � Howard Dean�s �disastrous tenure� as DNC chairman.

�He was not simply unsuccessful but incompetent, particularly in the case of the 2006 midterm elections. I said then and I�ll say again that Dean�s leadership was �Rumsfeldian in its incompetence,�� writes Carville, a political science professor at Tulane University.

Petty and childish.

In 2006 he made this attacks on TV and even called the New York Times unsolicited to complain about Dean after our big win in congress.

Carville implicates the Clintons and Rahm Emanuel in his attacks on Dean.

He said then as well that he was Rumsfeldian incompetent.

Flush with victory after the election, Rahm�s allies, led by Carville, try to mount a coup at the DNC by publicly attacking Dean and suggesting he be replaced by Harold Ford, a Tennessee moderate who just lost a Senate race. �You can�t go into 2008 having a party chairman that is completely disconnected from the congressional leadership and the campaign committees,� Carville tells me, further pounding the wedge that divides the Deaniacs and the Clintonites. When I ask if Rahm agrees, Carville says, �It�s not any secret that Rahm has expressed disdain for Dean and not very secret that Rahm and I are close. It doesn�t take a lot of dot-connecting here.�

What about the Clintons, who, given Hillary�s presidential ambitions, have more cause for concern about who runs the DNC in 2008? �Let�s just say nobody has called me telling me this is a bad idea. Sometimes silence is eloquence.� Not only did Carville�s coup fail but it arguably strengthened Dean, who, speaking before his state-party allies, mocked the attempt as a desperate attack from the �old Democratic Party.� Cutting his losses, Rahm quickly leaked word to the press that he and Dean had negotiated a truce.

Back then The Carpetbagger Report published these words of Carville.

The blog asked what in the world had gotten into James Carville.

Democratic strategist James Carville says his party should dump Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic Party because of incompetence.

Carville, during coffee and rolls with political reporters today, said Democrats could have picked up as many as 50 House seats, instead of the nearly 30 they have so far. The reason they didn�t, he said, is the Democratic National Committee did not spend some $6 million it could have put into so-called �third tier� House races against vulnerable Republicans.

He said he tried to meet with Dean to argue for additional spending for Democrats in the final days of the campaign, but Dean declined and gave no reason why.

Asked by a reporter whether Dean should be dumped, Carville replied, �In a word, do I think? Yes.� He added, �I think he should be held accountable.� He added, �I would describe his leadership as Rumsfeldian in its competence.�

It was obvious Carville wasn�t exactly a Dean-backer last week when he volunteered to lobby to replace Dean with Harold Ford, but comparing him to Rumsfeld? I assume Carville appreciates the seriousness of that kind of talk in Dem circles.

Carville gets away with this kind of stuff because for years the Democrats have been groomed to take the attacks from the other side graciously. They have learned the lesson so well they can not even defend one of their own who held the party together after the lost 2004 election and inspired us to be activists.

The Democrats need to speak out forcefully on stuff like this. It hurts all of us when one person is targeted like this and left out in the cold out of the party's national leadership.

Carville is petty to do this.