Jesus wept not only because these were his people who were lurching so unavertibly toward the abyss.

A well-defined ethnical line is all that separates the Slovaks from the Magyars and the Little Russians.

The first Trophy Veep?... Such penetrating questions may (or may not) explain why Jennings gets the big bucks, but nothing explains why Edwards is the man to stand that one heartbeat we hear about away from the presidency. And this is the point that dispels all goose bumps: John Edwards may be Peter Jennings' idea of a good lawyer, but a career of arguing cases before North Carolina juries, even augmented by five years in the U.S. Senate, has in no way given John Edwards the foreign policy expertise essential to supporting or possibly assuming the presidency in the middle of this global war on jihadist terrorism. The bankruptcy of Kerry's first presidential judgment is staggering. This, for Bush supporters, should be a relief.

Inwardly, Seven smiled, glad that the predictably irritable and impatient engineer had remerged from her cocoon.