''Democrats, don't put muzzle on Dean''

"Instead of muzzling Howard Dean, Democrats should give him a bullhorn. Rather than urging him to retreat from his attack on Republicans, party leaders ought to send him off to a political war college - preferably the one the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater attended. As chairman of the Democratic Party, which is teetering between political renewal and functional extinction, Dean should be making war, not peace. But that's exactly what his critics within the party seemed to be suggesting last week when they admonished him for his tough talk about Republicans. Americans, for the most part, love politicians who fight for what they believe - and they abhor political wimps. Dean is a fighter, albeit one who needs to learn that in an ideological spat, a well-placed jab often can do more damage than a barrage of roundhouse punches. But he can't learn that lesson if Democrats won't let him take the fight to the GOP."-from the op-ed by DeWayne Wickham, and this is the surprising part, who writes weekly for USA TODAY.