There has been so much ugliness directed at Dean from FL and MI and from the Clinton campaign...that it was almost a relief to hear Barack Obama have a few soothing words for him last night.



Isn't something wrong when it is worthy of a newspaper article because someone said something decent about the party chairman. It is kind of a sad thing, and it shows how terribly divided we have become.

I don't ever remember a time when the campaign of a candidate for president openly, loudly, and constantly mocked or attacked the chairman of the party because that chairman was following party rules. Carl Levin of Michigan got ticked off at Chairman Terry McAuliffe when he said he would not seat MI at the convention in Boston if they broke the rules.

But no one us even knew about it...they settled it with a deal to form a commission. The commission appointed by Terry to make Levin back off is the one that made the rules that Chairman Howard Dean is enforcing. It is the same committee that sanctioned FL and MI in the first place.

I see people talking about Hillary Clinton's "nuclear option" to get the Florida delegates. Why the surprise? She has been saying this for months. It is no secret at all.

Hillary herself talked about it in a recent interview with the St Pete Times. The interview was a mixture of words saying the DNC should decide, but then implying they should decide her way or there would be consequences.



Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, shown in a congressional hearing last week, told the Times on Sunday, “It’s always been my hope and my expectation that we would be smart enough to figure out we don’t want to alienate 1.75-million voters in Florida."



There have been protests throughout Florida organized by her campaign, although they are using so called non-partisan groups to organize the rallies. There was a protest in front of the DNC in which they taunted Dean in yells to "act like a man, Howard." Childish stuff.

Bill Nelson threatened blood on the convention floor. Wasserman Schultz has continued the conversation. Both have implied that Florida will vote Republican if Hillary does not get her way. And I am not even going to talk about Corinne Brown's constant calls to Dean to resign.

There is a lawsuit going on now that is so idiotic that the two filing it don't even believe in it. But they are so well funded and so into this lawsuit stuff that they are even invoking Rule 11, using it to get to the Supreme Court by August.

So why the surprise. Her campaign has said so, Florida has said so.
Someone in a post yesterday here accused me of being a dog with a bone about the Florida issue. That person is right.

I can not believe more are not absolutely livid at the attempts to split our party. It has even become popular to make fun of the rules, like it is somehow old-fashioned to think a party needs such silly things as rules.

It has been made popular now to ridicule a party leader who has the longterm interests of the party in mind. It has become common for McAuliffe who preceded Dean to miss no effort to follow the campaign's rhetoric about "disenfranchisement."

I must give credit to the Clinton campaign. They are brilliant strategists, unswerving, unwavering. Their tactics work, the tactics of ridicule and the use of wedge issues.

Sadly their tactics have worked so well in Florida, where the bloggers and media are totally complicit with the state party....that they actually think they are victims.