Despite my general policy of steering clear of politics on this site, I think it’s pretty safe to say that John Edwards’ political career is pretty much finished.  In case you live under a rock, or haven’t taken your eyes away from 14 year-old Chinese gymnasts pretending to be 16, former senator Edwards ‘fessed-up to having an affair with a campaign staffer who apparently gets around.  A lot.  While cheating on your cancer-ridden wife falls somewhere between “intentionally making babies cry” and “kitten-rape” on the Miserable Bastard Scale, it’s not my place to judge.  After all, it’s a private matter, and I actually feel bad for his family having to re-open old wounds in public.  That is not my concern.

Cheating on your wife doesn't count if you're in a different area code or she has incurable cancer. I'm sorry, what? Neither of those are true? Oh...shit.

Cheating on your wife doesn't count if you're in a different area code or she has incurable cancer. I'm sorry, what? Neither of those are true? Oh...shit.

My concern is the public’s reaction to this news.  Why are people “shocked” and “angered” when they find out that someone lied about having an affair?  He wasn’t cheating on you.  He’s not even in office anymore, and unless you live in North Carolina, he never even represented you.  Why do you care?  Someone you don’t know and have nothing to do with cheated on his wife, whom you also don’t know.  And when someone asked him about it, he lied.  What do you expect him to do?

It was the same thing with Bill Clinton, back in the day.  If you were married and someone asked you if you got a mouth hug from a chub scout while you were at work, you would say no!   That’s the sort of thing you would expect people to lie about if asked.  Especially if you were in front of a group of reporters.  And especially if your wife would find out.  That’s generally not the sort of information that people go around volunteering.  Not only for his sake, but his wife and family, too.  Why would anyone expect him to do otherwise?

“But,” you say, my argumentative straw friend, “his hypocrisy and deception speak ill of his character!  He has betrayed us!”  Again, he didn’t buy you a ring and make you a promise, so stop taking this personally.  This is his mess and his family has to deal with it, and you should have a little compassion for these people.  Secondly, character in public office is overrated.  Public officeholders are basically hired to do a job by the people. Let’s say you ran an accounting firm, and one of your star accountants, I dunno, trolled for man sex in airport bathrooms.  As long as what he was doing was legal, didn’t affect his work, and didn’t hurt anybody, you wouldn’t care.  You wouldn’t know, either, and there are policies and laws in place that keep you from even asking about it.  So why do we treat politicians any differently?

Here’s another example: Richard Nixon was so evil, he probably should have just grown one of those old-timey villain moustaches and tied women to train tracks, cackling gleefully until those pesky Woodward and Bernstein kids foiled him again.  But the Olympics in China this week are a direct result of his opening trade with them — without his presidency, we might even be involved in a second Cold War.  So when an election comes to a choice between a morally-upstanding moron and a highly-qualified kitten-rapist…I’m thinking those kittens may have had it coming.