DEAN’S LIST

“Unfortunately, our politicians are either incompetent or corrupt. Sometimes both on the same day.”
-- Woody Allen, “My Speech to the Graduates”

Better the lively debate of the Democrats than the Republicans’ tendency to make the trains run on time, but the current crop of Democratic presidential candidates are pushing it.

Leading candidate Howard Dean is no prize. Even giving him the benefit of a doubt that his many seemingly thoughtless comments are actually the result of canny political calculation; even giving him a pass on the long-term ideological flip-flops that so many candidates go through; alarm bells still go off over his inexplicable tendency toward secrecy, and his lame justifications of it.

Mainly this is about his records as governor of Vermont, which can be unsealed by him but are being left up to a court decision. One reason he gives for the secrecy is “to protect [other] people’s privacy.” Everything about this is too reminiscent of the Bush administration -- in fact, identical to its most shamefully shameless (or is that shamelessly shameful?) tendencies. Bad policy breeds in secrecy, and ideals get betrayed.

But the attacks being made on Dean over comments about Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden must stop. The candidates making those attacks are being irresponsible and unthinking.

They attacked Dean for saying the United States was no safer after the capture of Saddam Hussein. Dean was correct, for reasons that are well-known: Iraq had no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons capability in place, and certainly none that could threaten a nation many thousands of miles away, as this one is; it had no connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; it had no record of exporting terrorism that is meaningful to the United States. Hussein was weak in war and clearly had no key role in carrying out postwar attacks in Iraq. Since his capture, we’ve gone into and stayed in orange alert and have begun more dramatic and suddenly standard anti-terrorism efforts than at any time since 9/11.

Democratic candidates -- including Massachusetts’ John Kerry, on Sunday during the Iowa debates -- have also attacked Dean for saying he “couldn’t prejudge Osama bin Laden’s guilt for September 11th. What were you thinking?” Dean’s answer was correct: He was thinking of the rule of law. The country pursues war on the basis of intelligence, not a court finding, but our goal is to bring Osama bin Laden to justice, not to kill him. A U.S. senator who wants to be president would do well to remember that.

These attacks on Dean amount to little more than hysteria, which this country falls into all too easily. It loves to have passion and rally around a cause. It hates to think through what those emotions mean, or in what they result.

It’s a lousy way to do many things. Among them are conducting political campaigns and voting for president.