Ironically enough, Dean seems to be embracing the same fallback position as his old adversary Joe Lieberman, who's said regulate-only legislation is all he'd be willing to support if a public option is included in a comprehensive reform bill.

This is not true. Dean would of course support increasing Medicaid funding by making more less well off people eligible for Medicaid. And of course, even Ezra Klein concedes that Howard Dean proposed lowering the age for Medicare eligibility to 55. And Joe Lieberman has no objections whatsoever to mandates. But Kilgore and the Beltway have a different agenda - that is to convince you that health care reform must be good for the health insurance industry:

The problem, of course, is that absent an individual mandate to bring healthier people into the risk pool, or significant subsidies to lure them in, imposing a national system of community rating or guaranteed access to insurance on behalf of less robust Americans will likely boost private insurance premiums for everybody--not exactly an ideal outcome.

(Emphasis supplied.) Why these people need to be brought into the private insurance risk pool is not explained. Why these "healthier" people can not be brought into a PUBLIC insurance risk pool, thus lowering GOVERNMENT costs, is not explained.

Implicit in the analysis of Klein, Brownstein, Kilgore, Landrieux, and every Beltway type is the need for health care reform to be a Insurance Profits Protection Act.

Since Howard Dean does not accept that, he is their enemy. Since Howard Dean knows that in fact the health insurance industry is no friend to REAL health care reform, he must be attacked. Indeed, misstating what he says and thinks is now fair game. It is despicable.

And being enabled by all those good "progressives" in the"progressive" blogosphere who look the other way. Let the lionization of Max Baucus begin.

Speaking for me only