While the rest of the Morning Joe crew relentlessly lambasted Herman Cain for his befuddled response to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel‘s questions on Libya, Howard Dean came to the beleaguered Republican candidate’s rescue. “I don’t think that was that awful. Look, I don’t think –” Dean argued, before being drowned out by the other commentators. [...]

Rachel Maddow does not think the sexual harassment charges against Herman Cain are the most devastating development to a candidate from this weekend. In fact, she thinks his campaign might survive. But what won’t see the light of day for much longer, Maddow concludes, is the Rick Perry effort, after a 25-minute speech of bizarre, excited, slurred, and manic display at a Cornerstone event in New Hampshire this weekend.

As Howard Dean seems to see it, anyone gunning for a win in the 2012 presidential election is going to face the same problem: the Tea Party. “They are not playing with a full deck,” he said earlier today on Morning Joe, arguing that they make for an unpredictable voter base. “I’ve never seen this on the Republican side,” he continued. “They are usually much more disciplined.”

“I think the President’s team has been rather brilliant in putting this one together,” said former DNC chair Howard Dean, speaking on the American Jobs Act with Lawrence O’Donnell last night, sounding confident and convinced that the bill puts sufficient pressure on Republicans to get passed. “It would be hard to devise a better bill than this to put these guys on the griddle,” he said. “They’re in big trouble”

Former DNC Chair and current Vermont governor Howard Dean and former RNC Chair Michael Steele waded into the murky waters of political doctrine on today’s Morning Joe, pitting the former president George W. Bush‘s foreign policy against President Obama‘s, and then, ultimately setting the whole thing aside because, as Dean himself said, “that’s not what the election is going to be fought on; it’s going to be fought on economy.”

While some on Morning Joe were less than enthused with President Obama’s press conference performance yesterday, Howard Dean also stopped by to let the panel know he thought Obama was great, since “we all love it when he comes out fighting.” And especially since Dean thinks the Republicans are being completely unreasonable with their demands on the budget, Dean is happy to have Obama turning up the heat on Congress.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean is telling his fellow Democrats not to eagerly encourage Sarah Palin to run for President, thinking that she would be the easiest for President Obama to defeat. Dean is warning his party, “she wouldn’t be my first choice if I were a Republican but I think she could win.”

For all the breathless media hoopla and rumors around a possible rift between Glenn Beck and Fox News, you have to admit that he’s one of his network’s most ardent supporters on air. While he wasn’t the first to defend Fox News against Howard Dean’s comments from last week, he did give it a whole segment of his show today. It didn’t hurt that Dean dissed the Tea Party in addition to Fox News, something that Beck claimed indicated the former presidential nominee may be suffering from “dementia.”

When former Democratic National Committee chair/former Democratic presidential hopeful/yeller Howard Dean recently criticized Fox News as nothing more than “a very expensive, incredibly well-funded, right-wing propaganda organization,” it was only a matter of time before someone at the network responded. Today, On the Record anchor Greta Van Susteren did.

Former Democratic candidate for President Howard Dean unleashed some harsh comments about the Tea Party, Republicans and Fox News, in a recent speech at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. Warning that “the right wing desire to run things differently is threatening to the country,” Dean (the self-described “professional media hater”) proves here to be willing to hold nothing back.

The discussion on Libya certainly makes for some strange bedfellows. On Morning Joe liberal columnist Joe Klein and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan agreed that American military involvement in Libya was not a good idea, while former anti-war Democratic candidate Howard Dean was all for it.

On Wednesday night’s Countdown, host Keith Olbermann made a somewhat cryptic reference to the “Professional Left” flap, saying that he knew “from conversations at the time” that the kerfuffle was caused by “a combination of not setting ground rules with some reporters, and a lot of misunderstandings and frustrations.” He didn’t go into detail, possibly because conversations were off the record, so I reached out to the reporter who conducted the interview, The Hill‘s Sam Youngman.

On a day when many Tea Party-influenced Republican members of Congress are taking the oath of office in Washington, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean revealed his true thoughts about the Tea Party movement at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast. Although he doesn’t think Tea Party members are racist, he does think “it’s the last gasp of the 55-year-old generation . . . a group of older folks who’ve seen their lives change dramatically.”

Former Vermont governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean‘s convinced the just-arrived Tea Party members of Congress have a fundamental problem, that their beliefs can’t be translated into effective policy now that they have to govern: “The Tea Party leadership is basically fraudulent,” Dean said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Dean told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough he thinks John Boehner has the capacity to be a “very competent” Speaker.

Former Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson is a bit wary of the Tea Party movement, to say the least, but still considers himself a conservative. Defending his position to an increasingly incredulous Laura Ingraham on The O’Reilly Factor last night, however, he found himself fighting comparisons to DNC chair Howard Dean, the progressive website MoveOn.org, and a certain allegedly left-of-center cable network

Remember way back two weeks ago when Robert Gibbs pissed much of the media off with his complaint about the “professional left“? Well, Howard Dean does, and he circled back to it today on CNN’s State of the Union telling Candy Crowley that the real problem is not the “professional left” which doesn’t really exist, but the “people around the president [who] have really misjudged what goes on elsewhere in the country.”

The debate over the Islamic community center in lower Manhattan as not just caused a rift in the local community affected by it. By making a national impact, it has put traditional political allies like Keith Olbermann and former DNC chair Howard Dean on opposite sides of the debate. Tonight, Olbermann and Dean met on Countdown, and the discussion felt like watching two old friends talk out an uncomfortable disagreement over lunch.

Today on MSNBC’s Hardball, Chris Matthews tried to debate Salon‘s Joan Walsh and former Gov. Howard Dean that Andrew Breitbart‘s version of the controversial Shirley Sherrod speech was completely unedited. Considering there were about 35 minutes missing from that tape, this was wrong for obvious reasons. But if you caught the 7PM rerun, you wouldn’t have seen that, because Hardball retaped the segment, this time with Matthews admitting the Breitbart version was incomplete.

There has been so much reported on Shirley Sherrod and Andrew Breitbart that it’s hard to believe that there are actually news junkies out there who don’t understand the story, but they apparently exist. What’s harder to imagine is that a television news anchor like Chris Matthews happens to be one of them. In today’s opening segment on Hardball, Matthews debated Howard Dean and Salon Editor-in-Chief Joan Walsh about the tape, and steadfastly refused to believe that Breitbart published an edited version of the clip. Huh?

The most important story on cable news last week has continued into this week – Fox News was back talking about the Shirley Sherrod saga on TV and online.

Bret Baier responded with video evidence to Howard Dean‘s latest charges, while FNC admitted there had been an online “breakdown” in the publication of a story about Sherrod before it was announced she resigned.

Former Governor Howard Dean drew a characteristic rebuke from Fox News’ Michael Clemente when he accused the network of “absolutely racist” coverage of the Shirley Sherrod story. Clemente called Dean a “failed candidate” who “blame(s) Fox for almost anything.”

Speaking to Dylan Ratigan fill-in and Young Turks host Cenk Uygur, Dean stood by his comments, and dismissed Clemente’s criticism, while Cenk noted the long roster of “failed candidates” who populate Fox’s air. (h/t Aaron Wysocki)

Fireworks on Fox News this morning thanks to the guest pairing of Howard Dean and Newt Gingrich. In the aftermath of the Shirley Sherrod firing it’s interesting to see what fingers are pointing where. Howard Dean’s are pointing directly at Fox News, who he called “absolutely racist” in their coverage of Sherrod.

Do you ever wonder why it’s always that one conservative aunt that forwards you those chain emails about Barack Obama‘s secret plot to turn America into a socialist utopia? Salon‘s perusal of internet rumors in the last decade shows that conservatives are both more likely to spread false rumors about liberals via fowarded emails that liberals are about their opponents.

The Snowpocalypse has given skeptics a reason to dance on the frozen grave of climate change, from Sean Hannity to Matt Drudge to Senator Jim Inhofe‘s grandkids. Needless to say, it is driving the greener-than-thou community and the scientists who actually study this material crazy. Case in point: former DNC chair Howard Dean on ABC News last night expressing complete loss of belief in the legitimacy of Republican global warming detractors and claiming they simply “don’t believe in science.”

At about 1 a.m. this morning, Senate Democrats prevailed in a procedural vote that moved the health reform bill towards final passage this week. But on the eve of that vote, former DNC Chairman Howard Dean continued in his high-profile criticism of the bill from the left. Speaking on Meet the Press, Dean said that he “would certainly not vote for this bill if this were the final product:”