“YOU CHEATED, YOU LIED, YOU SAID THAT YOU LOVED ME…”

1/22/10

The Wall Street Journal, along with just about every other newspaper in the country, reported this morning that John Edwards has finally admitted that he is the father of two year old Frances Quinn Hunter, who is the daughter of Rielle Hunter, a videographer who worked on Mr. Edwards’ 2008 campaign for president. Note several things:

--Mr. Edwards has denied paternity of this child since she was born. Nice; how’s this child going to react when she learns that her father denied that he was her father for the first two years of her life?

--Mr. Edwards only admitted paternity on the eve of the release of a book by another campaign aide who was going to spill the beans on the whole sordid affair.

--That other campaign aide, Andrew Young (not the same Andrew Young who was UN Ambassador under Jimmy Carter), initially claimed that the baby was his, presumably out of a sense of loyalty to Mr. Edwards. This gives us a pretty good idea of what the typical professional politician, and professional campaign aide, considers a good, noble, and well placed sense of loyalty.

--Little Frances was conceived three months after Elizabeth Edwards, John Edwards’ wife, learned that her cancer had returned and was terminal.

In the great scheme of things, this is an unimportant story, largely because Mr. Edwards is, thankfully, largely unimportant now. However, I bring it up for three reasons:

--I often use words like “preening poltroon” to describe the typical politician of our current era. Mr. Edwards epitomizes “preening poltroon.” But the more one thinks about it, a better description of Mr. Edwards must be more base. Striving carefully to avoid raw profanity, I will describe Mr. Edwards as a “duplicitous portable receptacle of human, or perhaps bovine, but probably porcine, defecatory product.”

--The American public, addled by watching the endless hours of mind decaying pabulum, or worse, that emanates from the electronic brain numbing device that is present in every American home, has a very short and not all that acute memory. Mr. Edwards may yet rise from his political grave.

--Mr. Edwards’ lying for two years provides yet another example of a point I have made repeatedly in the Pontificator. (See, most recently, my 1/10/10 post “HIS LIPS ARE MOVING.”) Harrison Hickman, whom the Chicago Tribune describes as “a longtime friend and political advisor” to Mr. Edwards, reportedly said

“It is a very complicated set of reasons why (Mr. Edwards) lied. I’m not sure he even knows specifically why he did. The important thing, instead of untangling why, is to acknowledge that he did.”

Hmm…

Only someone named “Harrison Hickman” who is in the business of political prevarication could come up with such drivel. A normal, serious (or even not all that serious) person who works for a living knows that there are two reasons that John Edward lied, and lied in a way that has the potential to cause serious psychological and emotional problems in his daughter, whom he professes to love. First, he was afraid of the political repercussions of his affair with Rielle Hunter. This makes him not only a liar, but a scoundrel, a hyper-narcissist, and a coward. Come to think of it, those traits probably predestined him for great success (Remember, even though he never got the big prize, at least not yet, he was a U.S. Senator and a major party candidate for Vice-President.) in politics.

There is the longstanding theory of mine that states politicians lie because doing so comes even more naturally than telling the truth. They lie even when there is no point in doing so. (Some day I will repeat the story of Barry Goldwater’s death, a story that first led me to concoct this theory of politicians’ lying. That is grist for another post.) Further, they are so convinced that their attaining and holding high office is so important, both for them and for the benighted public, that such quaint notions as honesty and morality, or at least any morality that would supercede their own, twisted, personal version of morality, are rendered irrelevant. Professional politicians, and almost everyone who runs for office today is a professional politician, despite his or her protestations to the contrary, are natural born liars. Mr. Edwards is unique only in degree, not in substance.