R. Emmitt Tyrell: Pariah Status For Dean

R. Emmett Tyrrell, in the New York Sun (6-16-05):

[Mr. Tyrrell is the founder and editor in chief of the American Spectator, a contributing editor to The New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute.]

He is a skilled politician talking to his party's activists, and this "raw meat" is just what his activists want. . . . The activists are by nature excitable and actually in need of excitement. Dr. Dean understands them. . . .

The paranoiacs in the Democratic Party are those who talk of a "vast right-wing conspiracy," to a general audience of American television watchers. They are the Democratic leaders who accuse journalists of playing "into the service of the right wing," as Democratic minority leader Richard Durbin recently did when he chastised the press for reporting Dr. Dean's outbursts. Mr. Durbin went on, "I think we understand what's happening with you all [the journalists]. The right wing has got the agenda moving. . . . You've bought into it. You can't let up on it. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves."

Now that is another example of what in American history is called the paranoid style. It seems to afflict many leaders of the Democratic Party, first the Clintons, now Mr. Durbin. By comparison with them, Dr. Dean is a perfectly sensible chairman of his party.