After asking voters not to focus on “guns, God and gays,” Howard Dean is using Jesus in his campaign rhetoric – but only in the South. Dean is a “Congregationalist” (wtf is that?) and has a Jewish wife and children. Methinks that (a) Dean is too pragmatic to hold any kind of explicit abstract belief, and (b) Dean already has his bases loaded with deities to worship – like the environment and the “common good.” Cox and Forkum comments:

In other news, Dean thinks Bin Laden should be presumed innocent until a jury decides otherwise:

I’ve resisted pronouncing a sentence before guilt is found,” Dean said. “I still have this old-fashioned notion that even with people like Osama, who is very likely to be found guilty, we should do our best not to, in positions of executive power, not to prejudge jury trials.

Earth to Dean: There is an essential difference between a civilized, law-abiding country and a war zone. It is just as absurd to hold jury trials in a war zone, as it is to use machine guns and bombs against a common thief. Both Saddam and Bin Laden (if he is captured alive) should be tortured to obtain any relevant information and unceremoniously shot and dumped back into the hole they crawled from. If either is presumed innocent, then why did hundreds of U.S. soldier’s lives and uncounted billions of dollars go to kill them?