Patience is a virtue, Mr. Edwards

All ye doubters of the rectitude of the National Enquirer have been left with egg on your face; egg on your face I say! The good folks over at the king of tabloids have been crying for our attention for months…claiming that they had a legitimate story about John Edwards and his illegitimate love child.

And now some truth has indeed come out, as truth has a tendency of doing…and John Edwards has admitted to having an affair with this woman:

Who is she? We shall get to that in a moment…but let me explain first why I am even bothering to talk about it. It is not the act itself that really raises my ire. My issue is quite simply the hypocrisy of it all.

There’s nothing quite as decidedly sweet as a little hypocrisy, is there? It lingers on the palate, appeasing both our sense of destruction and our need for gossip. It is a big part of the fabric of America; our socially accepted ritual of voyeurism. And we are delivered our tasty little nuggets of tomfoolery by a very willing and able press corps.

A journalistic inquiry that compels a public figure to eat crow is really the modern day alternative to community stoning; the stuff a good Monday morning is made of! While admittedly public admissions of hypocrisy are not quite as fun or interactive as the rock tossing employed by our relatives of yesteryear… the method does have its perks. While pelting in its heyday was reserved almost exclusively for common women, today’s alternative allows us to blur the gender line and emotionally injure everyone, whether they be phallically challenged or not.

It seems though that today, this particular cocktail of embarrassment and shame is reserved mostly for the power-drunk political bucks that rove the grasses just off Capitol Hill. Yes, aspiring politician after politician have managed to get their dicks so inescapably caught in the ringer that political castration soon followed suite. Way to follow the pack, Johnny boy.

See, here’s a man whose presidential bid rested solidly on the ideals of integrity and compassion. This divide between his righteous indignation and his behavior is akin to finding out Gandhi having McDonalds smuggled into his residence while fasting for the rights of India. Ok, well maybe that’s a tad bit over stated…Gandhi and John Edwards are not quite on the same plane of relevance…as a matter of a fact John Edwards will be lucky if two years from now he’s on anybody’s mental rickshaw of relevance. But still, the duplicitous bastard pisses me off.

The idiot cheated on his wife. What’s that? You say a lot of politicians cheat on their wives? True… but how many of them have the big brass balls and the complete lack of scruples to cheat on their spouses when they have cancer? John Edwards seems uniquely disconnected and unaffected by sentimentality, which probably would have made him a wonderful leader come to think of it, but I digress.

Yes, John Edwards, the man o’ morals, had an affair with some 42-year old videographer he met in a bar, while his wife was trying to battle cancer no less. Edwards’ campaign hired the woman, she traveled with Edwards, making videos, and then she suddenly left the campaign, reportedly midway through 2006, and the videos all disappeared off the Edwards website shortly after. Then the story gets interesting…

His lil’ fling ended up pregnant, not long after she stopped working with the campaign. Edwards insists he is not the father, though he has yet to take a paternity test. Apparently the thought of losing her meal ticket’s got baby-mama a lil’ gun-shy; she won’t allow the test. You see, she has managed to procure herself a lovely little mansion to call her own out in Santa Barbara Ca, that she is sharing with the young aid that they paid claims to be the baby daddy! Aww, like a family! Anyhow, I don’t think she wants to risk all that to be on Maury Povich.

John Edwards of course denied that he knew of any monetary consideration for either his mistress or former campaign aide but did stipulate that one of his donors or handlers might have. Uh huh. And then like magic his former chief aid came forward to admit that he provided money to move Ms. Hunter out of Edwards’ state, without Edwards’ knowledge, of course.

Did I mention Mrs. Edwards was busy dying of cancer during this circus?

Edwards did supposedly tell his wife awhile ago, but he neglected to tell the rest of America. He didn’t figure he needed to…it was The National Enquirer with the story. And they are “tabloid trash” and “an example of the reason the American public has trouble trusting the media.” So he denied the story…for months.

When he finally did come out to us, he did so on a day when most media had left for Beijing…near the end of a news cycle on a Friday…no doubt anticipating a slow weekend filled with distractions and new news stories. For shame, Jonathan, for shame!

This is a man who put his ideals on a pedestal and put his wife in the corner. Elizabeth Edwards has made good on her vow to stand beside Senator Edwards until death do us part. And ol’ Johnny-Come-Lately couldn’t even wait until after the casket dropped to plow some random haggish bar straggler? How tacky…

Patience truly is a virtue…that John Edwards doesn’t possess. And because of his inability to suffer a little penis-neglect he will not become Attorney General, he will not speak at the Democratic Convention and he will not hold public office again. Hopefully his wife will make him miserable for the remainder of her time on earth, but it’s unlikely. Elizabeth Edwards is a far cry from her husband, and a damn sight better then an insincere wind-bag like him ever deserved.

So…you think I am being too hard on him? Or do you think he is as big of a hypocritical jackass as I do? And while we are chatting up in here…whatddaya think of Eve’s facelift??!