Your Cheatin' Heart
I don’t know what bothers me most about the whole John Edwards marital infidelity scandal.
Of course the God part offends me—Edwards has confidently declared that God has forgiven him. Amazing how many people know the mind of the transcendent, unknowable god they worship when they really want to, isn’t it? But that goes without saying. Every politician and pulpit-thumper in the US confidently announces that he’s all right with God, no matter how heinous his sin, no matter how sure he is that God has definitely not forgiven other sinners for far smaller sexual peccadilloes, so I can hardly work up the energy to be angry with Edwards for that. But there’s far worse to it than the religious hypocrisy our national politics are steeped in.
Part of me wants to rage against Edwards for running for president with a bimbo scandal hanging around his neck, endangering his party’s chances and the nation with it. We couldn’t afford the eight years of neocon sabotage we’ve just endured; we sure as hell can’t afford another four or eight years of it from a Republican beholden to right-wing money as the only thing holding him up, but we’d have gotten it had Edwards received the nomination. We may get it yet, if the Rove machine can resuscitate the old “Democrats are sexual perverts” meme. (Don’t bring up David Vitter, Larry Craig, and Mark Foley; it’ll just confuse everyone.) You may remember Edwards was my preferred candidate, back before he dropped out of the running. I liked his populist rhetoric, and he had enough of a margin to push a few agenda, and possibly even win running between the Obama-Clinton slugging match. Obama, to all appearances clean as a whistle and full of hope, has a lead but not an insurmountable one; how well do you think Edwards would hold up when Karl Rove and company released that little sleaze-bomb shortly before November 4? Hard to put a populist program in place if you can’t make it to office, and Edwards endangered the nation for a bit of tail, not that we haven’t seen that behavior before—which brings up the other part of me.
The other part of me wants to rage against the elements who argue that marital infidelity is so great a deal-killer in the presidency that they hope to tar Obama with Edwards’s affair—the very same elements who quietly overlook John McCain’s own marital infidelity to his first wife, Carol. You know, his first wife: the swimwear model who waited for him while he rotted in a cell in Vietnam, and whom he cheated on and when he returned to find out she’d gained a few pounds recovering from a crippling car wreck. Dropped her for a beauty queen heiress who he respects enough to call a cunt in front reporters. “Love, honor, and cherish ‘til death do you part” doesn’t mention anything about getting fat, fer chrissakes. If marital infidelity is really all that bad, shouldn’t we be walking away from the presidential candidate who actually practiced it? So why are news media ignoring that shameful tidbit? You know, the news media who McCain whines are being oh-so-mean to him.