HE FINISHES WITH A RECORD-BREAKING 8 GOLDS, MORE THAN ALL BUT 14 COUNTRIES IN THE MEDAL COUNT. MORE HERE. Photograph by David J. Phillip/The Associated Press

MORE HERE ON AN EXTRAORDINARY ACHIEVEMENT.

Rielle Hunter, the one-time apple of John Edwards’ eye, is emerging as quite a piece of work — and whose turbulent past intersects with a gruesome series of crimes. Hunter’s bona fides as a party girl are well established. She had a voracious appetite for sex and cocaine that so impressed onetime paramour and Generation X novelist Jay McInerney that he did a roman à clef on her in a piece titled “Story of My Life.” Why couldn’t Edwards have hit on a waitress...

MORE HERE.

Anyone who believed that John McCain’s campaign wasn’t (once again) lying through its teeth when it swore that Phil Gramm had been shown the door is hereby invited to change their medication. Gramm never really went away and will once again be at Honest John’s side this weekend at a series of briefings for major supporters in economically ravaged . . . er, a playground for the super rich in the Colorado Rockies. Recall that McCain’s very own terrorist in pinstripes was (not)...

As uncomfortable as the subject may be for people for whom the protection of privacy is more important than the corrosive effects of lying and hypocrisy on politics, the more that I learn about John Edwards’ romp with Rielle Hunter, the more Elizabeth Edwards reminds me of Hillary Clinton. Minus the cancer, of course. In fact, the parallels are rather stunning. Both women worshiped at the altar of political prominence and power, so much so that they overlooked clear evidence of their husbands’...

Imagine being admitted to a hospital for major surgery only to find out that while the surgeon and anesthesiologist are poised to do their jobs, the nurses are somewhere else. That situation is analogous to why the New Jersey hospitals crisis, the worst in the U.S. and a harbinger of things to come elsewhere as the nation’s health-career system slowly collapses, is not going to get better anytime soon. The crisis in the Garden State is being addressed in a politically expedient and piecemeal...

I have come to view American music as one great big tree with many branches — folk, blues, jazz, bluegrass, soul, zydeco, swing, and so on and so forth — and in my experience there is no finer way to appreciate that than the Rhythm & Roots Festival. The 11th annual edition will be held August 29-31 at Ninigret Park near Charlestown, Rhode Island, which is a mere octave or two from Interstate 95 at the Connecticut line and hard by the lovely Atlantic coast. I’ve done a zillion...

John Edwards has a problem. Michael Mukasey has a solution. There is the possibility that funds from the campaign of the presidential wannabe pretty boy went to Rielle Hunter, the object of his affections in a long suspected and now-admitted affair. This would be a violation of federal law. But Edwards need not worry. Just yesterday the attorney general said that prosecutions would not be pursued against Monica Goodling and other now resigned Just Ice Department officials who broke federal law in...

The what-ifs are flying thick and fast in the wake of Penisgate, as in what if John Edwards had been smoked out concerning his affair with Rielle Hunter before the Iowa caucuses won by Barack Obama that jump started his improbable march to the nomination. Former Clinton campaign honcho Howard Wolfson whines, as only someone of his self-important preciousness can whine, that Clinton would be the presumptive nominee if Edwards, who finished behind Obama and ahead of Clinton in Iowa, had been forced...

The Russian invasion of Georgia recalls another war and another Olympics and the day the water turned blood red when Soviet invaders and Hungarian resisters faced off at the 1956 Summer Games. In late October 1956, a student demonstration against Hungary’s Stalinist government grew into a nationwide revolt that was crushed by a large Soviet force in early November. Some 2,500 Hungarians were killed and 200,000 became refugees. In an eerie echo of today’s conflict in the former Soviet...

Mark Penn is a shameless thug. Props to Hillary for not buying totally into his dark vision. McCain has. Longer version here. Apologies to Oliphant for colorizing © 2008 Universal Press Syndicate

Despite the excesses of the Age of Bush — notably the embrace of torture and willful subjugation of the rule of law — the U.S. remains a substantially open and just society. So it was inevitable that the consequences of the administration’s foulest deeds would begin nipping at the heels of the perpetrators sooner or later. As far back as 2004, participants in White House meetings with Vice President Cheney, David Addington and Alberto Gonzales understood that these torture regime...

HUNTER AND EDWARDS ALOFT John Edwards’ half-assed effort to come clean about his affair with Rielle Hunter left a slew of questions unanswered. Chief among them are: * If he wasn’t the father of Hunter’s child and broke off the affair two years ago, why was he lurking in a stairwell of her current digs, the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, in the middle of the night? It’s time for John Boy to take a DNA test even if Hunter says no. * What was Hunter paid when, from where...

Iraq certainly wasn’t the first war where the invaders sought moral cover to justify their actions, but you have to go far to top Napoleon’s claim that he was going into Egypt as a mission civilsatrice in order to bring French-style culture and democracy to all those unwashed Arabs. But as Nina Burleigh writes in Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt, Bonaparte might have been crazy for starting the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place (sounds familiar,...

(1.) The mainstream media let us down yet again by failing to take seriously first rumors and then credible accounts of the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter affair until there was so much smoke that it’s a wonder that all of those notably uncurious political reporters weren’t barfing into their arugula salads. (2.) The New York Times deserves special scorn after running an innuendo-filled piece on an alleged affair between John McCain and a lobbyist but being struck deaf and dumb over the...

John Edwards repeatedly lied during his presidential campaign and since then about an extramarital affair Rielle Hunter, the former senator admitted to ABC News today. In an interview for broadcast tonight on “Nightline,” Edwards admitted that he did have an affair with the 44-year woman, but said that he did not love her. Edwards also denied he was the father of Hunter’s baby girl, Frances Quinn, although the he said he has not taken a paternity test. A former campaign aide, Andrew...

McCAIN’S NEW TV AD INCLUDES CLINTON SLUR OF OBAMA.

MORE HERE.

History has a funny way of bending back on itself. Contemporary events uncannily echo past events and past events suddenly present themselves not as hoary old newsreel images but as preludes to today. It is easy to dismiss this double helix of history as merely a series of coincidences. Were it only that simple. It is not, as several of today’s posts at my blog make abundantly clear: * The invocation of the gravity of the post-World War II Nuremberg trials by both prosecution and defense in...

At this point, John McCain’s ability to hold multiple views on the same subject is quickly becoming the stuff of legend. Exhibit A in this regard is his shifting rationales for running negative campaign ads that attack everything from Barack Obama’s self image to his eating habits to his religious scruples. But this explanation offered in a David Broder column takes the cake: The first question I asked John McCain and then Barack Obama was: How do you feel about the tone and direction of the...

Two TMV posts in one day about the fix John Edwards finds himself in? Hmm. You might think that there’s something to the allegation that he fathered a love child with Rielle Hunter. If the onetime presidential wannabe thinks that the story is going to melt in the summer heat, he’s in for a rude shock in the form of risking being dis-invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Most of the mainstream media has treated the story broken by the National Enquirer like...

The overriding question in the wake of the conviction of a driver for terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden is whether he received a fair trial. There are two answers and they depend entirely on your perspective: * If you believe, as I do not, that the 9/11 attacks in particular and the Global War on Terror in general demanded that the bedrock judicial principles in the U.S. Constitution be cast aside and a legal system rigged by the prosecution, reliant on torture and shrouded in secrecy was called...

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemenite who was a bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden, wasn’t going anywhere even if he was acquitted in the first military commission trial conducted by the U.S. since the end of World War II. That is not how justice works under the Bush administration. But that won’t matter following his conviction today of the lesser of two sets of charges against him by a panel of six military officers at Guantánamo Bay. The conviction is a qualified victory for the administration,...

ARE WE TOO LATE FOR THE BALLOON DROP? One of the crosses that I had to bear over a long newspaper career was coordinating national political convention coverage and occasionally attending one of the damned things. This included the brilliantly-choreographed extravaganza in Philadelphia in 2000 that culminated with the coronation of George Walker Bush, the man with the vision to lead America into the new millennium and to new heights of prosperity and power. The dread that I felt the night that Bush...