Congratulations, democrats -- it looks like your front-runner really
DOES reflect the "values" of your party...

You should be proud.



Howard Dean's Racist Hatefest
By Deborah Orin
New York Post | December 17, 2003


You won't be seeing any video of Howard Dean's x-rated, epithet-ridden
New York fund-raiser because Team Dean made sure to bar the TV
cameras. Which suggests they expected trouble.
Maybe it was the same foresight that inspired Dean to seal his records
as Vermont governor for 10 years because of worries, as he put it in a
moment of candor to Vermont public radio, about "future political
considerations. We didn't want anything embarrassing appearing in the
papers at a critical time in any future endeavor."

So there were no TV cameras last Monday night when pro-Dean comics
took the stage on West 18th St. in Chelsea at a $250-a-head Dean
fund-raiser (reduced from $500) and competed to see how often they
could use the F-word in the same sentence.

Comic Judy Gold dissed President Bush as "this piece of living,
breathing s---" and Janeane Garofalo ridiculed the Medicare
prescription-drug bill that Bush had just signed as the "you can go
f--- yourself, Grandma" bill.

Just a few days before, rival John Kerry had used the F-word to attack
Bush in Rolling Stone magazine in an apparent bid to sound hip, but
Dean's event was "enough to make John Kerry blush," as rival Dick
Gephardt's spokesman Erik Smith tartly put it.

And the Dean event got a lot worse. Comedian David Cross used the
N-word for blacks in a disjointed "joke" apparently based on the
premise that it's fine for a pro-Dean comic to use racial epithets as
long as the goal is to claim Republicans are racists.

Comic Kate Clinton evoked Michael Jackson (hit with new
child-sex-abuse charges) and said: "Frankly, I'm far more frightened
of Condoleezza Rice" - the Bush national security adviser who has
nothing in common with Jackson except being black.

Rice seems to drive liberal woman comics especially nuts. Sandra
Bernhard insulted her in racial terms with a "Yes Massa" accent at
another Dean fundraiser the same night. Perhaps the pro-Dean comics
find it unbearable that the most powerful black woman in U.S. history,
close friend to the president and his wife - and a brilliant classical
pianist to boot - dares to be a Republican.

Actually, there was something to offend everyone. Dean rival Joe
Lieberman got ridiculed for being unable to campaign on Jewish
holidays because he's Orthodox. Vice President Dick Cheney was accused
of talking "like Mary Jo Buttafuoco."

Cheney's wife Lynne was called "Lon Chaney" - the long-ago movie star
who specialized in playing ghouls in horror films. And Cheney's
daughter Mary, who is gay, was called "a big lezzie."

Even the apolitical "jokes" were ugly - like a suggestion that it's
bizarre to see an Asian baby with Asian parents because so many Asian
babies are adopted by whites.

As all this hate was getting spewed out, Dean sat backstage listening.
Aides say he was fuming, so livid that he almost refused to come out
to talk to the crowd. When he did, he began by saying some of the
language was "wrong" and "I just don't have much tolerance for ethnic
humor." But he didn't refer to all the X-rated anti-Bush and
anti-Cheney attacks.

More to the point, he did nothing to stop the hate session. It was,
after all, Dean's fund-raiser. He had the power (to use Dean's
favorite phrase) to come right out on stage and say the "jokes" were
unacceptable and he wanted it stoblasted rapper Sister Souljah for
anti-white words "filled with hatred."

If there had been TV cameras, it could have been really bad news for
Dean. As it was, he got off pretty lightly. The Post reported the
story and the Times ran a teensy-weensy account buried on page B-6 of
the Metro section.

Republicans are fuming. They say that if anything like this had
happened at an event where a top Republican was present and did
nothing to stop it, the media would rage about it for weeks.

"It's disgraceful. It's like an Upper West Side Manhattan left-wing Ku
Klux Klan mentality," said Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.). "If some Southern
redneck talked like this about a liberal, everyone would denounce it.
But because it's Upper West Side humor, somehow it's supposed to be
chic."