Instead of trusting Joe Lieberman's characterization of what Howard Dean said yesterday ("If he truly believes the capture of this evil man has not made America safer, then Howard Dean has put himself in his own spider hole of denial"), maybe you should consider reading the speech itself. It's here.

I'm still not on the Dean bandwagon, but it's an utterly reasonable speech. And as for the sentence that got Lieberman so exercised, it was part of a matched pair:

The capture of Saddam is a good thing which I hope very much will help keep our soldiers safer. But the capture of Saddam has not made America safer.

What's controversial about this? Dean is saying that over there the troops might be safer, though we don't know for sure -- which is conventional wisdom -- but that Saddam, while not a threat to anyone now, wasn't a threat to us over here even before his capture. Does Lieberman have any evidence to the contrary? As a result of sanctions and inspections and no-fly-zone bombs, Saddam had nothing with which he could harm us stateside even in his last years in power -- does Lieberman think he obtained terror weapons and the means to deploy them when he was in the hole? Well, Joe?