Since Friday the press has had a field day with the Edwards story.  No surprise there. 

 

Of course, forgotten in the feeding frenzy were other former Republican presidential candidates like Rudy Giuliani and his sleazy extraarital affairs history, McSame and his admitted affairs, and his most recent questionalble relationship with lobbyist, Vicki Iseman.

 

I was never a supporter of John Edwards.  I found him narcissistic, completely self-abosorbed, and exuding smarmy phoniness.   It should have been obvious especially when he was on the campaign trail for Democratic candidates for Congress in 2006.  It was amazing to watch him make speeches, ostensibly for these Democratic candidates, but never mention their names, and instead focus entirely on himself. 

 

As the Charlotte Observer notes: "After the 2004 election, he created a nonprofit whose stated goal was fighting poverty. The Center for Promise and Opportunity raised $1.3 million in 2005. But tax filings showed that much of the money paid Edwards' expenses as he gave speeches around the country, walked picket lines and met with foreign leaders overseas.

"He also started a privately funded Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at UNC Chapel Hill, which gave him another public platform. And the candidate who vowed to make poverty "the cause of my life" was ridiculed for $400 haircuts, a 28,000-square-foot home and his work for a Wall Street hedge fund."

But as Chris Hedges writes at CommonDreams via TruthDig: "What's sex got to do with it?"  He makes some excellent points.

"...It is all Jerry Springer, all the time.

"Reporters often know the sins of which they speak. They can shame John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Larry Craig and Bill Clinton and then head off to a hotel bar to do the same thing. The moral lapses of our media inquisitors, which I witnessed for over two decades as a reporter, can be as reprehensible as the behavior of those they cover.

"I do not trust or believe most politicians. I have covered too many. The question is not how we can get good people to govern. The question is how we can limit the damage of mostly mediocre, callow men and women, who comprise the majority of those who yearn for power, from doing the most harm. This comes through the rigorous checks and balances of a functioning democracy, not self-appointed political saviors. But we always prefer saviors, those who make us believe they have attained moral and heroic summits that elude us.

"There is something sad and pathetically human about Edwards' affair and his cowardly attempt to lie about it. I never liked Edwards. He is all flash and sparkle with his boyish $400 haircuts and oily sincerity. He preached a faux populism, one at odds with his record in the Senate, to sell himself to voters. But, even as I do not condone what he did, I feel sorry for him. He is being crucified by journalists and politicians, and a public, who often behave no better.

"There are worse things done by politicians than illicit sexual adventures. Ask an Iraqi. Ask an Afghan. Ask a detainee at Guantanamo. Ask an unemployed steelworker in Ohio. But in an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not want honesty or even reality but the reassurance of old clichs, stereotypes and mythic narratives. We want leaders who are willing to pretend they live in a make-believe world of happy couples and perfect relationships. We want to feel that they like us and we want to like them. This gives us what television gives us, a simplistic narrative around which to frame our lives. This narrative defies the messiness and disorder of the real world. If politicians adhere to this ridiculous narrative of personal happiness and fidelity, designed to reassure us that the world is ordered and neat and constant, they can commit egregious war crimes and strip us of our power. If they do not we will find better actors.

"Edwards' dishonesty does not compare to Bush's impeachable crimes. But Edwards' political career has been cut short, unlike Bush's, because he had the bad luck to get caught out of character behind the curtain."

While the Bush regime continues to torture and commit other reprehensible, anti-Constitution, anti-rule of law crimes, a lengthening news cycle is fixated with the sex scandal of a flawed, self-absorbed politician; a sex scandal that hasn't killed 4,000 plus US troops and countless innocent Iraqi men, women and children or ruined the US economy or inflicted damage on this country and its regular, hardworking people. 

The media in the US are, with few exceptions, mainly conservative, some right wing, corporate cheerleaders for Bush and his dangerous, ruinous policies (a media that shilled for Bush and helped get the US into the Iraq quagmire) damn the facts, Fourth Estate that is thrilled when it plays National Enquirer because that sells papers.