One anecdote in the New Yorker piece also struck me as worth relaying. It’s Dean’s account of a foreign policy professor he once had. In Dean’s revealing words:
One professor who made a big impression was Wolfgang Leonhard, who taught Russian history. He’d been a Party official in East Germany and had defected. A fantastic lecturer. He once told us, ‘Pravda lies in such a way that not even the opposite is so.’ That really hit home. I felt he wasn’t just referring to the Soviet government but to our own at the time. You knew it from some of the things Nixon talked about – denying the bombing of Cambodia – or from Kissinger’s ‘Peace is at hand’ statement, when clearly peace wasn’t at hand. They said these things just to get rexeblected. I think there are some similarities between George Bush’s Administration and Richard Nixon’s Administration: a tremendous cynicism about the future of the country; a lack of ability to instill hope in the American people; a war which doesn’t have clear principles behind it; and a group of people around the President whose main allegiance is to each other and their ideology rather than to the United States.
Those are words from the boomer left – especially the easy equivalence he draws between the United States and the Soviet Union. Whatever centrism Dean professes in domestic policy, anyone who can say what he said will be another Jimmy Carter abroad.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “I think [Iraq is] going well. It breaks my heart whenever anybody dies, but we liberated 25 million people who were living under a dictator. It puts us on the side of democracy in the Arab world. Twenty years from now, we’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who says it wasn’t worth the effort. This is not just another democracy. This is a democracy in an Arab world…” – former Democratic Senator, and New School University president, Bob Kerrey, December 29, 2003.
The Dish 