THIS REALLY SUCKS.

Once I am able to get past the immorality of the Iraq war, as well as the carnage in human lives and its devastating impact on stability in the Mideast and the American economy (and that ain’t easy), the tentative troop withdrawal agreement reached between Baghdad and Washington is good news for Barack Obama. It also is bad news and good news for John McCain. It is bad news because Obama can correctly claim that “This is what I’ve been urging the U.S. to do all along,” and...

HMM.

The post-post-mortems are rolling in on Fornigate as we learn more than we ever cared to know about Rielle Hunter, including how to correctly pronounce the trollop’s name and the revelation that her lawyer advised her to let John Edwards take a paternity test because he would marry her after his wife Elizabeth succumbed to cancer. Yes, it all makes you want to take a really long shower. Most pundits are picking at crumbs at this point, I myself have drained the well of usable photographs of...

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I promised myself that I would not blog on the Jennifer Aniston-John Mayer smash-up, and it’s been like only 72 hours since I last wrote anything about the John & Rielle Show, which actually had more to do with electrocuting horses than short-circuiting political careers. But a newly-published account concerning Edwards shamelessly using his wife’s cancer to try to guilt-trip a newspaper editor into the presidential wannabe’s own Cone of Silence cannot go un-noted. Explains...

Is it possible that the addled John McCain really believes the “cross in the dirt” incident occurred when he was a POW? I’ll give him that much, but isn’t it curious that he has brought it up at a time when a guy to whom such an incident did happened has been much in the news? And won’t it just be ducky when we get past the conventions and can move on from crosses in the dirt, cones of silence and Hawaii as an elitist destination and talk about the stuff that matters? Or...

When the Bush administration put out the word that only guilty verdicts were allowable at the Guantánamo Bay war crimes tribunal, Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann saluted crisply and answered the call. Hartmann (small photo), an Air Force reservist and corporate lawyer, has been a relentless and aggressive advocate for the military commission system despite his supposedly neutral role and so shamelessly pro-prosecution that a military judge has barred him from acting as a legal advisor to an accused...

I didn’t think I had it in me, but I have just finished yet another book about World War II, probably the hundredth or so that I have read in a lifetime of interest in the myriad angles, intricacies and strategies of that great conflict fought by my parents’ generation. I am glad that I did what with the dust-up in Georgia and a war in Iraq that has lasted considerably longer than the time between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and their unconditional surrender. Retribution: The...

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...

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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...