The Speech

If Howard Dean meant to leave Iowa as a serious candidate with one of the treasured 'three tickets out,' any such intention was obscured by the rant he delivered to the faithful after over 80% of Iowa caucus goers rejected his campaign.

In a classic red-faced, finger-pointing, Mad Howard extravaganza that The Note notes that "...even Drudge isn't overreacting to," Dean put Nice Howard in the closet, while using Tom Harkin as a coat rack.

Am I overreacting? Well, when a Presidential candidate manages to shock Howard Stern I don't think overreaction is possible. Stern, who described the yowl that capped Dean's diatribe as "the cry he makes when he gets Little Howie stuck in the zipper," dubbed the Dean performance over an AC-DC track and found it made better heavy metal than political discourse.

Maybe USA Today's Walter Shapiro knew what he was talking about when he described HoHo as reminiscient of an "aging rock star reduced to reprising his greatest hits in smaller and smaller clubs."

All the reviews aren't bad, though. Matt Welch liked it. "Boy, That Dean's a Crazy Sonofabitch Ain't He? But not necessarily in a bad way! I kinda liked his barking madman routine, why the hell not?" he writes, summing up with "I kind of like the idea of a crazy man running for president, but my tastes have long been unsound…."