Oh Baby!
By the time you read this it will probably be official. John Edwards will have formally admitted what we already know. That’s he’s the father of that there baby that popped up in the middle of his campaign. Ok, it’s sort of old news. But in these dog days of August when “the news” is dominated by the birther/deather sideshow, I don’t think I risk much by taking a brief time out to belatedly say what a miserable disappointment Edwards turned out to be.
I liked him a lot when I saw him as he surged in the final days of the 2004 Iowa caucuses (a contest he would have won if they had come a week later). I liked him even more when he was reborn a few years later as a rather vocal populist. He’s a seductive guy, apparently, and I admit he bamboozled me. I was able to spend some up close time alone with him (as a reporter!) very, very early in the campaign — in Nevada in March 2007 and then again a few months later in Seattle. I also followed his campaign (and that of all the others in Iowa) and I watched him fold in the Nevada caucuses. I was more certain than some of my friends that the guy really had experienced some sort of epiphany after the dreary, dismal 2004 campaign and that he was deadly serious about closing the gap between The Two Americas.
In retrospect, I have to suspect it was never more than a pose. Too bad, because his rhetoric was right on the mark.
His political career, of course, ended when he admitted to covering up his affair. Now he will formally bury the cadaver. Again, too bad.
August 14th, 2009 at 3:06 am
Edwards was always too glib; as is Obama. Today you find out the truth about Edwards glibness, I’m not sure when you’ll discover Obama’s. But then the left is frequently open to being bamboozled.
August 14th, 2009 at 3:23 am
What are the legal penalties for using campaign contributions to pay off a mistress, her love child, and a flunkie who agree to take the rap?
August 14th, 2009 at 5:59 am
I thought the Breck guy was gay.
August 14th, 2009 at 6:53 am
Moral compasses sure seem to be affected by the refrigerator magnets of life.
August 14th, 2009 at 7:58 am
I’m wondering just how GM Roper could have made his comment even more ridiculously glib. Probably not possible.
August 14th, 2009 at 9:34 am
That Twitter box features a lively debate about whether whether Edwards is a faggot. A debate begun by Ann Coulter. I’m not sure this is a valuable addition to the otherwise excellent redesign.
August 14th, 2009 at 10:03 am
It’s very easy to take shots at a man who steps out, especially when the wife is hit by illness. It’s harder to imagine what happens to a man when his partner is suddenly beset by a woman’s cancer and he is suddenly encountering a loss of sexual agency that may be lifelong
Marc, let me give you a little guideline for that kind of scenario. Antonio Villaraigosa stepped out on his wife Corina in the middle of her thyroid cancer. He did it within weeks of arriving in Sacramento for the first time. You cheered him on then and you cheered him on well after that.
He stepped out on her again when she was in the middle of a depression and raising two kids despite it all. He was having a very incautious affair, and everyone in media knew it. You said nothing, and only cheered him on when he ran for re-election for Mayor. You told the city, in fact:
“I just as easily confess to still liking and even admiring him.”
After two step-outs on Corina, both when she was ill, you still like and even admire him.
I guess you’re still bamboozled by Antonio, even though you no longer are by Edwards.
August 14th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Truly, it is beyond the realm of possibility that anyone with a messy personal life could actually care about making the planet a
better place to live. Thanks for wising us up to that sort
of ghastly liberal relativism.
It also saves me the trouble of reading the demented
Christopher Hitchens on any subject, since he walked out
of his first wife while She was pregnant.
August 14th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Much as I liked Edwards’ message and envy his ability to communicate it, I never wholly trusted him.
Generally I don’t think a person’s sex life, including his/her integrity in that aspect of life, carries over substantially into public life. For that reason, I don’t really think it should be grist for the political mill. I think that political positions taken that are contradicted by a politician’s personal conduct are fair game, though.
What Edwards (and Ensign and Sanford) have done, though, goes beyond just bad behavior. The cover-ups, possibly made possible by campaign contributions (or tax money, in Sanford’s case), make their escapades newsworthy. As Bob Williams suggested, they may justify grand jury interest as well.
August 14th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Why did Marc Cooper redesign his blog at the same time the Los Angeles Times redesigned their site? hmmmmmm
Was there a sale offered by newly unemployed blog designers.
Is this a conspiracy to distract us, while Obama pushes the death panel Health Care plan.
August 14th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Snitchens isn’t the only hypocrite cad who’s scribbled for The Nation. You know that Alexander Cockburn married pretty well. In fact, we used to say in the 90′s that dear Alex “writes left but sleeps right!”
August 14th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
“Truly, it is beyond the realm of possibility that anyone with a messy personal life could actually care about making the planet a
better place to live.”
Not at all. What is beyond the realm of sanity is a guy who is running for President getting that deep into his own personal shit and assuming he can get away with it. Hubris.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Virtually every thing the The Breck Girl said in his “come clean” interview on ABC was a lie. Even his fallback haven of decency — “I did, but not when Saint Elizabeth was battling cancer” — was bogus.
August 14th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
reg hit it on the head–hubris. Anyone who thinks they can be president doesn’t lack for ego, and if they have any charm to go with it at all–and they often do–well, the temptation is mighty strong. I don’t agree that we need to conclude that Edwards was faking what he claimed he cared about, but he was delusional about his ability to get away with his little secret.
They probably just think, “Hell if Clinton could dodge the bullet even with that dress flying around, then I got nothing to worry about.” So there’s a new reason not to like Clinton–encouraging southern Dems of middling charm to think they can pull it off. Amateurs.
August 14th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
…”Dreiser was the novelist of desire, who saw the American tragedy in which one is condemned to reach out, while the grasp closes on nothing. Dreiser can seem to find no ultimate purpose to life in America, said Mencken. “he can get out of it only a sense of profound and inexplicable disorder, of a seeking without a finding. There is not only no neat programme of rewards and punishments; there is not even an understandable balance of causes and effects’. Living in America is like sailing cockelshell boats upon an angry sea. “The waves which batter the cockleshells change their direction at every instant. Their navigation is a vast adventure, but intolerably fortuitious and inept–a voyage without chart, compass, sun or stars.”
Dresier’s major characters all are caught up in a voage of ambition and desire; their tragedy is not, however, one of not attaining the object of their desire, although this may happen; more often their tragedy is that the object once attained isnot fulfilling. COnsider two of Dresier’s heroines–Sister Carrie and JEnnie Gerhardt) Both in the typically American pattern struggle to escape poverty, ignorance, and physical miseries; both escapte the fate which appeared to be their lot. Both succeed through seduction, but in neither case is this what interests Dreiser. Dreiser’s tales are not maudlin fables of virtue’s fall,–promiscuity is not at the root of the tragedy of either Carrie or Jennie, observed Mencken, ‘its not that they are degraed, but that they are lifted up, not that they got to the gutter, but they escape the gutter. ‘ In America the problems is not so much that one looses the race, but that winning means so little.
The same is true of Dreiser’s heroes, who endure tortures that are remarkably similar. Frank Copwerwood and Eugene Witla achieve worldly advancement, but his ‘widens their aspirations beyond their inherent capacities,’ and so results in final frustration. In early reviews of Dreiser’s book, the humanists and moralists could see in the tragedies of Witla and COwperwood nonly some defect of personality; they attributed the fall of these protagonists to their secual excesses–theyassumed Dreiser’slesson to be that licentiousness leads to personal tragedy and social disintergration. The fact about Witla and Cowperwood, said Mencken , ‘is that they are not mere Don Juans–that they are men in whom the highest idealism strives against the bonds of the flesh. Witla, passion-torn, goes down to disaster and despair. It is what remains of the wreck of his old ideals that floats him into peace at last. As for Cowperwood, we have yet to see his actual end–but how plainly his shadows are cast before! Life is beating him, and through his own weakness” This is the typicall American pattern of tragedy–defeating oneself through one’s strengths.
August 14th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Edwards’ infidelity was a weakness. He is quoted as confessing his head being turned by the power and attraction his achievement had given him.
That is a character flaw but not one that means he was a con man or his idealism and populist passion about the issue of poverty was a lie.
If he were French, having a mistress would be meaningless. But here, the “values” create a false drama and even though its political suicide here to have an affair while running for office its done all the time.
Gary Hart…
Stephanopolus makes some good points about how Clinton’s fucking around wasted his staff’s time constantly having to put out the media fires and the last straw was his sordid, ridiculous dalliance with Lewinsky.
In America its the screwy moeurs that create the firestorm.
Edwards’ public confessions were what were nauseating and then his wife, for chrissakes, writing a book! This is where is all goes bizarre and peculiarly American.
Edwards’ was for real. His politics were not fake. But he lost the battle of class.
August 14th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
And I find it really funny that this predominantly male forum is so hypocritical about a guy taking advantage of his uh position to stick his dick in wherever he can.
PUH lease.
August 14th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
I really had wanted to share having just caught by accident a wonderfully poignant documentary on VH1 called:
Woodstock Now and Then.
Keep hearing Joni Mitchell’s haunting little Woodstock tribute–written because she couldn’t go cause her manager decided she had to make the Dick Cavett show–anyway…that little choking refrain:
…And weve got to get ourselves
Back to the gar-den
August 14th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/08/14/bob.dylan/index.html
Don’t that beat all.
Gates should take a leaf out of Dylan’s book.
By the way, when does Vol 2 of Chronicles come out?
August 15th, 2009 at 2:40 am
There were 47 million people at Woodstock, according to a recent poll of baby boomers.
August 15th, 2009 at 8:12 am
It was never in the cards for Edwards, who was, let’s not forget, the netroots candidate, not Obama.
August 15th, 2009 at 10:27 am
I knew Edwards was an asshole and a flip-flopping dipshit when I had a short conversation with him during his last campaign.
I noticed on his site, he made strong mention of the phantom Iranian nuclear weapons (which of course don’t exist.)
So I asked him, why didn’t he mention Israel’s very real nuclear weapons. He gave a weasel answer, saying, who said they have them? In the few short moments I had with him, I mentioned several sourced. He smiled, grinned, refused to answer, and danced off to shuck and jive for the cameras.
I called him a chickenshit and wrote him off.
August 15th, 2009 at 11:41 am
He wrote himself off.
August 15th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Sounds like he’s just trying to meet the qualifications for running for governor of California. Is there a spare room at the Beverly Wilshire for him and his young family?
August 15th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
More on the adorable story of two 20 something cops in Jersey shaking down Bob Dylan…because they didn’t know who Bob Dylan is:
…”The 68-year-old singer of Like A Rolling Stone wasn’t carrying ID, so police took him back to his hotel, where tour staff vouched for him.
Dylan biographer Howard Sounes, author of Down The Highway, told Sky News Online of the musician’s fondness for living a vagabond existence during his touring schedules.
“He is this charming and eccentric character but it is almost like he gets dressed in the dark,” he said.
“Friends talk of him dressing as a tramp and driving around in a pickup with dogs in the front – that chic 1960s look disapppeared somewhere along the way and he turned into a male bag lady.”
Meanwhile, cops have been lauding over their colleague’s mistake.
“It has been the talk of the station,” one police officer said.
“The policewoman was very young and did not recognise Dylan – there was another officer with her and even he did not recognise Dylan.
“Both said they never listened to his music and had no idea what he looked like.”
They do now.”
August 15th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Lets see is it “they didnt know who Bob Dylan was…dont know who Bob Dylan is”?
August 15th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
But then the left is frequently open to being bamboozled.
My side didn’t embrace a dimwitted moose huntress incapable of coherence and who quit little more than halfway through, nor did my side put forth a man who, after failed business opportunities, managed to make money through a combination of corporate welfare and crony capitalism and became president after six years in what is one of the weakest gubernatorial roles in the nation (the Texas State History Museum is named after Bob Bullock for a reason).
Love your glass house.
As for Edwards, I hope Elizabeth drops him like the proverbial hot potato. I hope his kids don’t speak to him again. Jackass.
August 15th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
As if it wasn’t bad enough that he went behind his [awesome] wife to fool around with a woman with neither the intelligence nor beauty to match Elizabeth’s own, and thus disgracing his good name and that of his children’s….but he adds insult to injury by hurting yet another life, his illegitimate daughters, by spending a year denying he is her father….and only “coming clean” when the wheels of justice force him to do so, and it is financially advantageous for him to claim her. Really, really sad; and frightening to think that he might have become president.
August 15th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Having said that, I have to admit that I too was an early enthusiastic supporter of his, and I now feel like a dupe. I campaigned for him in 2007-2008…spending hours and hours doing so.
August 15th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
In fairness, even if Dylan did have ID, it would probably say “Robert Zimmerman” and the young cops still wouldn’t know.
August 15th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
When he had his music licensed through ASCAP, his name was listed in the database as Robert Dylan, which is how his name would appear on a royalty check, so I believe that he had it legally changed.
August 15th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Not to get too deep in the weeds here, but I’m kind of surprised that Dylan’s music is licensed by ASCAP. Back in the day I thought ASCP didn’t have much to do with his kind of music and BMI was the rock & roll, country, R&B, blues publisher. Maybe he passed the “Columbia smell test.”
August 16th, 2009 at 7:48 am
No he started with ASCAP, but actually jumped to SESAC a couple of years after ASCAP gave him their highest honor, the Pied Piper award.
Also, not to get too far afield, but after ASCAP was sued in the 1940′s for antitrust violations, the consent decree with which they settled required them to allow anyone in as a member provided that their work has either been commercially recorded, gotten airply or is available as sheet music in sheet music outlets.
August 16th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Since Bob Dylan is far more interesting than Edwards I hope you all read his Chronicles.
Totally jammy.
And his liking to go around like a bag lady makes him more endearing. I don’t think I have ever read anything about him being shit in any way shape or form…but don’t get me started on phony Joanie.
January 30th, 2010 at 4:16 pm
Gutter Guards can keep your home protected by keeping leaves from clogging your gutters and causing water to spill over the side causing deterioration to fascia boards, siding and landscaping. Gutter protection is very cost effective compared to the cost having your home waterproofed would be.