Regrets, I may have had a few

How I loathe what we should go ahead and call the Trent Lott formula of contrition. A classic of the genre was uttered yesterday by Howard Dean, who, you'll recall, caught hell for cultivating the votes of people who put Confederate flags on their vehicles. He said in reponse, "I deeply regret the pain that I may have caused."

All he had to do was omit the words "may" and "have," and he would have sounded sincere rather than, well, like a politician.

An editorial in today's New York Times wonders whether he'll be able to survive imbroglios the way Bill Clinton did. The very comparison makes me shudder. I feel a case of preemptive Dean fatigue coming on.