Times are tough for syndicated snark Robert Novak. It’s been quite a while since he outed a CIA operative, his McCain veep scoop this week turned out to be false and his old war-hero pal keeps acting tres unpresidential. On top of all that, he dinged a pedestrian with his black Corvette this morning on the way to the spin factory and then, according to witnesses, tried to drive off before police could arrive. The guy is a lawyer, so who cares? Novak, 77, has earned a reputation around the...

LOOKIN’ BAD.

JUST ASKING.

Some pundits are referring to events this week in Iraq as John McCain’s “Waterloo.” That may or may not be true, but it misses a larger point: While the Bush administration has done plenty of end runs around the Constitution, it was unable to repeal the law of gravity and the consequences of its excesses were bound to come crashing down sooner or later. As the president’s handmaiden, McCain was going to get bonked. Mind you, Barack Obama was nothing if not clever in looking...

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After months of peddling a position on the Iraq war that has included an American troop presence anywhere from 100 years down to five years as he has had to repeatedly backpedal, John McCain now finds himself marginalized with Nouri Al-Maliki and Barack Obama, of all people, stealing his thunder on his war. The presumptive Republican nominee already was on shaky ground by making the “success” of the Surge his major Iraq talking point and declaring the war “won” but offering...

Jews are among the smartest and most engaged voters when it comes to public affairs and knowing when they are being played, so it seemed like only a matter of time before they began parting ways with Joe Lieberman, John McCain’s very own Uriah Heep and a senator whose political dishonesty runs at a flood-tide pace these days. Among high-profile Jews in Congress, Lieberman is viewed far more unfavorably than Barack Obama, according to a new poll. Only 37 percent of Jews view the Connecticut...

In keeping with the myriad outrages that it has perpetrated in fighting the so-called Global War on Terror, the Bush administration has not lacked for cojones. Congress was a mere handmaiden or not consulted at all when the White House decided to establish a parallel court system to try terror suspects, when it tossed the Geneva Conventions into the Potomac and embraced the use of torture, when it established a plan to secretly rendition suspects to the Rumsfeld Gulag, and when it twice refused...

The kerfuffle over whether Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki explicitly endorsed Barack Obama’s Iraq troop withdrawal plan will pass quickly, but it is worth noting before it does that the Bush administration just can’t help but squander what few shreds of credbility it still has left. In case you missed it, Al-Maliki tokld Der Spiegel over the weekend that he found much to like in Obama’s position. This provoked an uproar at the White House, which already finds itself in the hugely...

Even with the election three and a half months out, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Barack Obama will be the next president. This is not a particularly rash prediction given that color-blind Democrats and Independents and even some Republicans will far outnumber people who would never vote for an African-American, Obama has an enthusiastic base and will attract a broad cross-section of voters, is pretty much in tune with the mainstream on the issues that matter, has long coattails...

FORBEARANCE, HUMILITY AND GREATNESS PERSONIFIED

You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer. – FRANK ZAPPA While I suppose that red-meat Americans should be up in arms over the impending sale of venerable Anheuser-Busch for 52 billion large to Belgian-Brazilian brewer InBev, it certainly won’t change my leisure-time habits. The AB stable of beers, from the flagship Budweiser brand to Bud Light...

The terms nuance, satire, racist, subtlety and flip-flopping are taking a pretty good beating this political season with the feckless news media outdoing itself in the further dumbing down of what passes for political discourse. Barack Obama’s position on Iraq is fundamentally unchanged, but every nuance of that position is attacked by supporters of John McCain as flip-flopping if it doesn’t conform verbatim to what he said earlier. The New Yorker magazine cover showing Obama as a Muslim...

KEY TORTURE PLAYERS: Feith, Addington, Gonzalez, Bush, Cheney Being Israel and protecting the values on which it was founded is one helluva tough job, but a funny thing happened on the way to the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state: It has subsumed some of those values for political convenience and is kissing George Bush’s ass when it comes to torture. This has great pertinence because Israel apparently is one of the relatively few countries that would roll out the welcome mat for administration...

CHENEY ONLY PRETENDED TO BE SLEEPING; MAYER WAS WIDE AWAKE While it had been widely assumed that the decision to torture enemy combatants and other detainees in the War on Terror began at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Bush administration long hid behind that “trickle up” explanation, it is now apparent that the origins of this dark chapter in American history — and the single most defining and insidious aspect of the Age of Bush — can be traced to Vice President Cheney. Nevertheless,...

Having been chided last week by Phil Gramm as a whiner afflicted by “a mental recession” as one of millions of Americans who are struggling to keep their heads above water while the U.S. is sucked ever deeper into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, it was grimly satisfying to see Henry Paulson standing on the steps of the Treasury Building yesterday afternoon and announcing yet another massive taxpayer bailout, this one for the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage...

NO ONE KNOWS WHAT VESPUCCI LOOKED LIKE Has there ever been a more unlikely story of how a major piece of real estate got its name, and undeservedly so, than that of America and Amerigo Vespucci? Absolutely not. America is so named because in 1507 Martin Waldseemüller, a German cartographer who made a cut-out map for do-it-yourself globemakers, fell for a forgery called the Soderini Letter that implied Vespucci had discovered a new world. That world was described as being populated by giants, cannibals...

BYRON R. FOUTY (TOP) AND ALEX R. JIMENEZ On May 12, 2007, the early morning calm at a small U.S. Army outpost in the village of Quarghouli hard by the Euphrates River southwest of Baghdad was shattered by rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. A dozen or so insurgents, led by Al Qaeda regulars, overwhelmed the seven soldiers from the 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division, breaching the concertina wire ringing their two Humvees and setting the vehicles afire. The...

It’s a given that presidential candidates who are running for president are going to miss a vote or three, but the situation with John McCain is ridiculous. The Republican wannabe has not voted since April 8, missing a total of 76 votes. This includes several key votes on important legislation, among them Social Security, which he views as “a total disgrace,” and expanding veterans’ GI bill benefits, which he vociferously opposed and then took credit for after that bill...

What’s a warmonger to do? The Iraqi government is feeling its oats because of a semblance of stability on the military front, there is a chance that provincial elections in the fall might bring some calm to the fractious political front, and a security agreement that gives Washington the ranch and Baghdad sloppy seconds will be DOA unless it is rewritten to respect Iraqi national sovereignty and includes a U.S. troop withdrawal timetable. Worse still, President Bush and John McCain find themselves...

I’m just back from a whirlwind three-day tour of four Middle Atlantic states that was part-business but mostly pleasure, with some political snoopery thrown in for good measure. (I just can’t help myself.) Some observations based on an admittedly unscientific sampling: * There were Barack Obama lawn signs, posters, t-shirts and buttons pretty much wherever I went from a small town in Delaware to Pennsylvania coal country to northern New Jersey suburbs to upstate New York, while I lost...

As oft danced as Serge Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet has been over the last 70 years, the great Soviet composer’s original score and all of the original accompanying dances have never been performed. Yes, never, and therein lies a tale. That changed over Independence Day weekend with the world premiere of Romeo & Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare at Bard SummerScape danced by the Mark Morris Dance Group with the American Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leon Botstein. The...

MY HOME ON WHEELS AT WHITE SANDS, NEW MEXICO, MAY 1976 While most of my friends — the sane ones, anyway — were buying houses and raising families in the 1970s, I was seeing the U.S.A. in a Volkswagen bus that I had customized to be a comfy home away from home. I had globetrotted in previous years and realized after my return stateside that I knew more about the Far East than East L.A., so I embarked on a year-on, year-off, year-on exploration of the contiguous 48 states. I had seen Hawaii...

WATCHING FIREWORKS (Coney Island, New York, 1962) By Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos