Dean's recent comments, attacking Republicans for this and that ("I hate all Republicans and everything they stand for", "The Republican party is a party of white Christians who are not very friendly to different kinds of people", "Republicans never made an honest living in their lives", etc.) have gotten a quite a bit of negative coverage in the mainstream media. Most people say this is unfair, that the quotes are taken out of context, etc.
I disagree.
I think Dean is doing this on purpose, setting himself to be attacked in the media, in a good cop/bad cop routinue. He has set himself up to be "bad cop", the attack dog. Our canidates and elected officials are the "good cops", distancing themselves from the comments. This allows the message "Republicans suck ass" to get repeated in MSM over and over again (which is very hard to do these days), without any Democratic elected official having to say it-nobody is going to be voting for Dean for any office any time soon. Whether our canidates and elected officials (who distance themselves from Dean's comments) are in on it and playing their role, or just being timid and backing down, doesn't really matter-it's quite effective either way. This way, the negative, anti-Republican message gets out there, but in a way not directly tied to our canidates. It's quite brilliant, really.