It’s about the bad guys, stupid
: The problem isn’t Howard Dean’s scream.
The problem was that Howard Dean made George Bush the enemy when the real enemy is still murderous Islamic terrorists.
They’re the bad guys, stupid.
: Howard Stern understands that. He knows how to win the nomination and the election and he said so this morning:
Convince the voters that you will be tough on terror and will fix the economy and you will win.
Stern speaks for many voters. He speaks for voters who know that we’re at war and that we must win.
He’s no fan of Bush but right now he’s leaning toward voting for him — until he hears a Democrat say what he wants to hear about fighting the bad guys.
: Tom Friedman understands this, too, in the brilliant and very timely end to his five-part series on how to win the war against the bad guys. (Friedman and Stern frequently agree.)
Friedman reads the real import — and blessing — of the Iowa vote and what it means for the war on terror:
God bless the Democratic Party’s primary voters in Iowa. They may have rescued our chances of succeeding in Iraq and even winning the war of ideas within the Arab-Muslim world. Go Hawkeyes!
How so? Well, it seems to me that Iowa Democrats, in opting for John Kerry and John Edwards over Howard Dean, signaled (among other things) that they want a presidential candidate who is serious about fighting the war against the Islamist totalitarianism threatening open societies.
He says that the Blair Democrats — Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, Clark [I’d question that last one] were intimidated by Bush and Dean. But Iowa frees them to speak up, if they’re smart. And what they should say is not that we will disown the Iraq war and pull out but will, instead, do a better job than Bush is doing of building a democracy there.
It is the only way to build a national consensus for what’s going to be a long cold-war-like struggle to strengthen the forces of moderation and weaken the forces of violent intolerance within the Arab-Muslim world
