Charles Kaiser on "that New Yorker cover," and the rest of this week's media winners and sinners

Winner: The indispensable Tom Powers, who is always required reading on national security issues, for his convincing meditation in the New York Review of Books on the almost unthinkable—a massive air attack and/or full-scale invasion of Iran before the end of the Bush administration.

Powers and New Yorker writer Sy Hersh are practically the only two journalists left in America who are still taking the possibility of this catastrophe seriously.

Powers summed up his view to FCP this way: "The press on the whole is dealing with the war with Iran issue roughly as they did the run-up to invasion of Iraq: like a routine weather story, when a hurricane is brewing. Nobody has yet laid out the consequences of widening the war to include hostilities with Iran. Nobody has remarked that the U.S. is claiming the right to attack another country completely outside the confines of international law. Nobody is seriously questioning whether the U.S. can handle the probable consequences of such a war, or what it would do to American politics, not to mention the American deficit, the American ability to focus on problems at home, or the place of America in the world. Look at the map—Afghanistan (which touches China) to Lebanon—150 million people, six major languages. What is Iran expected to do if attacked? Sit on its hands? Why is our constant barrage of threats met only with silence in the public prints?"

Why indeed?

Sinner: That New Yorker cover. Was it the end of Western Civilization as we know it? No, it was not; but it wasn't smart, or funny, either. It also sucked up all of the attention that should have gone to...

Winner: Ryan Lizza, for his fascinating (though overlong) 14,000-word account in the same issue of Obama's remarkably rapid rise through the maelstrom of Chicago politics. Lizza's bottom line: "Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them."

Winner: Jon Stewart discussing that now infamous cover:

Winner: Kirk Semple, for a beguiling piece in the New York Times about the rise of Bukharian Jews—and Bukharian architecture—in staid Forest Hills, Queens. "Don't be upset with our people because we like to be large," pleaded Boris Kandov, president of the Bukharian Jewish Congress.

Winner: Sarah H. Lynch in Time, for a clear-eyed view of the remarkable prevalence of recreational drug use in America. "Despite tougher drug policies in the U.S., Americans were twice as likely to have tried marijuana than the Dutch ... In fact, Americans were more likely to have tried marijuana or cocaine than people in any of the 16 other countries, including France, Spain, South Africa, Mexico, and Colombia."

Winners: The editors of the New Republic, for their intelligent dissection of Obama's non-flip-flop on Iraq. "Yes, it's stop-the-presses enormous: Barack Obama has affirmed a position that he has held for months." And for calling out...

Sinner: Mark Halperin, who told Anderson Cooper that Obama's new/old position "is one of the biggest things that's happened so far in the general election."