I watched part of the Democratic candidates’ debate from Des Moines last night. It was painful. It really was. If Howard Dean wins this nomination, it will set the Democratic Party back thirty years. This guy is clueless. Nothing he says corresponds to any reality. He simply has this ideas of how the world should be, and he gets upset if you don’t agree with him.

Al Sharpton, God bless him, really stuck it to Dean last night with a question about the number of minorities in Dean’s cabinet in Vermont. The look on Dean’s face was priceless. You could see his eyes darting back and forth, trying to find a response, but nothing was coming. He tried to use the old Trent Lott / Martin Luther King, Jr. joke from K Street, but it died. It was almost as great as the clip of Dean on Fox News retracting his statements about the Iowa caucuses from four years ago. This man can’t think on his feet to save his life.

Anyway, Wesley Clark was not as the debate, but the NY Times found some statments from Clark suggesting that even he thinks Iraq and al Qadea are linked

Less than a year before he entered the race for the Democratic nomination for president, Gen. Wesley K. Clark said that he believed there was a connection between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda.

The statement by General Clark in October 2002 as he endorsed a New Hampshire candidate for Congress is a sign of how the general’s position on Iraq seems to have changed over time, though he insists his position has been consistent.

“Certainly there’s a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda,” he said in 2002. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that they would be talking to Al Qaeda, that there would be some Al Qaeda there or that Saddam Hussein might even be, you know, discussing gee, I wonder since I don’t have any scuds and since the Americans are coming at me, I wonder if I could take advantage of Al Qaeda? How would I do it? Is it worth the risk? What could they do for me?”