John Edwards, Worst Person in the World (Part II)

When his corruption trial ended yesterday without a conviction on any of six counts John Edwards was all about John Edwards again, looking for love in all the wrong places ... again.

Redemption comes to those who wait, not those who ask. OJ had it right: After he was acquitted of double murder he let his lawyers announce a fund to find the real killers and lived in the shade for as long as ego would allow. Edwards thought instead that the Anthony Weiner gambit was the way to go.

This is neither colossal misjudgment nor uncharacteristic hubris from a guy who thought that going to Haiti after that country's devastating earthquake was a good idea.

Like many others I thought the prosecution was a bad thing, probably political — but that's about process and the next prosecution and the rule of law, not about the "awful, awful" things that this once rising star did while he was on the ascent.

There isn't much more to say, so, from the archives, here's my rant the first time Edwards tried to re-join decent society.

From January 21, 2010:

It's rare for someone in the moral cesspool that is often public life to be as utterly shameless as John Edwards, so I feel compelled to write a few things down to keep track of it all.


Let's see:

• You have an adulterous affair with a woman, from the office, who is younger than your dying wife, whose incurable cancer is a matter of public record.
• You apparently have unprotected sex with this woman. A child is born, and you deny paternity so your daughter will read all about that in a few years.
• You not only pointedly lie about all this but you convince or force other people step up to publicly support your lie.
• You say you will take a paternity test you cannot be compelled to take and have no intention of taking because you know it will expose your lie, a litigator's trick that is slimy even by litigator standards.
• All this is going on as you try to get elected president of the United States. Disclosure of your sins during the campaign or after your election would stigmatize your party in a way not seen since Richard Nixon made "Republican" a dirty word. You don't care about that, either.
• When you finally come clean, under the back-breaking preponderance of evidence nobody but a birther could possibly construe any other way, you don't come clean yourself, but put another crony in front of the cameras to spill your guts. He refers to you as a liar, whooppee, while also saying how tough this has been on you.
• You, meanwhile, while not spilling your guts, acting as if any of this is going on, or even appearing conflicted or contrite, blather on about Haiti, making your vanity now hemispheric as you use the death and hopelessness of millions of people a backdrop for your attempt to re-enter the human race.
• You decide to put on this pathetic show in Haiti, where your presence on the ground will do nobody any good, and where I hope your televised remarks about how desperate things are there will be mashed up with your hair-coiffing embarrassment and displayed on the hacked version of a campaign site you haven't had the decency to update so it at least does not say:

"I began my presidential campaign here to remind the country that we, as citizens and as a government, have a moral responsibility to each other, and what we do together matters."

Have I missed something?

(With apologies to Keith Olbermann ... again)