The video is up at Crooks and Liars, and the transcript is up at MSNBC. Keith Olbermann has had two great Dean people on two nights in a row. I just never saw much of the transcript shared from last night.
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/08/31/howard-dean-makes-his-countdown-debut/DEAN: This time, we‘re not going to lay down and worry about what their supposed toughness on defense. The truth is, the defense issue works for us now. They have a war on terror, they have a war in Iraq, and they have a war on the middle class. They‘ve attacked people‘s—kids‘ ability to go to college, healthcare, wages have gone down. Katrina has been a mess. We‘re in a middle of a civil war in Iraq.
They don‘t know how to deal with anything. They can‘t get anything right, including defending America. You can‘t trust the Republicans with your money, you can‘t trust them to fix really big natural disasters, you can‘t trust them to defend America.
.....No amount of name-calling is going to save them. The majority of the American people do not believe the President Bush is telling the truth, the majority of the American people do not believe this administration is competent.
And a little more from the transcript. Bush claimed to Brian Williams that we did not start the war. He was wrong.
OLBERMANN: You said the president started this war. We‘ve already heard today from comments from the White House, even comments from the president speaking to Brian Williams in an interview we‘ll be playing in part in a few minutes, that the new terminology, as of tomorrow, is, we, meaning this country, did not start this war, meaning Iraq, plus counterterrorism, again merging these things. Is that going to be...
DEAN: Well, that is simply—well...
OLBERMANN: ... going to be...
DEAN: ... that‘s false. Look at Paul O‘Neill, the former secretary of treasury‘s book, an honest, decent guy, happens to be a Republican—there are honest, decent Republicans—who ran Alcoa Aluminum. He wrote in his book, written by Ron Susskind, he said that George Bush had said he was going to get rid of Saddam Hussein when he got into office in his first cabinet meeting. That was nine months before Iraq.
This administration has simply not told the truth.......What we‘re asking for is to get out of the gutter with this debate. We want real healthcare that works, we want jobs in America that stay in America, and we want a strong, tough, and honest defense policy, where we actually have some allies who respect our country.
We were the most respected country in the world before George Bush took office. And I want to be the most respected country in the world again, before this decade is over. And with a new election and a new way of doing things in a new direction, I think we can do that.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14601135/