Kathryn, that’s terrible news about Dean. I was already missing his election coverage over at The Weekly Standard. Even though he’d been under the shadow of death for years, he was such a grand example of someone who, gloomy odds notwithstanding, just gets on with living his life and pursuing his dreams that I assumed he’d beat this latest setback like all the others. Sitting in for Hugh Hewitt, he interviewed me just a couple of weeks ago and had the best line of the exchange, talking about Charlie Gibson clucking like a metrosexual schoolmarm. He was a good-humored partisan, which is ever more an endangered species, and he always remembered to see the comedy in his own side.

When I was on the radio with him, he liked to call it “All-Accent Thursday”. The first time I heard him I vaguely wondered whether the extra-thick chowdah accent was some kind of put-on, but he talked like that off-air, too. If he’d gone to some career advisor, they’d have said, “Radio? With those vowels? Only after vocal-chord implants.” But he was funny and insightful in a way that a lot of guys with the million-dollar dulcet tones aren’t, and so he got to host a nationally syndicated show coast to coast. He was a natural blogger and broadcaster, and, while it’s a tragedy that it should all end just as he’d found a national audience for his talents, he went a long way in his short life. I shall miss him enormously.