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...

For Barack Obama supporters, this is the summer of our discontent. While John McCain flails, Obama does a victory lap around Europe and comes home to a tanking economy and two unpopular wars, but his lead in most polls is miniscule, he is behind in one and has lost ground in a few key states. What’s going on? After cogitating hard on this seeming paradox while spending much of the weekend off of my feet because of a big back attack — as in floating in a refreshingly cool pool and laying...

The McCain Truth Squad was quick to strike back when Barack Obama supposedly suggested that one way for Americans to save on that $4-plus gas was to maintain proper tire pressure. So sure were the grouchy grandpa’s handlers that they’d hit political paydirt that they arranged for Republican operatives to hand out tire-pressure gauges as being symbolic of Obama’s energy policy. Hilarious, right? Well, not really, since the suggestion is not only a good one, but has the backing...

1936 Opening Ceremony (top), smog envelopes Beijing Olympic Village I don’t know the point at which the Olympic Games began morphing from being a spirited quadrennial contest for the world’s best amateur athletes into an orgy of bribery, propagandizing, chemically-enhanced derring-do and crass professionalism. But I suppose the 1936 Berlin Games is a good enough place as any, and an appropriate bookend to the 2008 Beijing Games, the most-controversial-in-advance Olympics since then. While...

TRENTON AND MELINDA DUCKETT A federal judge has ruled that a lawsuit claiming CNN’s Nancy Grace drove the mother of a missing toddler to suicide can go forward. I’m of two minds on this one. As a journalist, I’m aware of the chilling effect such suits could have. But as a human being who happens to be a journalist, I’m well aware that Grace has worked diligently to make her brand the intentionally-cruel interview and has done so with the full support of CNN. Duckett appeared...

While John McCain’s latest TV commercial comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears may be playing well in Peoria and his very own Uriah Heep, that Joe Lieberman, suggests that we “should just relax and enjoy it” like a quickie on YouPorn, the ad has been an unmitigated disaster among virtually all pundits of all stripes because it is being talked about more for its utter childishness and racial undertones rather than whether it makes a valid point. Writes Rick Moran...

KARL ROVE THANKS NICE KID FOR HELPING CHANGE FLAT TIRE

With the House Judiciary Committee voting 20-14 to hold Karl Rove in contempt, the question is how much longer George Bush’s former consigliere will be given free rein in print and on tevee with his legal woes mounting. The easy answer is that while any self-respecting media outlet would politely tell Rove that he might want to consider a wee vacation from bloviating because he considers himself to be above the law, they have no respect for anything except their bottom line and not pissing...

OBAMA IS NOT REALLY MEETING WITH TROOPS IN THIS PHOTO The great thing about using smear tactics is that even when the smear is proven to be untrue the damage has been done. This helps explain why in their latest effort to portray Barack Obama as unpatriotic, John McCain and his surrogates are accusing him in a TV commercial and elsewhere of canceling a visit to wounded troops at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a military hospital in Germany, because he was not allowed to take reporters and...

GONZO AND MONICA: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN When George Bush heads back to his Texas ranch to search among the scrub brush for his squandered legacy, he will leave behind a Justice Department that resembles a Superfund site and the legacy of two attorneys general who willingly relinquished the office’s most precious asset — independence — in the service of partisan politics and helping enable the president’s historic power grab. So inured have we become to Bush administration...

Obama spoke to 200,000 Germans, McCain spoke at a German restaurant The desperation of John McCain — ranging from character attacks to outright lies to repeated shifts on the issues — is symptomatic of a candidate scrambling to keep his head above water a few days before an election, not 15 weeks out. Speaking of 15 weeks, it has been about that long since McCain sewed up the Republican nomination. And yet that all-important turning of the corner — the moment when everything falls...

One of the underreported and unappreciated aspects of the Age of Bush is that despite the appearance of unanimity some administration officials, typically careerists and not political appointees, were horrified at the embrace of torture and other extralegal actions and spoke up. They were silenced and in some case were fired, demoted or resigned. When an official whose loyalty to the rule of law ran deeper than their loyalty to the administration tried to fight back, they usually were met by a human...

While the right-of-center chattering class, with a leg up from the struggling McCain campaign, has been in high dudgeon for days over Barack Obama’s not-a-campaign speech campaign speech today in Berlin, my memory is a little longer and my perspective a whole lot less narrow. As a world traveler, it has always mattered to me how America is perceived abroad, and not just because I have had to pretend to be a Canadian or Irishman to get out of bar fights. Mind you, my government should not...

THE HISTORIC PETERS HOUSE WOULD BE SAVED AND REHABBED The ghosts of the Tocks Island disaster of the early 1970s when hundreds of homes, barns, a church and other structures were destroyed to make way for a dam that was never built are about to write another sad chapter in the saga of the Minisink Valley with the resumption of destruction in the historic area straddling the scenic Delaware River in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The Tocks project was a lightning rod for the nascent American environmental...

At least when John McCain screws up it’s in English. (Wink, wink.) Mr. Foreign Policy Expert’s latest discombobulations are false claims that the Surge began well before it began (he apparently confused the Surge with the Anbar Awakening) and that a major Sunni sheik wouldn’t be around if it hadn’t been for the Surge. Alas, the sheik was actually offed by Al Qaeda-led insurgents in the midst of the Surge. And speaking of dead people, the McCain campaign has unveiled a Web-based...

It is a story with three of America’s favorite subjects — celebrity, sex and hypocrisy — but you’ll have to look awfully hard to find it. When Senator Larry Craig was arrested for allegedly playing footsie with an undercover cop in a Minneapolis-St. Paul airport men’s room stall, the mainstream media was all over it like a bad suit. After Roll Call broke the story last summer, it appeared in thousands of print and TV outlets and was the butt of many a late-night comedian’s...

RIGHT-WING BLOGS USE HITLER ANALOGIES, BUT ONLY FAUX OUTRAGE HERE. AND DIDJA KNOW THAT THE GUY RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD HAS FLIP-FLOPPED ON GENOCIDE?.