Dean Defense Forces: Tom Delay = appeasement hypocrite

William Saletan effortlessly flays DeLay alive on the altar of his own words:

That was bad enough, but Dean wasn't finished. He suggested that the United States should curb its warlike impulses to avoid offending other countries. "The White House has bombed its way around the globe," he sneered. "International respect and trust for America has diminished every time we casually let the bombs fly." As for the current war plan, Dean complained that "no one wants us to be there" and that the president's crusade "has made the Russians jittery and has harmed [our] standing in the world."

Then there was the creepy way Dean kept referring to the president. He called the showdown "Bush's undeclared war" and "Bush's bombing campaign." He described it as something "the president has put us into" and warned his audience, "We should think very, very seriously whether we are going to take ownership of the bombing"—as though the president weren't the nation's commander in chief. He urged Congress to de-fund the war and "pull out the forces we now have in the region."

Dean essentially called the United States the war's villain. Once a U.S.-led coalition "starts meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, where does it stop?" he asked. He charged that we were "starting to resemble a power-hungry imperialist army" and portrayed our mission as an "occupation by foreigners."

Dean even defended the enemy's defiance of the international community. It was unfair and unrealistic of the United States, he suggested, to demand that a dictator "agree to allow foreign troops … to have free rein over the entire country." This was like asking him to "slit his throat with his own people," said Dean. "No wonder" the dictator refused.

OOPS. Actually, replace "Dean" with "DeLay" and replace "Bush" with "Clinton" and replace "Iraq" with "Kosovo" ... heh heh. Delay made these remarks four years ago and now accuses Dean of being unfit for office on the basis of the same arguments.

This piece in the Houston Press from 1999 (a wonderful liberal weekly, I read it religiously) also provides further documentation about DeLay's penchant for reality distortion:

[DeLay] had graduated from the University of Houston at the height of the Vietnam conflict in 1970, but chose to enlist in the war on cockroaches, fleas and termites as the owner of an exterminator business, rather than going off to battle against the Vietcong.

He and Quayle, DeLay explained to the assembled media in New Orleans, were victims of an unusual phenomenon back in the days of the undeclared Southeast Asian war. So many minority youths had volunteered for the well-paying military positions to escape poverty and the ghetto that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like himself. Satisfied with the pronouncement, which dumbfounded more than a few of his listeners who had lived the sixties, DeLay marched off to the convention.

"Who was that idiot?" asked a TV reporter who arrived at the end of the media show. When he was told the name, it drew a blank. DeLay at that time was a national nobody, and his claim that blacks and browns crowded him and other good conservatives out of Vietnam seemed so outlandish and self-serving that no one bothered to file a news report on the congressman's remarks."

(via Atrios)