I have to admit, the thought has crossed my mind, too.

Last night’s farewell address was really quite pathetic; a mixture of fantasy and outright distortion. (Jonathan Chait has a really wonderful take on Bush’s comment, "I have followed my conscience and done what I thought was right." The answer to which, naturally, is "Yes, we can all agree that you’re not a paid enemy agent.") Slightly less pathetic was the presser he gave a few days ago in which James Fallows thought he was watching a Eugene O’Neill play. I get what Fallows is saying (although I think O’Neill is the wrong playwright). Bush looked as if he knew, deep down, that his presidency was a failure. And it was slightly poignant. But I think we really are way too close to Bush to properly examine his legacy. It will take a few years. And I have little doubt that history will rank his presidency in the bottom five — but number one? I’m not sure about that. Sullivan says that his greatest challenger is James Buchanan. A pretty good choice. But, actually, not the worst in my eyes. Buchanan has the dubious distinction of being president as — one-by-one — the southern states seceded from the union… And doing nothing about it! This was certainly unforgivable. But I’ve always thought it was sort of ridiculous to lay the fault of the Civil War on his doorstep. You have to wonder what would have happened had Buchanan immediately jumped into some sort of negotiation with the leaders of the Confederacy. Would there have been an end to slavery? Or would war have come later and at an even greater cost? Impossible to know — but my sense is that the Civil War was inevitable by the early-1850s. Warren Harding’s administration certainly gives W. a run for his money in terms of corruption (see Teapot Dome scandal) and malapropisms ("The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead," e.e. cummings noted upon his death.) But I find it difficult to get as mad at Harding as, say, Richard Nixon. Richard M. Nixon has enjoyed some measure of public forgiveness recent years — possibly because some of his policies were a little more liberal than they seemed at the time and some of his diplomatic moves had a measure of success. But I think this view is a mistake. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Nixon was a criminal. He (and his staff) committed numerous felonies while in office. For anyone who doubts me on this, pick up Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s classic, The Final Days or Rick Perlstein’s great book, Nixonland (which I was surprised not to see on too many "Ten Best" lists this year.) There was a great deal of winking at the Justice Department under Bush — and he was ruthless with his political rivals. But you don’t see break-ins to a rival’s psychiatrist office as you did with Daniel Ellsberg. You don’t see them planting evidence in an assassin’s apartment to make Democrats look like the party of the nuts, as they did with Arthur Bremer. The levels of fraud and illegal activity under Nixon are just too mind boggling to recount. Moreover, while Nixon might have opened up China, he is a miserable failure on Vietnam, Cambodia, South America, Greece and many other arenas. (See Christopher Hitchens’ screed against Henry Kissinger — which is just as much a screed against Nixon.) Some of the bloodiest fighting of the Vietnam war (a war he promised to end) came under Nixon. I do not feel charitably towards him. He’s certainly in the bottom three. The other one whom I really think is in contention is Herbert Hoover — the only one on the list I feel slightly bad putting on, because Hoover wasn’t necessarily a bad guy. (He might have even been considered a great man if he had never been president.) He cared deeply about humanitarian relief work — and he provided a tremendous amount of relief for a badly battered Belgium during World War I, as well as the rest of Europe afterwards. However, like Buchanan, Hoover was completely impotent during an unprecedented crisis. Unlike Buchanan, who only dithered for a few months as states seceded, Hoover dithered for three long, painful years before he got out of dodge. Not just dithered. He likely made the Great Depression even worse with ill-conceived ideas like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Letting the military loose on poor veterans (the "Bonus Army") was a national disgrace. And his determination not to deviate from "volunteerism" as a recovery plan for the poor was a disaster. Nearly 25 percent of the country was out of work by 1932. Many people don’t realize just how close the U.S. was nearing all out anarchy in March of 1933 when FDR was sworn in. Banks were closing at a shocking clip. Two million people were homeless. Many, many people believed that the U.S. would be shifting to some sort of socialist economy. Was that all Hoover’s fault? No. But he worsened a horrible crisis. So those are my nominees. I think Bush stands shoulder-to-shoulder with these men. War. Crisis. Corruption. Incompetence. Congratulations, Mr. President (for four more days, anyways). It’s been quite a ride.

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It takes only one call from your mother to disabuse you of any such idea.

"I’m so worried about him," my mother said to me earlier today. "Doing that big speech in the rain."

"Why?" I asked.

"What if he catches a cold and kills himself?"

"Oh, come on."

"No ‘Come on,’" my mother said. "People die from colds all the time. There was a president who died from a cold, wasn’t there?"

It’s true. William Henry Harrison. He died a month after giving a two-hour long inauguration speech without his hat and coat where he caught a cold that eventually became pneumonia. (He also holds the record for the shortest presidency on record — 30 days, 12 hours and 30 minutes according to wikipedia.)

"That’s true," I said, "but Obama’s healthy."

And then my mom set off the nuclear bomb.

"But what about his supporters?" she said. "You’re going to tell me that nobody who went out there didn’t get sick? They won’t be able to vote for him!"

Uh. Well. Kinda true. All day long I’ve been worrying about the people who went out in the rain to see Obama. Oy. I hope they at least took an umbrella.

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Some (notably, one of my personal favorite columnists, Jonathan Chait) have suggested that the party will turn to Sarah Palin. And more recently a squabble has broken out between Christopher Orr (another fave) and Ross Douthat about whether Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal will prevail. Certain die hard Romney fans think the Mittster should be given another chance.

Oh, come on, guys! Am I the only one who has figured out who the 2012 GOP nominee will be?

It’ll be General David Howell Petraeus.

That comes, of course, with a lot of caveats. Lord only knows if he has any interest in the job. (Like Sherman he might say "If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.") And I haven’t the faintest idea whether he has any political skills. (He might turn out to be too much of a loose cannon like Douglas MacArthur.) But from what I’ve seen of him, he doesn’t look like too big of a nut. If he can be persuaded to run on the Republican ticket I think he’ll strike most Americans as Dwight Eisenhower-like. And I think it will set a fire under Republicans. (In fact, before McCain clinched it earlier this year, I half-thought the party elders might arrange for him to swoop into the primaries and engineer a nomination.)

Just remember: You heard it here first.

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I’m not so sure any more. I think it’s very possible that Missy Chase Lapine has just taken that one step too far.

"Who?" you say.

If you haven’t heard of Missy Chase Lapine, she’s the author of The Sneaky Chef, which is one of those, your-kids-will-love-your-crappy-cooking-if-they-only-don’t-know-it’s-healthy-so-don’t-tell-them cook books — which Jessica Seinfeld probably cribbed off of when she wrote her own book in that genre called Deceptively Delicious. (Better title.)

It was one of those controversies that’s hard to take seriously. While I have no doubt that Jessica probably did some "borrowing" which would get a less wealthy and celebrated author in trouble, the resulting publicity no doubt redounded to Lapine’s favor.

But Lapine is now pushing the envelope. In today’s New York Post, Bruce Golding says that based on Jerry’s last appearance on Letterman she’s terrified. Why? He made some sort of crack about how all assassins go by their full names (Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, John Wilkes Booth, etc.) — like Missy Chase Lapine. (Although, I must admit, that wasn’t quite clear from the article that they were talking about Lapine. I assume they were.)

"I’ve never felt so frightened and vulnerable as the day my daughter, 7 years old, came home from school and asked, ‘Mom, what’s an assassin?’" Lapine told Golding.

Oy…

First off, why should she be the one scared if she’s supposed to be the assassin? (Or maybe I’m reading this story wrong.) Angry? Sure. But scared? I don’t get it. Or is she worried that Jerome Allen Seinfeld is some sort of furtive assassin?

The only thing that I can really find objectionable is that Seinfeld is trotting out the whole "three names assassins" schtick. Very old. C’mon Sein. You need some new material.

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Max Gross, author of From Schlub to Stud: How to Embrace Your Inner Mensch and Conquer the Big City, will be blogging all week as one of Jewcy‘s Lit Klatsch bloggers. Gross is a real estate reporter for the New York Post, and also one of Jewcy editor Michael Weiss’s closest friends. Weiss can attest to Max’s being both a schlub and a mensch.

Since she first went on the campaign trail, Sarah Palin has been called many things, but I think Judith Warner might have come up with a new one in her op-ed in Sunday’s Times…

She essentially calls Palin a schlemile. (Sort of. Warner quotes the great Bella Abzug saying, "Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemile to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemile." And then she applies that to Palin.)

It’s a mostly fair characterization.

In fact, it’s worth one’s time to look at the classic definition of a schlemile, going by Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish) which goes something like this:

1) A foolish person; a simpleton. "He has the brains of a shlemile." [MPG: Rosten very rarely uses the "c" in his "sch" Yiddish words.]

2) A consistently unlucky or unfortunate person; a "fall guy"; a hard-luck type; a born loser; a submissive and uncomplaining victim. "That poor shlemile always gets the short end of the stick." A Yiddish proverb goes: "A shlemile falls on his back and breaks his nose."

3) A clumsy, butterfingered, all-thumbs, gauche type. "Why does a shlemile like that ever try to fix anything?"

4) A social misfit, congenitally maladjusted. "Don’t invite that shlemile to the party."

5) A pipsqueak, a Caspar Milquetoast. "He throws as much weight as a shlemile." "No one pays attention to that shlemile."

6) A naive, trusting, gullible customer. The usage is common among furniture dealers, especially those who sell the gaudy, gimcrack stuff called "borax."

7) Anyone who makes a foolish bargain, or wagers a foolish bet. This usage is wide in Europe; it probably comes from Chamisso’s tale Peter Schlemihl’s Wunderbare Geschichte, a fable in which the protagonist sold his shadow and, like Faust, sold his soul to Satan.

Obviously, not all of these things fit precisely with Sarah Palin. I would be hard pressed to think that someone who has come so far on so little is in any way "unlucky" or "unfortunate." Quite the opposite.

Nor is Palin a social misfit — if anything, her social status is her greatest strength. (Her only strength, when you get right down to it.)

But she certainly fits in with the first definition. (You really couldn’t ask for better words than "Foolish" and "Simpleton" to describe her.)

The third definition I could go either way on. Who knows if Sarah Palin is handy around the house (I’m sure she is) but she definitely strikes me as more than a little gauche.

And I think definitions five, six and seven are all very fair. (Certainly if you watch Tina Fey’s portrayal.)

Which leads me to believe: Warner is right. Sarah Palin is, for the most part, a genuine schlemile. Which, I hate to say, does inspire some pity and sympathy for her — even in a yellow dog Democrat like myself. For a long time now Sarah Palin has clearly been in way over her head — and this has made me wonder if she woke up every morning praying that this non-ending parade of ridicule and media scrutiny were just some dreadful nightmare.

Moreover, the worst you could say about her (until she started playing viciously) was that she didn’t quite appreciate how unqualified she was. It’s not easy being self-aware (most people aren’t) and Palin clearly was not. That’s not her fault, exactly. It’s a reason to vote against her — not to hate her.

But sympathy only goes so far…

Rosten adds something important to his entry on schlemiles: "It is important to observe that shlemile, like nebech [nebbish], carries a distinctive note of pity. In fact, a shlemile is often a nebech’s twin brother. The classic definition goes: ‘A shlemile is always knocking things off a table; the nebech always picks them up.’"

After eight years of picking up after George W. Bush, personally, I’ve had enough schlemiles in the executive branch. Demorcrats were always the much more nebbishy party. Vote nebbish in ’08!

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Recanati wine is desperately trying to pass for gentile.

First off, there’s the name. Nothing about "Recanati" sounds particularly Jewish. In fact, it sounds vaguely Italian. (Which doesn’t hurt a wine.) Then there’s the fact that the front label is extremely simple—there is nary a Hebrew letter in sight, only the brand, the vintage, the grape and the region. You have to take a close look at the back to find the kosher stamp. And if you were to call the PR department at Recanati, they would admit that no, they’re not really advertising the fact that they’re kosher.

"We’ve been encouraging wine shops to start an Israeli section," says Michael Wolff, the senior brand manager for the Israeli wine, which is produced in the Galilee. The idea is to get away from the "kosher" label and all its connotations.

Recanati is hardly the only Israeli wine hiding the inconvenient fact that, yes, they’re also kosher. "We don’t really talk about the kosher aspect of our wines," says Marsha Palanci, who does marketing for the Israeli brand Yarden. "We market it as an international wine."

The reasons behind this are of the "duh" variety. Long before brand giant Manischewitz even existed, the words "wretched" and "kosher" were synonyms when it came to wine: Jews have proven themselves utterly maladroit winemakers for literally thousands of years. Not that it was always their fault: Jews rarely had access to grapes, and they oftentimes weren’t allowed to own land. And when the Jews arrived in America, the only grape they had access to was the Concord, which needed to be diluted with sugar—making wines like Manischewitz so sickly sweet.

But there is nothing in the rules of kashrut that makes bad wine inevitable. For a wine to be kosher it needs to either be flash-pasteurized—heated to 90 degrees Celsius—or it needs to be made by Sabbath-observant Jews. Wine experts disagree about whether flash-pasteurization has negative effects on taste (though most believe it does), but regardless, nothing about shomer Shabbat vintners makes for crappy wine.

And given that we’re living in the age of gourmet, where food and drink is as much about status as it is about nourishment and chefs like Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud are celebrities known by their first name, it’s only fitting and proper that the moment is ripe for an excellent, upscale kosher wine. Why should Jews be left out? Let the gourmet kosher wine revolution begin.

The last decade has seen signs of just that sort of uprising. Israel, France and California have all been churning out top-notch labels at extremely high prices. California-based Covenant, for example, retails for $110 and can be found on the wine lists at Per Se and French Laundry. Other kosher wines, like Recanati, are as shy about their kosher status but considerably less expensive. To see the revolution in progress, I canvassed a number of wine stores and wine experts and came up with a list of the best wines the kosher world has to offer. Then, for the sake of research, I sampled all of them with a friend.

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