Thanks for the audio link.
My 4-year old son got a kick out of it!

I have to say that the sound clip of “Mad-Dog Dean” was nearly as entertaining as the speech given by a drunken Teddy Kennedy a few years ago introducing Bill Clinton!

Dean is angry and giving a voice to angry Democrats. I’m angry, too. But nobody on the right has enough true passion to be angry about anything. They’re too busy being smug and happy about having their hands (temporarily) on the flow of power and gaining all their individual perqs.

I want an angry candidate of the right. It is time for a radical solution to our current political paralysis on the right. How many more decades will it take of mild, mewling Republicans, who betray conservatives at the drop of a hat, before people awaken? (Maybe never, huh?)

We don’t want anger, which is a useless and destructive emotion except in brief situations. We want a steady level of indignation, which is the proper stance of a patriot when his country is being threatened or betrayed.

If people aren’t angry now, they never will be. Anger motivates. Right after *fear*, it is the most powerful of all emotions. Due in large part to immigration and the empowerment of Third World races, people in my part of the country experience *fear* every day. I can only hope they will next respond with righteous anger.

I agree with Paul C. I certainly have been angry lately, as I think has been evident in things I’ve written about Bush’s plan. But when people make anger itself the focus, it tends to get divorced from objective reality and become an activity unto itself, as we see with the anti-war right and the anti-Bush left.

Fear is not just a strong emotion along with anger. As Plato says, fear for one’s country is the very source of the courage with which one fights back against its enemies.

Plato also says that fear and indignation are the proof that we are rational beings. Therefore we should be careful that our fear, anger, and indignation do not become irrational.

Here Dean admits what I’ve suspected all along, that he was never a serious candidate with a serious intention of being elected president of the United States and governing this country, but that he was running for purely personal and emotional reasons, to express himself (or, as his wife put it, to get it out of his system).

This is by Lucianne Goldberg at her website:

In Walter Shapiro’s quite insightful and ignored new book, One-Car Caravan, he writes of a long, cold car ride in the back seat of a car with Howard Dean and a driver.

This was only the third in-depth interview with a national political reporter and before Dean had learned some of the subtleties of spin. Shapiro asks him how he decided to run for president.

Dean replies:

“The answer should be that I deeply care about it, and I thought it all out. But the way it happens is that I’m very intuitive, so I was driven toward running before I knew why I was doing it.”