John Edwards Sack O'Dung

From the Economist:
"THE new memoir by Elizabeth Edwards is destined to be one of those books that lives in talk-show appearances and cable-news debates, and not so much on bookshelves. She vomited when her husband told her that he'd been with another woman! She still loves him! She never wanted him to run for president!

Mr Edwards admitted the hanky-panky to her days after declaring his candidacy in 2006—almost a year before the National Enquirer reported it. She was afraid of the destructive questions Mr Edwards' affair with videographer Rielle Hunter would raise. Later events proved her right. "He should not have run," she says.

Does Mrs Edwards understand what her husband did wrong by running? It wasn't that he embarrassed his family. It was that he basically bilked thousands of Democratic donors and volunteers out of their time and money for a cause that he knew was not just doomed, but threatened to doom the entire party if he won the nomination. If the Edwardses have some tact, they'd donate the proceeds from this book to their former campaign staff."

TW: This blog was not around when the Edwards affair blew up. But the release of Elizabeth Edward's book provides an opportunity to punch him belatedly. There was a time when screwing around was not a dis-qualifier for POTUS aspirant, those days are long gone. The Bill Clinton 1992 process put philandering off the table for the foreseeable future. Clinton's continued hubris doomed the country to a wounded POTUS for the remaining two years of his own term, then created the atmosphere by which an incompetent could gain the office for the following eight years.

Any fool who would run with a mistress as part of the equation exhibits such incredibly poor judgment that his candidacy is on its face ridiculous and even scary. As the above piece frames, John Edwards stole the time and money of his supporters, thank goodness he was nowhere near to gaining the nomination. If he had done so he would have done tremendous harm not only to the Democratic party but the entire political process.

I will say as well, I had assumed Elizabeth Edwards had learned about the affair roughly when the public did. To learn she abetted her husband's scam does not put her in a better light by any means. This is not to take any of the blame off the shoulders of the John "Sack O'Dung" Edwards.