This should be the best of times for John McCain. After all, the presumptive Republican nominee has pretty much gotten a free ride from the news media while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have duked it out, but the septuagenarian’s campaign is sprouting problems like zits on the face of a 15-year-old. To wit: * His biggest liability is Mister Twenty-Seven Percent, yet George Bush keeps stepping on his lines. * His best chance against Obama is to sell himself as a straight-talking maverick,...

HUGE AND HUGELY HISTORIC. MORE HERE. Photograph by Jeff Gentner/The Associated Press

So, one day, into Delaware’s great Basin/With strange Machinery sail Mr. Mason/And Mr. Dixon, by the Falmouth Packet/Connect, as with some invis’ble Bracket/Sharing a Fate, directed by the Stars/To mark the Earth with geometrick Scars. — TIMOTHY TOX Mason & Dixon is the penultimate book in my long slog to read the complete works of Thomas Pynchon (only his Vineland awaits) and is of more than usual interest because your Faithful Reviewer plies his trade within a stone’s...

I have snoozed through all of the vice president talk — as in who should be the running mates for Barack Obama and John McCain — because it’s much too early to get serious about that stuff. But then I had an epiphany, at least as far as the presumptive Democratic nominee is concerned: Charles Timothy “Chuck” Hagel. Inviting the retiring Nebraska Republican onto the ticket works every which way but one. He is the consummate straight talker, a hero from the same war as...

No, President Bush wasn’t attacking Barack Obama in his hugely inappropriate smack down before the Israeli Knesset yesterday in which he criticized a certain politician who would appease America’s enemies by speaking to “terrorists and radicals,” White House officials said on the record today while telling reporters off the record that Obama is of course who was being targeted. Two hundred forty nine days and counting. Obama fired back in a speech in South Dakota today: “After...

The fur is again flying in the feminist sandbox over the other big endorsement that Barack Obama received on Wednesday, this one from the National Abortion Rights Action League. NARAL’s endorsement statement called Obama: “A strong advocate for a woman’s right to choose throughout his career in public office. He steadfastly supports and defends a woman’s right to make the most personal, private decisions regarding her reproductive health without interference from government or...

Purple areas are where Clinton got 65-plus percent of the to-date primary vote. Green areas are West Virginia districts she won — as in all of them. An alien from another planet could be excused for getting whiplashes (this particular alien has more than one head) in trying to decipher these results from voting in a strange land on planet Earth called the United States of America: * In a state called West Virginia, voters in a primary election went for a white woman over a black man by a lopsided...

I have a theory about West Virginia, the state with the “Wild and Wonderful” slogan and the first bearer of good tidings for Hillary Clinton since her accountant told her it was okay to lend herself another few million bucks in her quest to defy gravity. West Virginians aren’t irredeemably racist as some commentators portray them, they just don’t like any politician who is not a white male, and despite her lopsided 41-point victory there yesterday Clinton is no Mountain Mama,...

From my perspective — and I’ve got plenty of company on this — Hillary Clinton has more than made the case that she would be worthy successor to George Bush after waging a primary campaign predicated on outright lying, divisiveness, fear mongering and race baiting that grandmasters like Karl Rove and Lee Atwater would approve of, the latter at least until his death-bed catharsis. Hence the notion that she and her helpmate husband should be punished — from being cast out of...

One of the wags at The Onion wrote the other day that the number of acceptable phrases that a presidential candidate can use has dropped from 38 at the beginning of 2007 to a mere four. They are: Thank you all for coming, God bless America, These pancakes are great, and Death to the infidels. Like all great humor, there is an element of truth to this, which leads me somewhat circuitously to get the jump on what is sure to be one of the more provocative story lines of the fall phase of the 2008...

On the 492nd day of Hillary Clinton’s quest to become the first woman president, one inevitability was rudely replaced by another. That was the number of days that elapsed from January 20, 2007 when Clinton (photo) announced that “I’m in. And I’m in it to win,” something that few observers could seriously doubt, and Tuesday past when voters in North Carolina and Indiana delivered another message: Her defeat at the hands of Barack Obama in the political cage match of...

(10.) She can devote all of her time to enable the residents of Guam to vote in presidential elections. (9.) When she tries to say Muslim it comes out muslin. (8.) Jack Abramoff may be available to help her with her golf game. (7.) Her campaign staffers can get a head start on lining up jobs with the Obama administration. (6.) She’s run out of nice things to say about Obama. (5.) Maureen Dowd makes her cry. (4.) Voters aren’t as stupid as she thought they were. (3.) Even her black maid...

She came, she saw and she fell still further behind. The results of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries were pretty much preordained — a Barack Obama victory in the Tar Heel State by a large margin and a Hillary Clinton victory in the Hoosier State by a narrow margin. That the results were exactly that is a repudiation of Clinton’s latest and, by my count, fourth strategy in the last five months, this one to treat voters like idiots. The results also should be Clinton’s final...

There are 796 more reasons why the folks who declared the Surge a success should hang their sorry heads in shame. That is the number of Americans (52) and Iraqis (744) killed during the month of April in an uptick in violence that was going to occur sooner or later because the Surge has not been a “success” by any appropriate use of that term. As I noted back on February 1 and has been noted by others far more sage than I am since then, war is not a linear thing, but rather something...

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Hackworth (right) with S.L.A. Marshall in Vietnam (1966) There’s a guy in virtually every organization who is a pop-off, and David Hackworth fit that description perfectly. But unlike most pop-offs, this man – the most highly decorated soldier in American military history – was reliably on target. So much so that his career ended with the threat of a court martial because of his scathing criticism of the Vietnam War, but his legacy as an eccentric but fearless and brilliant officer and...

“Hello, this is Lamont Williams. In the next few days, you will receive a voter registration packet in the mail. All you need to do is sign it, date it and return your application. Then you will be able to vote and make your voice heard. Please return the voter registration form when it arrives. Thank you.” That is a transcript of the robocalls that voters in predominately black districts, which is to say Barack Obama-leaning areas, received in a ham-handed voter suppression effort by...

When I came into the newspaper business in 1967 at the tender age of 20, most reporters and editors drank like fish and smoked like chimneys (on the job), lived and died for the news scoop, type was set on massive linotype machines using molten lead, and when the presses of morning and evening newspapers rolled it was like printing money. Today newsrooms are like vegetarian cafeterias, the scoop is most often the purview of cable news channels, or Internet sites, the entire typesetting and printing...

When the history of the New York Times‘ long slide from grace and profitability is written, there should be a chapter for op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd, who has gone from being a must-read to an obnoxious crank. Don’t get me wrong. There are far too many op-ed political columnists who are as dull as dishwater (Broder and Collins come to mind), but agree with their opinions or not, there is usually some semblance of a factual underpinning for what they write. Not so with Dowd. At least...

The only good thing to be said about Faux . . . er, Fox News is that their ratings ain’t lookin’ so hot these days. Neither are the ratings for other cable news channels, but at least you wouldn’t expect them to make a whopper of a mistake in promoting a Clinton-Obama debate based on the legendary Douglas-Lincoln debates and being so impaired as to believe that the Douglas was abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. Which prompted Hilzoy to note at Obsidian Wings: “Legally,...

A woman who police believe to be Deborah Jeane Palfrey, known as the “D.C. Madam,” was found dead today, Tarpon Springs, Florida, police said. The body has not been positively identified. “Detectives are investigating an apparent suicide of a (white female) that appears to be in her early 50s,” police said in a news release. Suicide notes were found near the body in a small storage shed next to a mobile home, police said. Palfrey was reportedly staying at the home of her mother,...

By most accounts, the Washington-based advocacy group Women’s Voices Women’s Vote is a stand-up organization, but in its lust to help Hillary Clinton it has run afoul of the law in a most foul way in yet another state. WVWV stands accused of waging a high-tech voter suppression campaign in predominantly black, Barack Obama-leaning districts in North Carolina where residents have been receiving robocalls implying that they weren’t properly registered to vote in the May 6 Democratic...

On the 5th anniversary of President Bush’s declaration that major combat operations in Iraq were over, the Pentagon reported that American combat deaths were again on the upswing and in April were the highest in seven months.

Papa says he’s gonna fill Ole Bessie up with some of that McClinton gas John McCain’s embrace of a summer gasoline tax holiday is an idea so economically unsound but is such terrific feel-good political theater that Hillary Clinton soon joined him in an effort to pander to voters that will be tough to top. But then it’s still six months to the election, so who knows? Why is suspending the federal gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day so unsound? Because as any economics major...

No one survives being president of the United States without looking the worse for wear, but comparing George Bush’s stock 2000 campaign photograph with the image above taken at a White House press conference this week is shocking. The man looks like he has aged 25 years in eight, although I suppose the more important question is how much we have. I got into the habit of printing out and studying photos of the people about whom I was writing a few years ago. In fact, Osama bin Laden was one...