HOWARD DEAN CELEBRATES DIVERSITY - Mark Steyn tries to explain the Democrats-(Hewitt interview)

HH: Mark, let's start by playing the clip of the day, from Howard Dean's appearance in San Francisco yesterday. Here's the money quote:

HH: Mark Steyn, pretty much a white, Christian party, all behaving the same, all looking the same. What do you say about Howard Dean's latest foot-in-mouth?

MS: Well, you know, in a decade as Governor of Vermont, Howard Dean did not appoint a single minority, single African-American, to his administration. I mean that's not his problem. It's a 98.5% white state. But a guy in that position isn't perhaps the best man to go around bemoaning the lack of diversity. Today, for example, a Republican judge was confirmed, who's the daughter of Alabama sharecroppers. And we have to say, why, if the Democratic Party is supposedly so diverse, why is the Democratic Party leadership apparently homogenously white? I mean the Democratic Party looks like an antebellum plantation from 150 years ago. You got the big, white owner and the white family in the big house, and thousands of black workers in the fields. Whereas the Republican Party...where's the Democrats' answer to a figure like Condoleezza Rice?

HH: It's also so absurd, given the president's totals among Latinos in the last election, his upping of the black vote to 12%, Jewish vote I guess about 30%. It's just stupid. I mean, the guy is just a nut.

MS: Well, you know, the problem with Howard Dean is that I was relaxed about him when he was campaigning. Let's say, you know, the nightmare had happened, and he'd have won the presidency. He would have governed as a centrist, as a reasonably centrist president, the way he governed Vermont for ten years. He was a perfectly acceptable governor in Vermont. What he wasn't good at was campaigning, because when he was campaigning, this other Howard Dean, this nasty guy who's mouth runs away with him, would reveal itself. And in Vermont, he had this poodle press, you know, this very compliant state newspapers, that let him get away with it, and covered up for him. And so in effect, the Democratic Party have now promoted him to a position where his defect is expanded to national scrutiny, and his strengths are just done away with. I mean, this is the worst job in the world for a guy like Howard Dean.

HH: And we can only hope he keeps it longer, although even the lefty bloggers like Bilmon, over at the Whisky Bar are calling for his head this afternoon.

HH: Let's talk a little bit about Hillary Clinton, also in the news yesterday. I want to play two clips for you, twelve and fifteen seconds each. Here's Hillary:

MS: Yes, it is, and in fact, Hillary has been, I guess, the sanest senior Democrat in the last couple of years, and that she's understood the changes that have happened post-9/11. She hasn't said the idiotic things about Iraq that Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd and Barbara Boxer and so forth have said. And you never quite know with Hillary what it is that she really thinks. And clearly, there are two Hillary Rodham Clintons. There's the one who appears with News Gingrich, and says very moderate and sensible things when out in public. And then there's the other who tosses the red meat to the mob when she's at an in-house party event. And the question is, which one is she going to run as? If she runs as the Hillary we just heard in those two clips, that's of no interest to anyone, and she's going to go down the same way that John Kerry did. If she sticks to the moderate, centrist, 9/11-changed-things Hillary, then the math is very different, I think.

HH: Now, I want to go to a statement that Chuck Schumer made on the Senate floor yesterday about Janice Rogers Brown. Cut number 7, Duane, because it all fits together with the Hillary, and the Howard Dean stuff, sort of the ratcheting up of incendiary rhetoric by Democrats one would have thought knew better. Here's Chuck Schumer yesterday:

HH: Mark Steyn, does she want a theocracy? At what point do people start laughing at the Democrats?

MS: Well, you know, this is the real insanity of Howard Dean's remark. He is saying, and Chuck Schumer is supporting it, the terms like "White Christian." White and Christian are now insults in the Democratic Party.

MS: And if I would, just in simple political terms, I would think very carefully about making the word Christian an insult if you're...because the reality of the situation is it's the lack of white Christians in the Democratic voting booths that have made the party un-electable in great swaths of the United States. So this, simply as a matter of politics, that kind of thing is disastrous, and Chuck Schumer ought to know better. There is simply...this idea that Janice Rogers Brown is out of the mainstream only works if you define the mainstream as the side that keeps losing all the elections every two years.

HH: That's right. And it's not very persuasive, and I think it is now not even thinly cloaking an anti-religious bigotry at the heart of the Democratic Party now. I do believe the left has just thrown in with this idea that to be religious is to be a nut of any sort.

HH: Mark, I want to switch very quickly to Syria, because today's Washington Post carried a detailed, lengthy account by Ghaith Abdul Ahad of the Syrian backing of the Jihad pipeline, running from Saudi Arabia through their country, into Iraq. Have you had a chance to read that article?

HH: What's that...do you think that's exaggerated? Or do you think that's what's actually going on? And if so, how long can the United States tolerate a Ho Chi Minh trail for jihadists?

MS: Well, you know, it's not a question of how long the United States can tolerate it. What's interesting to me, from what I hear is going on on that border, is that a lot of the new Iraqi security forces are itching to exercise their right of hot pursuit into Syria to track down these people and kill them. And they'll be a lot less squeamish about doing that, and they have a right to it in international law, than the United States has been in the last couple of years. So I think the Syrians...you know, if you listen to what's his name's...baby Assad's state of the union earlier this week, he's not going to be around in a couple of years. Syria's changing.

HH: Expand on that. I did catch that, but I wasn't on the air when he made that statement.

MS: Well, it was basically this long, petulant whine about the domino effect that's going on in that region, where he's being forced to pull out of Lebanon, and now there are reformers in his own country calling for multi-party democracy and economic liberty and all the rest of it. He's on the ropes. And a guy on the ropes really has better things to do with his time than to be bearing the brunt of trying to topple a regime that can't be toppled in his neighboring country. He's not going to be around in a couple of years.

HH: That's very...how about North Korea returning to the talks. Are you surprised by this?

MS: I am, only in the sense that when you are dealing with an insane regime, it's never entirely clear what they're going to. So in that sense, everything's a surprise.

HH: All right. Last question, Mark. Tony Blair and the president yesterday, long press conference. I got a chance to watch the whole thing. They genuinely seem to have a working relationship that's very professional, and they expect to endure for some time. Who's getting the benefit of that relationship?

MS: I would think that actually Mr. Bush, things are going his way. You know, everyone keeps saying oh, well Blair backed Bush on Iraq. Why can't Bush surrender on something like the Kyoto treaty, or the international criminal court? And in fact, he doesn't. Bush holds firm on that, and Tony Blair, if anything, is moving closer to the Bush positions on those issues.

HH: And we do have thirty seconds left. John Bolton, the Democrats say they're going to filibuster. Will that destroy their reputation for, their new-found reputation for moderation, Mark Steyn?

MS: Yes, I think it will, because I think the fact that we've seen what's gone on in the U.N. recently means that John Bolton is seen by Americans as necessary at the U.N. And the Democrats are out of step with the country on this, not the Republican Party.

HH: Can they stick with it? Will they actually hang tough, week after week, voting to deny a vote to Bolton?

MS: I don't think they will. I think eventually this will crumble. I don't think the politics of this works for them.

John Bolton, the Democrats say they're going to filibuster. Will that destroy their reputation for, their new-found reputation for moderation?

The Dems must be doing that "Hey, wait a minute" looking-around thing right now, wondering how they got themselves into this mess. They've been delaying, hoping the public would swing their way and force Bush to withdraw Bolton, hoping some new personal dirt would show up. It hasn't worked. They seem to have gotten very little out of the McCain deal. And with Dean and Schumer sounding like anti-Christian lunatics, Bush's Social Security push resulting in polls saying a majority of Americans now prefer his savings account idea (something which snuck in under the radar, while we heard news stories about how he'd failed in his push for this), and even something like yesterday's Patriot Act hearing showing that the Dems clearly would rather hurt our troops than give the president ANYthing...things are just getting worse for them.

I'm not the most optimistic person in terms of politics, but it seems to me the Dems are really falling apart, when I expected things to go better for them after the election. I think they are underestimating how lasting the feelings of post-9-11 Americans are in terms of terrorism.

BTW--has anyone else noticed that the press no longer do their monthly "body count" of US dead in Iraq? Used to be all over the place, but I can't find such headlines anymore.

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