Dean on Fox responds to the Carville stuff. Replays on Fox News at 6:00 Eastern [View All]

[madfloridian]

The transcript is interesting. A few of the statements:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,228923,00.html

He says Conservative and Liberal don't mean much right now, the country is in trouble.

DEAN: First of all, I think the words conservative and liberal are now meaningless. You have a conservative president who ran up the biggest budget deficit in the history of America. I don't know what those words mean anymore.

And about Iraq:

The vast majority of the American people believe the truth, which is that it was a mistake to get into Iraq in the first place. That the president does not believe, but we — everybody in America understands that we cannot stay — except possibly the president and Vice President Cheney, understands that we cannot stay in Iraq forever. We can't have a stay-the-course mentality. We need to get out of Iraq. The question is how we can do that. We hope to work with the president to bring our troops home.

Keeping 140,000 brave Americans in Iraq is not making America safer. It's very clear that it's not made America safer. And the American people just voted to say send some folks in there who are willing to be tough and smart about how we defend the country.

WALLACE: But cut our losses is what the message you get from this election is.

DEAN: Yeah, don't stay in Iraq. We're not going to put up with terrorism in Iraq or anyplace else, but we can't keep 140,000 brave Americans in Iraq indefinitely. Did not we learn this lesson in Vietnam?

And about Carville and Ford...I think if he and Harold Ford talked about it, then it was taken as a serious thing. These kind of attacks by gravy train strategists need to stop.

First of all, what do you make of this criticism, and do you have any intention of stepping down?

DEAN: I have to say I get a laugh out of that one. Here we have — let's leave the federal races aside, because the DCCC and the DSCC did do a wonderful job. But the truth is we got six additional governors. We got nine additional legislative chambers. New Hampshire now has a Democratic house and senate for the first time in a century.

We did great. And I think the time really has come now, now that we're in power, at least in the Congress, to pull together, to be unified. We've got a lot to do in the next two years. We've got to elect a Democratic president, and so...

WALLACE: Do you have any intention of stepping down?

DEAN: No. I talked to Harold last night, and he has no — he doesn't want the job. This is some kind of inside the Beltway silliness.