Living Up to Expectations

Some Republicans supported Howard Dean as head of the Democrats. They figured that Dean could not stop shooting off his mouth.

Recently he lived up to this expectation:

The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is 'okay' to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is.

Ignoring the fact that it is not exactly Bush's right-wing court, he has not appointed a single justice yet, how do we reconcile this statement with the fact that the court's liberals voted in favor of Kelo and its conservatives voted against it. Dean has it backwards. I can think of three possible explanations. None of them reflect well on Dean:

1) Dean didn't check the voting record. He simply assumed that a horrible decision like this must have come from the conservatives.

2) Dean did know who voted but he forgot, assuming that a decision favoring big business must have come from conservatives.

3) Dean knew perfectly well who voted for what but he knew that this was a bad decision. Most people do not pay attention to who voted. Dean figures that by blaming conservatives he can turn this into an anti-Bush point. Dean is trying to Bork the entire court by blaming bad decisions on conservatives and giving liberals credit for good decisions, regardless of who voted how. This could work. A recent column by Tom Teepen "proved" that Bork "Borked" himself by being outside the judicial mainstream. Rather than relating facts, Teepen repeated the baseless accusations. Years later, the Borked version is being repeated as truth. If the Democrats keep twisting the Supreme Court's voting record, people will start believing their version rather than the truth.

This last possibility assumes that Dean is a shrewd political operative who is willing to lie about important points.