Unsettling shades of Pat Buchanan and Sarah Palin here.
Not at all. The former can be abrasive and the latter is a moron, but these aren't the sorts of things they say. Howard Dean says horrible things regularly. You may be too young to remember the 2000 primary campaign. He spent more time insulting the GOP primary voters than trying to win that primary election. He is very well known to be an intolerant bigot toward Republicans, and an islamophobe as well. To be fair, he is probably not a major-league asshole on par with Rush Limbaugh or Bill Maher, but he doesn't have the best "bedside manner" and much was written about that in the 2000 campaign. (Social skills are something we talk about regularly with my irregularly willful son just now.) I perceived that Dean was a thorough jerk at the time, and I was surprised when he was made the DNC chairman. As it turns out, he performed well in that job. In fact, he had an extremely successful tenure as DNC chairman. We had several threads about him some ten years ago, and I had to admit that he was well-suited to that position. I guess you don't have to have a personality to do that job. Anyway, this sort of comment is nothing unusual from Howard Dean. I certainly wouldn't expect Obama to appoint him to any post in the State Department.
