In Thursday's Washington Post, reporter Michael Leahy talks to friends of disgraced senator John Edwards, who's morally dense enough to complain that he's being isolated as the Democrats still honor other notorious adulterers like Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy. Treatment of him is so "unflinchingly horrible" -- and yes, Bill Clinton is still drawing Democratic hosannas and liberal-media shoe-polish interviews.
Earth to Edwards: First, there's the never-made-it-to-president thing. But Edwards can't seem to absorb the cheating-on-wife-dying-of-cancer thing as the gold medal of self-absorption:
His confusion extended to the latest chapter in the drama — criminal charges alleging that in an effort to conceal his affair during the height of his 2008 presidential campaign, he illegally arranged for secret contributions of about $1 million to take care of Hunter’s needs as she prepared to give birth to their daughter, Quinn. Sometimes his painful bouts of self-analysis turned to frustration over his belief that he had been singled out among a long list of philandering politicians, living and dead, for pariah status.
“He knows he made mistakes,” [Glenn] Bergenfield says on the eve of Edwards’s trial, which is set to begin Thursday with jury selection. “But John thinks that the treatment of him is so unflinchingly horrible and that what he did is not so different from what others did — JFK, Clinton, the whole rogues’ gallery. We’ve had this conversation about his situation, and I remember he did compare it to Clinton. He said, ‘I did a horrendous thing, but I don’t know why I’m getting such an unforgiving treatment when you think of what other people have done.’ ”
The Post just left that lying there, surely calculating that its readers can figure out why that argument is stupid and self-pitying.
