Bill Kristol, Jane Mayer, and the rest of this week's winners and sinners

Winner: The sublime Jane Mayer, for another superb piece in the New Yorker, this time explaining who smoothed the road to the vice presidential nomination for the right wing's favorite hockey mom: a twentysomething Messianic Jew named Adam Brickley ("Jesus was Jewish, so to be like Him you need to be Jewish, too") and a whole host of those Washington insiders Sarah Palin is constantly attacking.

Brickley, trained and housed by conservative think tanks in Washington, starting combing the Web at the beginning of 2007 for an appropriate Republican woman to counter Hillary Clinton, whom he assumed would be the Democratic nominee. After discarding senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and Olympia Snowe (not nearly right wing enough), Brickley focused on Palin as someone with "a strong grassroots following." Also, there was something about her that reminded him of Obama.

Brickley started promoting the Alaska governor on his website, palinforvp.blogspot.com, and soon she was being touted by conservative mainstays like Instapundit, American Scene, and Stop the ACLU. That in turn led to her crucial jump into Rush Limbaugh's lap, who praised her for the single quality that makes it possible for so many "serious" conservatives to support her: "She's a babe."

But things didn't really begin to take off for Palin until she was tipped off that both the Weekly Standard and the National Review had chartered cruise ships that would be stopping off in Juneau in the summer of 2007.

The Standard's ship arrived in June, carrying Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, and Michael Gerson. By the time they finished lunch at the governor's mansion, all of them were dazzled.

Then Palin closed the deal by giving them a tour of a nearby gold mine, which environmentalists were cruelly persecuting—by trying to prevent the mine from dumping its waste into a pristine lake in the Tongass National Forest. One month later, Fred Barnes wrote a piece in the Standard headlined "The Most Popular Governor," and Kristol started touting her for veep almost every time he went on television, culminating in his declaration last July that Palin was his "heartthrob": "I don't know if I can make it through the next three months without her on the ticket," said the self-proclaimed "egghead."

In August 2007, it was the National Review's turn to visit Juneau—with Rich Lowry, Robert Bork, Dick Morris, and Robert Bolton in tow. Once again, these tough-minded conservatives were bowled over by a governor in high heels. National Review senior editor Jay Nordlinger declared her a "real honey," and Bolton was especially pleased that Palin was familiar with his vital effort to "stave off international controls on the global flow of small weapons." Now there's an important priority!

So now you know why the conservative commentariat was so much less surprised by this brilliant choice than the rest of us.

N.B. This is Jane Mayer's third triumph this year, following the publication of The Dark Side, her brilliant bestseller about torture, and the airing last week (on way too few public television stations) of Torturing Democracy, for which she was a consultant. If you missed it on TV, you can watch it here.

Sinner: Bill Kristol, for continuing to ignore the fact that you can't call yourself an "egghead" (as he described himself to colleague Maureen Dowd) and be a fervent supporter of Sarah Palin at the same time. On Monday, in an exceptionally confused column—even for him—Kristol praised the common sense of the American people, then forgave them for (currently) supporting Obama, and ended by embracing that idiot, Joe the Plumber, because "he seems like a sensible man to me."

Winner: Joby Warrick of the Washington Post, for revealing the existence of two memos that prove that the White House explicitly authorized waterboarding and other torture techniques used by the CIA.

Winner: Murray Waas, for uncovering the role of William Timmons, McCain's transition chief, in trying to ease international sanctions against Saddam Hussein.

Winner: Carl Bernstein, for detailing all of McCain's connections to the terrorist for whom Bernstein did so much to make famous in the first place: G. Gordon Liddy.

Winner: Rachel Cooke, for a lively profile of national treasure Seymour Hersh in the Guardian.

Winner: The editors of the Economist, for reporting that 82 percent of the American economists who responded to a survey from the magazine said that Obama has a better grasp of economics than McCain. One reason reported in the October 10 issue: McCain's plans would cause the deficit to rise much more drastically than Obama's.

Winner: Clyde Haberman, for his righteous (and entirely appropriate) anger at Mike Bloomberg for jettisoning principle in favor of ambition in his quest to change the law to allow him to serve a third term as mayor of New York City. In an unfortunate echo of his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, Bloomberg suddenly decided the city couldn't possibly survive without him staying at City Hall for another four years. For Barack Obama's hilarious take on Bill Clinton's reaction to this news, see Obama's splendid speech before the Al Smith dinner, where the Democratic nominee's demeanor was more like JFK's than ever before.

Sinner: Alessandra Stanley, for waxing rhapsodic about Sarah Palin's "sassy, sprightly debate" performance and her "engaging," "relaxed," and "delightful" star turn on Saturday Night Live, on which Stanley thought Palin was given "the last word in every joke." Actually, Palin was the silent victim of every joke—especially the hilarious rap-moose moment—and practically the only words she spoke were, "Live from New York!"

Winner: David Tanis, for writing A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes, the sensation of the fall cookbook season. Tanis is everyone's favorite chef, from Alice Waters, for whom he runs the kitchen at Chez Panisse in Berkeley half the year, to the denizens of the Rue Saint-Jacques in Paris, where he and his partner, Randal Breski, host Aux Chiens Lunatiques, the most delicious salon in the City of Light. Each of the new cookbook's 24 menus have a manageable three or four dishes. In the Times, Julia Moskin called A Platter of Figs "the iPhone of cookbooks: a sleek redesign of something you already have, but with juicy new features that render it irresistible."

	Meet the Press (NBC–Brokaw)	Face the Nation (CBS–Schieffer)	This Week (ABC–Stephanopoulos)
White Men	1	1	3
White Women	1	1	3
Black Men	1	0	2
Black Women	0	0	1
Gay People	0	0	1

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Seen Something? E-mail to alert me to anything you see that warrants high praise or high dudgeon.

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. He has also written for Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, New York, The Washington Post, The New York Observer, Rolling Stone, Details, Interview, The Advocate, Vogue, and Salon. He has taught journalism at Columbia and Princeton. To find out more, visit charleskaiser.com.

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