One can understand Chuck Schumer being caught unawares as he was game-theorying, to Senate colleagues, the opposition's "extreme"-ness as a delicious, shutdown talking point. He didn't know. But this, from a presumably aware Howard Dean, is unpardonable:
"If I was head of DNC, I would be quietly rooting for it," said Dean, speaking on a National Journal Insider’s Conference panel Tuesday morning. "I know who’s going to get blamed – we’ve been down this road before.
"From a partisan point of view, I think it would be the best thing in the world to have a shutdown," said Dean. He added that as a statesman, he is not rooting for a shutdown because of its harmful effect on the country.
He added? A "statesman" doesn't add that the nation's welfare is, oh, by the way, of paramount importance, seeing how the latter remark's common sense gets washed out by the torrent of the opposition's glee over the former's stupidity.
I started to write something to the effect of Dean's gaffe being "unbelievable," but these are, after all, professional Democrats we're talking about -- an incomprehensible assembly of strategy-bleeding bumblers who can screw up even the most mouth-watering, the most drool-worthy of political opportunities.