Kathryn, I’m catching up after a day or so away, so apologies for the lag. If Dean is ‘confessing’ to some drug use, good for him. One of the more tiresome aspects of the current political scene is the way in which the personal lives of the candidates are put under such relentless scrutiny. It’s something that must scare off otherwise able candidates and it raises the hellish prospect of rule by a profoundly priggish collection of dullards, ’saints’ and liars. The test should be simple. So long as a candidate’s private conduct (and that means contemporary private conduct – college-age peccadilloes should rarely be of concern to any sane elector) is not in complete contradiction (we should always allow room for a little hypocrisy) to their legislative stance, it should be irrelevant and, generally, left under wraps. Nick Gillespie has a good piece over at Reason pointing out that this issue is (yet another) reason to lament the apparent end to Arnold’s run for the California governorship.