Here's an excerpt from Howard Dean's Rolling Stone interview :
Q: In Iowa, an unnamed Democratic group was running ads against you that somehow implied that your policies would help Osama bin Laden.
A: I'm disturbed by the Democratic attack ads. When we find out who's running them, they're going to be unelectable, and they'll have no future in politics.
Q: Why's that?
A: Because they're being funded by enormous special-interest groups -- we don't know who they are yet. That is the old Democratic Party, the Democratic Party that can't possibly win. If you're a politician who relies on special interests, trying to run against the president, who relies on special interests, you really don't have much of a case to be president.
Q: You criticized the president for not standing up to Saudi Arabia. What would you do to confront the Saudis?
A: First of all, I'd get off foreign oil. All it means is enormous investment in renewables. Wind -- the Danes get twenty percent of all their electricity from wind. We can do something very close to that. Solar -- you've got to change the tax laws and have a massive effort to do that. Oil conservation -- if you had the same mileage requirements for SUVs and trucks as you did for the rest of the fleet, every year you'd save the entire amount of oil that's supposed to be in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Q: How do you feel about the president's policy of limiting stem-cell research? Do you think he did that to mollify his supporters on the religious right?
A: I don't know what drove the president to his restrictions on stem-cell research. But I can tell you: This president should never get the vote of any family with a diabetic in it, under any circumstances, because of what he's done to dash the hopes of small children of recovering. And not just diabetes but all manner of potentially curable diseases. I think his slavish adherence to anti-scientific thinking is costing people their lives and their hopes all over the country.
Q: How about John Ashcroft?
A: He doesn't represent the mainstream. He doesn't care, and he believes he literally has the God-given right to enforce his views on every other American.
Q: Irrespective of what the Constitution says?
A: That's what I believe. You'd never get them to admit that, but that's what they're up to. This administration intends to remake America by appointing judges who will rewrite the Constitution by their court decisions. These guys are not driven by real-world considerations. They're driven by an ideological view of the country, which they believe, literally, it's their God-given right to inflict on everybody else. And this election's going to show, I hope, that it's not their God-given right, and that we don't want it.
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