Day: August 1, 2007

“They want to shut me up,” says John Edwards, who apparently thinks jokes about his $400 haircuts are part of a plot to keep him quiet. I am on his side. Leave the man alone. Let his jaw keep flapping at 100 mph.

With every word the Democratic candidate for president utters, the public learns that much more about his demagogic, hypocritical phoniness. Even in a recent Creston, Iowa, tantrum about scary forces spouting trivia to drown out his seriousness, he was busily providing evidence that bunkum is his specialty.

BERLIN — I’m walking down a street in what used to be the communist part of this city, when my companion points to a couple of police officers strolling in front of an otherwise ordinary-looking doorstep. He explains to me that this is the apartment of Angela Merkel, head of the German government. (Rather charmingly, it’s next door to a shop called “The Empire of Art”).