Painful because Booker, a rising Democratic star, is such a good guy. Amusing, because rarely are Americans treated to such premier seats in the political theater of truth and consequence.

I am referring to two candidate debates that I witnessed during the Democratic mayoral primary that year. The first took place Aug. 3 during the Lamond-Riggs Citizens Association mayoral forum at Plymouth Congregational United Church on North Capitol Street. I served as moderator.

Listen to what Newt Gingrich said in January: “The Bain model is to go in at a very low price, borrow an immense amount of money, pay Bain an immense amount of money and leave. I’ll let you decide if that’s really good capitalism. I think that’s exploitation.”

On Wednesday, some understandably disgruntled investors filed suit in federal court against Facebook and several of the big banks that promoted its stock sale. The lawsuit alleges that the social media giant and the banks “selectively disclosed” to “certain preferred investors” the fact that Facebook’s financial prospects weren’t as bright as the public had been led to understand.

Those are the messages, contradictory but compelling, embedded in a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) about the fast-approaching “fiscal cliff.” The economy will confront the precipice at year’s end, on account of a confluence of tax cuts set to expire and spending cuts scheduled to kick in.

The prostitution scandal involving a dozen Secret Service agents in Cartagena, Colombia, is spreading into a broader burlesque for the agency, furthered by a Washington Post report that tolerance of a frat-house culture has induced some employees to come up with the “Secret Circus” name.

There is political instability nearby in Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, as the Arab uprising moves through its second year. In each of these countries, the leadership maintains power in a balancing act. Only Turkey, with its triad of a strong economy, army and political leadership, seems genuinely stable.

Blond, blue-eyed Elizabeth Warren, the Senate candidate in Massachusetts and Harvard professor who cites “family lore” that she is 1/32nd Cherokee, was inducted into Oklahoma’s Hall of Fame last year. Her biography on OklahomaHeritage.com says that she “can track both sides of her family in Oklahoma long before statehood” (1907) and “she proudly tells everyone she encounters that she is ‘an Okie to my toes.’ ” It does not mention any Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother. A DVD of the induction ceremony shows that neither Warren nor anyone else mentioned this.

Its chairman, Jamie Dimon, has admitted that the firm was “sloppy” and “stupid” in making trading bets that lost $2 billion. But Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee wouldn’t hear of it; they preferred to blame government.

This is odd coming from a man whose career has been based, with enormous success, on making it ever harder to turn that thing off.

If you didn’t know what lay behind the gates of the vast structure in Janzour, just outside the Libyan capital, you’d probably assume it was the Libyan Naval Academy. That, after all, is what it used to be. But drive past the empty main building and into the former living quarters, and you won’t see any sailors. Laundry hangs from the balconies. Children play in the dust below. Women in black abayas walk up and down the concrete plazas, while elderly men in long white gowns smoke cigarettes and stare at the sea.

Forty-six months ago, then-candidate Barack Obama flew to Berlin to call for a new era of friendship with Europe after it and the United States had “drifted apart.” With an offer to end the American unilateralism of the Bush years, he urged the adoring crowd: “Now is the time to join together through constant cooperation.”

The NAACP’s 64-member boardapproved a resolution Saturday supporting “marriage equality” not as a matter of empathy or compassion but as a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. In citing this rationale, the 103-year-old organization founded by W.E.B. Du Bois firmly linked the campaign for gay rights to the epic African American struggle for freedom and justice.

So on one level the resistance to evaluating teachers more systematically, rewarding good ones and encouraging bad ones to leave, is puzzling.

Romney’s address struck me as standard fare for a college graduation. He hit all the familiar notes: gratitude to school and a nod to parents for sacrifices made; celebration of the virtues of hard work, devotion to principles, individualism, service, family. There was even a little shameless politicking, with Romney telling the audience “what the next four years might hold for me is yet to be determined. But . . . things are looking up, and I take your kind hospitality today as a sign of good things to come.”

It started with the annual March for Life anti-abortion rally in January, which readers said was inadequately covered. It accelerated with a front-page story in March about Barbara Johnson, a Catholic lesbian who was refused Communion at her mother’s funeral by the Rev. Marcel Guarnizo, a conservative priest in a Gaithersburg parish.

When Barack Obama was running for president, he successfully managed to distance himself from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, leaving his Chicago church during the campaign and shrugging off suggestions that the preacher’s fiery rhetoric had any effect on him over the 20 years of their close friendship.

Russ Caswell, 68, is bewildered: “What country are we in?” He and his wife, Pat, are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolding in Orwellian language.

This town’s police department is conniving with the federal government to circumvent Massachusetts law — which is less permissive than federal law — to seize his livelihood and retirement asset. In the lawsuit titled United States of America v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Massachusetts, the government is suing an inanimate object, the motel Caswell’s father built in 1955. The U.S. Department of Justice intends to seize it, sell it for perhaps $1.5 million and give up to 80 percent of that to the Tewksbury Police Department, whose budget is just $5.5 million. The Caswells have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime. They are being persecuted by two governments eager to profit from what is antiseptically called the “equitable sharing” of the fruits of civil forfeiture, a process of government enrichment that often is indistinguishable from robbery.

For years, the stronger European economies have managed to bump along from challenge to challenge — providing bailouts to the improvident in exchange for fiscal restraint and reform, while reassuring credit markets in an elaborate confidence game. But the fundamental problem has never been resolved. Europe is a monetary union without being a fiscal union. Germany has become the continent’s rich uncle, vouching for the credit and covering the debts of distant relations without authority over their spending habits.

Okay, let’s call Rand Paul cynical — but not because of his playground taunt of the president a few days ago at a gathering of religious conservatives in Iowa. Let’s call him cynical because of the monstrous proposal the Kentucky Republican offered on the Senate floor Wednesday.

There was Romney, campaigning Tuesday in Iowa, praising the nation’s previous Democratic president and casting him as far superior to the current incumbent.

Since 2001, it has produced No Child Left Behind, a counterproductive federal intrusion in primary and secondary education; the McCain-Feingold speech rationing law (the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act); an unfunded prescription drug entitlement; troublemaking by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; government-directed capitalism from the Export-Import Bank; crony capitalism from energy subsidies; unseemly agriculture and transportation bills; continuous bailouts of an unreformed Postal Service; housing subsidies; subsidies for state and local governments; and many other bipartisan deeds, including most appropriations bills.