Howard Dean, fresh from stereotyping minorities as hotel workers, has weighed in recently with two more bits of wisdom during a visit to Kansas.

As Mickey Kaus notes (by way of Polipundit), Dean ended a speech on Friday in Lawrence, Kansas with this statement: “This is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.” Wonderful. Pretty soon he’ll be calling George Bush “El Diablo”.

The worst part about Dean’s destructive rhetoric is that the rank and file take their cues about what’s acceptable from people like him. The local report on the Lawrence speech quotes Katherine Dessert, a “student and preschool teacher,” as demanding even more extremism. “I feel like he could have gone even stronger with his language… I feel like he was a little bit too conservative. It didn’t move me.” When preschool teachers want more red meat, you know we’re in trouble.

During a different speech in Topeka, Dean also said “I don’t believe the way to fix Social Security is to have Wall Street run it so that it can be invested in Enron and Tyco and MCI.” However, as I’ve pointed out before, Bush’s plan would not allow specific investments in individual securities. The index funds that investors could put their money represent a broad cross-section of corporations, and would not be appreciably impacted over the long term by individual corporate failures. There’s a larger issue here, of course, about the risks associated with investment in stocks, which can be quite high if you retire at the wrong time, but rather than making that argument, Dean is just throwing out tarnished corporate names to try to generate a negative association with Bush’s proposal. It’s not a reasoned argument.

Thanks Democratic National Committee!