I had to write my syndicated column and my London Times column late last night and early this morning. G-File coming tomorrow by the way. But here’s a snippet from the (as yet unedited) synidcated column:

So how did Dean jump the shark? Well, I think the moment was when he greeted his supporters in Iowa after it was clear he came in a meager third place behind John Kerry and John Edwards.
He ran out to the crowds. Waved a flag around, wore one of his campaigns cute yellow hats, peeled off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. “You know something?” Dean asked the crowd. “If you had told us one year ago that we were going to come in third in Iowa, we would have given anything for that.”
Okay fair enough. You’ve got to say something uplifting to your supporters when the voters drop you like a fifty-pound bag of Iowa dirt. You can’t just mope like a big dog whose food bowl’s been moved. But then the ravages of “Mad How” disease started to show. “Not only are we going to New Hampshire,” he exhorted, his voice managing to get deeper and shriller at the same time. “We’re going to South Carolina and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we’re going to California and Texas and New York. And we’re going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we’re going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House.”
He then let loose what could only be called a primal scream: “YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAGGGHHHHHH!”
Okay it could be called other things too. But whatever it was, he sounded like he meant to go to a proctologist but accidentally visited a chimney sweep instead.
…Now, compared to some of the other things Dean has said over the last year, his nice list of states is, on the merits, not a big deal. Even his blood curdling scream probably isn’t anything new to the people who know him best.
But it was something new to lots of Americans. Moreover, at the very moment the voters had declared they wanted more moderate and reasonable candidates, Dean gave them undiluted rage. Disc jockeys like Howard Stern are already – unfairly it should be said — playing his diatribe against the soundtrack of Nuremberg rallies.
Dean has spent the better part of a year running as the candidate of rage. With his bulging neck and slightly mirrored eyes, he even looks like the Hulk in that interim stage in-between man and monster, you know right before he rips out of his clothes and turns green. He may have talked about domestic policy, but his popularity was due to a single issue: his neck-bulging opposition to the war. And yet three-fourths of Iowa caucus voters opposed the war, but they still dropped Dean like a bag of dirt in favor of two men who voted for it.
In short, at just the moment Dean should have made it clear he’s more than just his bezerker schtick, he decided to make a parody of himself. In other words, he jumped the shark.