ONE MORE POINT ABOUT DEAN'S SOVIET "GAFFE"

From the Hardball transcript to which Taranto links:

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Governor Dean, could you tell us how your administration will actually get bin Laden?
(LAUGHTER)
DEAN: I think this president is conducting the war on terror in exactly the wrong way. About three months ago, ABC News smuggled uranium into Los Angeles, California, from Jakarta, Indonesia, and we didn’t find out about it. That was the purpose, just to see if they could do it. And they did.
We’re spending a lot of money in Iraq. We’re spending money building tactical battlefield nuclear weapons, which are never going to be helpful fighting terrorism. And we’re not spending money on human intelligence and on cyber-intelligence and on cargo inspection and on buying the enriched uranium stocks of the former Soviet Union. If that stuff gets in terrorist hands, we have a major national security problem.
So what we’re going to do is focus on terrorism and not on nation states, unless the nation states merge with the terrorist organization, as they did in Afghanistan. And I supported the action we took in Afghanistan to fight terror.
But, by and large, this president, I don’t believe, has any idea how to fight terror. And I don’t think he is being particularly successful at it either. (emphasis TFM's)

This was earlier in the interview, a few minutes before the supposedly offending portion. So let's suppose, then, that in the Iran response Howard Dean was referring to all the former Soviet republics that could be giving nuclear equipment to Iran. It's a bit unwieldly to keep saying "the former Soviet Union" or "the former Soviet republics" at that frequency. So he said what he said, and we know what he meant. If you have a problem with that, of if you're a conservative pretending to have a problem with that, then you're an idiot trying to play gotcha.