It was a good week for keeping one’s own counsel, or at least wishing that one had. In the moment firefighters exhumed him from the ruins of the 62nd Street townhouse he’d just blown to bits, failed suicide artist Dr. Nicholas Bartha likely reconsidered the e-mail he’d sent to his ex-wife in which he boasted, “You will be transformed from gold digger to ash and rubbish digger!” GOP Senate candidate and fellow Upper East Sider KT McFarland probably regretted having claimed her dad abused her when her brother, Tom Troia, came forward on the day of her big fund-raiser to say she’d made it all up. (His catchy endorsement of her: “Evil needs no reason.”) Another bumbling candidate, law-and-order-obsessed attorney-general wannabe Jeanine Pirro, stayed mum after it came out that her ne’er-do-well husband, Albert, was clocked by cops doing 98 mph through New Rochelle earlier this month. (His driving did not, however, cause the gale-force winds that laid waste to other precincts of Westchester; that was a tornado.) Anna Wintour endorsed Diane Von Furstenberg to be president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which could come back to haunt Vogue if underdog candidate Joseph Abboud stages an upset. President Bush decided that the U.S. would start following the Geneva Conventions, just like a real First World country. Ol’ Lockjaw, Dick Cheney, kept his blood pressure in check while Vladimir Putin took a potshot at him over his hunting mishap and Valerie Plame sued him for ruining her career. Robert Novak, whom Cheney would probably like to take on a one-way quail hunt, finally spilled his sources in the Plame leak, sort of. The public got a peek into Albert Einstein’s private life in newly released letters in which he documented a Hefner-esque success with the ladies. Which merely proved the wisdom of Brooklyn assemblywoman Diane M. Gordon, who was videotaped trying to swap a parcel of land with a builder for a free $500,000 house. “I’ve been around long enough to know,” she told her would-be accomplice, “that if you want a dream to come true, you got to keep your mouth shut.”

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Related:

• Archive: “It Happened Last Week”
• Articles by Mark Adams
• Table of Contents: July 24, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!