A few days ago we had Ralph Peters in the New York Post ranting about Howard Dean's "Internet Gestapo" and comparing Dean to "Hitler's Brownshirts." Now Austin Bay, in a syndicated column, suggests, clearly only half in jest, that Dean is suffering from clinical dementia:

The sufferer whirls like a dervish, stumbles frequently, blinks before bright lights, occasionally whines through gritting teeth.
Mad cow disease? No — Mad How disease, the political bacillus spread by Park Avenue's Typhoid Mary of ulcerous anger, "Mad How"ard Dean.

Mad How is a variant infection of SARS — Scream and Rage Syndrome — a brain-eating, kuru-like plague afflicting the hard left of the Democratic Party, the hot-wigged activist and conspiracy theorist faction that forces even the sanest of Joe Liebermans and Dick Gephardts to madly kowtow.

Kuru? It's a malady cannibals catch, "a progressive, fatal degeneration of brain tissue, marked first by unsteadiness of stance ... loss of coordination ... exaggerated startle response ..." (See www.siu.edu/˜anthro/welch/Anth305/kuru.pdf.)

But, of course, the real political hate speech is calling people "neoconservatives." Rigfht, David Brooks?