Slow-Motion Train Wreck

The drama of John Edwards' fall from grace continues to spin hilariously, tragically out of control. A galaxy-class train wreck which hasn't yet reached its peak, the sordid, tawdry details just keep on coming, like Cheerios rolling out of the General Mills ovens. It still amazes, confounds and delights the rest of us who sort of have the normal ration of morals.

Former campaign aide and snubbed bromance-partner Andrew Young is working the talk shows with a vengeance and intensity normally reserved for the publicists of a young Hollywood starlet who somehow forgot that wearing panties is a fairly good idea when you are getting in and out of cars. His book detailing the whole tacky affair is due out tomorrow and it's sure to be a top-seller, if not a cultural milestone, just like the tell-all book "Game Change" that came out a couple weeks ago, spilling the behind-the-scenes dirt of the 2008 presidential campaign.

It seems as if the American public cannot get enough of highly-detailed accounts of the scandalous behavior of politicians. That may be due in part to the fact that there is no scarcity of this scandalous behavior and in the hyperactive, instantaneous news cycle of the internet and cable television, we are constantly bombarded by all kinds of ludicrous conduct practically the minute they see the light of day. Maybe Americans have made up their minds long ago that politicians are vile loathsome pigs and every new report of love children or illicit trysts just reinforces and validates that opinion. Or maybe it's like watching the audition shows of "American Idol" - seeing legions of the terminally crazy lose their minds in a very public fashion make us feel better about our own lives. Or maybe, I like scandals because they give me reason to use cool words like "tacky," "tawdry," and "sordid." Whatever the reason, political scandals are like media crack-cocaine, and that monkey shows no sign of getting off our backs anytime soon.

But once we get past the sadly-obvious fact that the Edwards situation has more cheesiness than a Wisconsin state fair, we begin to see the debris field of broken lives and hearts, of promises and confidences betrayed, and marriages and families torn asunder by conduct of the most selfish and thoughtless kind. When stuff like that hits the fan, everybody gets splattered with something nasty. Even cancer-striken Elizabeth Edwards, who throughout most of the emerging scandal was sympathetically cast as the Wronged Woman, has been portrayed as a shrieking, batshit-crazy harpy.

A scandal of this magnitude requires an enormous, highly elaborate web of lies and deceit to contain it. It takes on a life of its own and rapidly becomes unsustainable. Even the most carefully-constructed house of cards has to collapse under its own weight, and that is what we are witnessing now. Apparently Edwards and his erstwhile collaborators thought they could get away with something, but the harder they tried to keep it under wraps the more it started to trickle out. I don't know how Edwards expects his children to be able to weather this whole situation. They are what soldiers call "collateral damage," that is, innocent bystanders who get hurt solely because they were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place when everything goes to hell. And what about this "love child?" To me the most outrageous, immortal aspect of this whole thing is that Edwards tried to get Young to assume paternity for the child. It's completely astonishing to me that you would deliberately lie about who is a child's father. Someday she would have discovered the truth, and what a horrible, life-shattering revelation that would be. I could not even imagine living through something like that.

So, when we last saw John Edwards he was wandering through the pulverized landscape of earthquake-ravaged Haiti, trying to find himself some sort of redemption in the rubble and tragedy, a very apt metaphor for his political dreams. That was probably the only place he could find people more miserable than he is. The big difference is that the people of Haiti did nothing to deserve their current predicament, the senile babbling of Pat Robertson notwithstanding. Edwards, on the other hand, did everything he could to deserve his sorry fate, and I have absolutely no sympathy for him. I'm saving my sympathy for the children of the Edwards' and the Youngs, who have perfect examples of how responsible adults do NOT behave.

Apocalypse Now!

Anybody who thinks living in the desert is boring needs to come and visit when we are having one of our crazy weather weeks, like we are now. It's true during the overwhelming majority of the year our weather is consistent to the point of being boring - for long periods of time we are saddled with blue, cloudless skies, warm-to-hot temperatures and a delightfully dry climate. It's during the summer monsoon season and in the current mid-winter rainy spell when our Chamber-of-Commerce weather takes a hike and we get something completely different.

You need to remember this is a place where even a 30% chance of getting less than a tenth of an inch of rain gets everyone really excited and giddy with anticipation. So when the Rain Gods decide to bestow copious quantities of their liquid blessings on us - presumably to make up for denying us even a trace of precious moisture for as long as 180 consecutive days - it is a big, big deal. The local news media have gone into full-on apocalypse mode and the weather service has been issuing flash-flood warnings every five minutes. The weather people are all over TV predicting a possibility of getting half a year's worth of rain this week alone, and they are fairly squealing with delight and shivering with apprehension at the same time. Good times!

So while we are preoccupied with actually getting wet when we take a step outside, there has been a lot of craziness going on in the real world. The aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti continues to loom large and ugly before the world, as rescue and relief agencies scramble in a desperate attempt to contain the terrible humanitarian disaster. Luckily we are not in the middle of hurricane season, because I could not imagine what would happen if a major hurricane started to bear down on that most unlucky place.

But another earthquake, this one of a political nature, happened on Tuesday when Republican Scott Brown scored an unexpected victory in a race to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. Such a victory was pretty much ruled out as wildly impossible just a few short weeks ago, when Democrat Martha Coakley had a double-digit lead in the polls which was regarded as insurmountable. So she decided to take an extended Christmas vacation while her opponent tirelessly worked the campaign trail. That may turn out to be the most expensive Christmas vacation ever for the Democrats, because Brown's election shattered the Democrats' sixty-seat supermajority in the Senate, giving the Republicans carte blanche to filibuster everything except the brand of toilet tissue used in the Senate rest rooms.

And filibuster they shall, with Obama's centerpiece health care reform legislation as target numero uno. How incredibly sad for this country that the one, best chance we had at fixing the horrendously broken health care system pivoted on this one election. The Republicans are almost delirious with joy and are making no attempt at all to conceal their glee at this major setback. Not only is losing the seat extremely painful for the Democrats, but particularly galling is the irony that it is Ted Kennedy's seat, who was the main champion of health care reform for most of his career. Blame is being flung far and wide, although most pundits agree that a deeply incompetent, totally mismanaged campaign by Coakley was the main cause of the failure. This is very very bad news for Democrats.

Brown's victory is bad enough, but today it was announced that the Supreme Court ruled that corporations should be able to spend money in political campaigns. Let's review, shall we: Our electoral system is already choked and corrupted beyond measure by corporate lobbyists of all types, and we all realize that's a big problem. So what should we do? Oh, I know, said the Supreme Court: Let's open up the wonderful world of campaign spending to the big corporations and allow them even more latitude to influence and corrupt the elections, large and small, in this country. Freedom of speech issue, said the Supremes. Hey, news flash, you crotchety old farts: People have freedom of speech, corporations don't. What is so hard about that? Corporations aren't people, and they should not be afforded freedom of speech protection. One needs only to view one of the slanted, ridiculous ads for something called "Clean Coal" - a complete contradiction if there ever was one - to get some idea of the heights of idiocy this will lead to.

Had enough depressing news? Let's wallow in a little more, and take a look at the strange case of John Edwards. Former Senator and presidential hopeful, Edwards was regarded as a rising Democratic star with a long, bright future in front of him until he decided to cheat on his cancer-striken wife and have an affair with a filmmaker. When word of the affair was leaked, Edwards got on every media outlet he could and denied, denied and denied some more. When rumors started spreading about him fathering a child with his mistress, Edwards donned the cloak of Righteous Indignation and proclaimed far and wide across the land that the story was utterly and completely free of merit. Today, he backtracked on all that and admitted yes indeed, everything was true. Apparently the upcoming tell-all book by a former campaign aide which will assert that Edwards offered to pay hush money for the rest of his life if he assumed paternity of the child in question (which he did) prompted Edwards to 'fess up to his tacky indiscretion.

I think the part that bothers people, including me, the most is the ease and facility with which Edwards deliberately and with all premeditation lied to the entire country repeatedly by denying something he knew full well had happened. This is why people have no respect for politicians nowadays, because they prove themselves to be compulsive, adroit and inveterate liars over and over again, until they are backed up against the wall and have no choice but to admit their sins. How extremely sad we have people of such dismally low morals in high public places.

And the rain keeps falling outside on the dry dusty desert, from a featureless gray sky, trying but not quite able to wash away our sins.

Another Day, Another Scandal

Once more we are treated to the sight of one of our august elected officials acting like a lovesick teenager and completely betraying the trust of their constituents and the integrity of their own ideas by getting caught in a tacky, tawdry extra-marital affair. South Carolina governor Mark Sanford apparently woke up the other morning and decided he could not get through the day without hopping on an international flight down to Buenos Aires to see his squeeze-on-the-side Maria Something-Or-Other. Telling no one where he was going or when he would be back, Sanford blithely turned his back on his family and his responsibilities of his leadership position and just left, forcing his staff to sound like totally clueless idiots by making them serve up some drivel about him "hiking the Appalachian Trail" to "get away for a while." When he was busted by a reporter getting off a plane in Atlanta he knew he had gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and a seedy, blubbering, squirm-inducing, public apology was next on the list of terminal embarrassments that are in his immediate future.

Sanford, who was also the head of the Republican Governors' Association (a terrorist organization if I ever heard of one) was being groomed for a possible presidential bid in 2012. I'm thinking he should look into a local Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise instead. Other Republican governors who are also likely presidential contenders are the eternally loathsome Alaska governor Sarah Palin (Tammy Tundra), Minnesota's Tim Pawlenty (Snoooooze), Mississippi's Haley Barbour (any guy named "Haley" is automatically disqualified) and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (HAHAHAHA! I'm so sure!).

Politicians acting like swine in the middle of their spring rut is nothing new; in fact it happens all the time. Eliot Spitzer resigned the governorship of New York after he was discovered engaging the services of a high-priced hooker. The country was treated to the double spectacle of his rubbery face and beady, shifty eyes as he tiptoed around his behavior, and also his wife standing by his side, looking like she just wanted the earth to open up and swallow her. Her embarrassment and mortification were epic, and an acknowledgment that her marriage was a complete sham. Then a while ago there was Governor Jim McGreavy of New Jersey who had a same-sex dalliance with some guy from Israel and the nation was treated to the TMI details of that little snogfest. Just last week, Senator John Ensign of Nevada, another potential Republican presidential contender in 2012, announced he had an affair and resigned from the Senate leadership. At least he had the good grace to resign, something which is apparently lost on Sanford.

And then there's the classic case of Idaho Senator Larry "Wide Stance" Craig, who got caught toe-tapping for a little male companionship in an airport restroom. Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, Craig adamantly denied his guilt and shrilly declared his heterosexuality, which turned more stomachs across this country than the latest salmonella scare. His wife looked so pathetic standing by his side, but she obviously had neither the mental capacity nor the worldly experience to even dimly understand what was going on.

Democrats get caught with their pants down almost as much as Republicans, but when it happens to a Republican it is especially gratifying, because they are the party of social conservatism and family values. They are constantly bellowing about how those godless liberals and gay people are destroying the family and the sanctity of marriage. It seems to me that these Republican man-sluts are doing more to destroy the sanctity of marriage and respect for the family than all the gay and lesbian couples across the country who are in committed relationships and only want those relationships recognized and validated like those of every other tax-paying, native-born citizen.

Sanford was a darling of the Republican right for at least initially turning down economic stimulus money for his state and also for his socially conservative views, but I guess that was all for show because he obviously has no respect for his vows of matrimony and his family. And many Republicans have all their fake piety and sanctimonious bullshit on display as they listen to Sanford's rambling, disjointed confession and say, oh he has sinned, he's a human being, let's all forgive him. Where is this magnanimity when it comes to accepting people with different lifestyles and political views? Where is this open and loving spirit when they gleefully rejoice over the cowardly, cold-blooded murder of an abortion provider? Where is this gentle, forgiving spirit when they spend millions of dollars to pass discriminatory amendments to state constitutions?

All this is very indicative of the rot and hatefulness which is at the core of the Republican party. One thing all Republicans seem to have in common, and indeed seems to be a genetic prerequisite for party membership, is their towering, unbelievable and monumental hypocrisy. Their mantra apparently is, "Do as I say, not as I do." They impose standards of morality and personal conduct on every citizen of this country and then see nothing wrong when they choose to violate those standards themselves. For a fellow Republican it's always all sweet forgiveness and grace; for everyone else, it is loathing and disdain for their lack of moral character and respect for religion.

Hypocrisy really does find its highest, truest expression in the Republican party. And you can bet your butt I'm going to wallow in all this delicious schadenfreude at the expense of the Republican party for as long as possible. I suggest you do, too, because it's great fun and they so deserve it.