Dean At His Best

Screaming Howard Dean said, “pretty much a white, Christian party." That is, in itself, a luscious field of debate topics. Let us take a look at that comment from two angles shall we.

First of all, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Dean is indeed correct that the Republican Party is basically made up of only white Christians (he forgot the “male” part, for the Democrats are convinced that men vote only Republican, but we will forget that false argument for now). If that is true (which it is not, and I will get to that in due course), who cares? Why should white Christians not be allowed to express their views? Why should white Christians not be allowed to have an agenda?

It is truly a most intolerant statement to make. If it is true, I suppose that means that if you are white and if you are a Christian, you should, in Dean Land, not be allowed to vote or push an agenda. The senseless thing about the statement, of course, is that there are white Christians in the Democratic Party. I wonder if that means that Dean does not like them as well? Oh, wait, that is the liberal double standard for you. It is fine for the Democrats to do something, but it is wrong for the Republicans to do the same thing.

Now for the second part – is the statement true? Why, of course not. The fact that it comes from Screaming Dean means that it, at best, is the stretched truth. But the fact is, unfortunately for Democrats, the Republican Party is not made up of only white Christians (it just annoys me that he forgot the third part of that oh so used phrase of theirs, that third part of course being "males").

In the 2004 election, 44% of Hispanics (my ethnic background by the way) in the nation voted for Bush (up 9% from 2000), 44% of Asians voted for Bush (up 3% from 2000), and 11% of African Americans voted for Bush (up 2% from 2000). It seems to me that those numbers throw Screaming Dean’s argument into question.

So, we see that if we allow Screaming Dean’s argument to be taken at face value, his argument does not really matter. Second, we see that we cannot take Screaming Dean’s argument at face value in the first place. Either way, it just once again shows that with just a little touch of logic and a little bit of common sense, the Democrats and their 30 year old arguments just do not hold up to scrutiny. Enough said.

Your favorite 17 year old radical right-wing conservative religious fundamentalist extremist,
Caleb