Molly Ivins on people's strange reactions to Howard Dean, as quoted over in a dKos diary:

Meanwhile, the punditry is busy cranking out mostly pro forma hail-and-farewells to my man Howard Dean. I hate whining and life is not fair, but I still think a whole lot of people who should have known better freaked out over Dean, treating a mostly mild-mannered, perfectly sensible and quite cheerful fellow as some kind of anti-establishment antichrist. I mean, he was governor of Vermont for 10 years, not Lenin.

[...] What was so scary about Howard Dean? Could it be because he (and some very bright young people who worked with him) found this way to raise real money in small amounts from regular people, and that just threatened the hell out of a lot of big corporate special interests? And out of an entire political establishment that is entirely too comfortable with the incestuous relationship between big money and politics? For just a moment in time, Dean was ahead of the pack -- and no one owned him. Go back and look at whom that scared.

[...] I think we owe Howard Dean more than a, "Gee thanks for participating in our noble political system." Personally, I'd like to say, "Gee, thanks for helping keep democracy alive when it looked fairly dicey."

Right on, sister Molly. In the midst of my now-reinforced disgust with traditional party politics, the very existence of a guy like Howard Dean is an encouragement. More cynically, while it strikes me that he's been politically assassinated this round, at least it wasn't a literal assassination this time, and so there's still some small hope for the future. How Dean chooses to focus his energy henceforth will be very interesting.