I’ve been doing this blogging thing since about… 2002 or 2003, depending on how you score things; so in a weird sort of way 2004 was my first Presidential election. It was certainly the first one where I was actually paying real attention about what was going on, particularly when it came to stuff that happened before Labor Day 2004 (which is when most people start paying attention to Presidential elections). And, of course, if you followed the ’04 race you were following Howard Dean. The passion! The amazing fundraising! The fierce devotion to the antiwar cause! Particularly that last one; Howard Dean was the Great Hope of the netroots. He was the antiwar guy who had a shot at the nomination. Dean was the guy who spoke “truth to power” about the War in Iraq.

Well, as one of the bards of my childhood put it: Prepare the viands, prepare the foods, prepare the strange wines, for tonight indeed is a great night! …And it is. I’ve been waiting a decade for this preordained event.

Former DNC chairman Howard Dean supports President Obama’s call for a punitive military strike against Syria.

“Thus far I fully support the president, including his going to Congress,” Dean said in an email to The Hill.

Now, Allahpundit has already demolished the blazes out of Howard Dean’s immediate defense, so I’m going to quote the relevant bit:

Why was Dean the obvious choice to flip next? Because he’s already flipped before. He supported Obama’s attack on Libya too and, then as now, tried to distinguish his strident opposition to the Iraq war by claiming that that involved being lied to by the government. That’s the touchstone for intervention apparently, according to Dean: As long as the president’s being kinda sorta honest with you about why he’s attacking, you can support his stupid, futile military operation against a bad actor in the Middle East with a clear conscience. Except, of course, Dean’s lying himself. Go back and read his anti-war speech in Iowa from February 2003, a month before the invasion of Iraq and many months before he had reason to believe he was “lied to” about WMD, to see why he opposed the war at the time. The short version: He saw a political opportunity on the left ahead of the 2004 primaries and decided to seize it.

…and suggest that you read the rest of Allahpundit’s post*. Meanwhile, let me twist the knife a little; is this really who the antiwar movement pinned all of their hopes on? Is this who they broke all those bats and attended all those meetups and generally made unholy nuisances of themselves for? A guy who has wasted no time in demonstrating that his major concern about any given war is whether a Democratic President can take credit for the good results? I mean, I understand that people ended friendships over this guy.  Over Howard Dean.

The mind, it reels.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: I don’t think that anybody’s going to be able to get any of their money back from Howard Dean, either.

*Expect a lot of push-back on Howard Dean’s sudden yet inevitable betrayal, of course. The brutal truth of the matter is that Dean (as Allahpundit noted) adopted, and then retroactively applied, the Democratic line on WMDs for the same reason that his compatriots did; the issue appeared to have traction among the American voting public. That would be… not ‘fine,’ but also not surprising. What’s surprising is that Howard Dean apparently doesn’t know that you can look things up on the Internet. He doesn’t seem to grok that some of us have long memories, too.