So Howard Dean made headlines this week because he said that the Republican party pretty much all looked alike and they were the party of the white Christian males. Muddle-headed Dems like John Edwards and Joe Biden played into the GOP’s media strategy by criticizing Dean, making us look divided and chipping away at his leadership, instead of focusing their outrage at the pack of whoppers delivered every day by the Repugnicans in power.

But whaddaya know… Dean is absolutely right (via AMERICAblog):

[A] new book about America’s political divisions notes that the 99 percent of all Republican legislators across the country and in Congress are white. The national Republican Party, whose base is in the South, the Plains and the Mountain states, looks to white men as its power base and source of leadership. Even when Republican states have significant minority populations, the elected Republican representatives rarely are drawn from those communities.

Of 3,643 Republicans serving in the state legislatures, only 44 are minorities, or 1.2 percent. In the Congress, with 274 of the 535 elected senators and representatives Republican, only five are minorities – three Cuban Americans from Florida, a Mexican American from Texas and a Native American senator originally elected as a Democrat.

President Bush’s home state leads the way. Texas, with a minority population of 47 percent, has 106 Republicans in the state legislature, but there are 0 blacks and 0 Hispanics among them.

Dean was right about the Iraq War. Dean was right about not being safer with Saddam out of power. Dean was right about Southern white guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks voting against their own interests. Yes, he’s brash, he shoots from the hip, he can be a little impolitic, but damn it, it’s time somebody with a “D” behind their name abandoned the fear of offending the offensive right, shook up the mushy middle, and stood up for the enlightened left with the same temerity and bravado of a Bush stump speech in the Bible Belt.

I volunteered for and voted for Kerry because he was not Bush, and all I got was an ineffective lecturer without the balls to fight fire with fire (and wishy-washiness on war and gay rights). I should have put more energy (and much earlier) behind Maple Powered Howard.