I recently ran across a rather refreshing commentary on The Daily Beast website which was titled “I Just Can’t Hate John Edwards” and which was written by Eric Alterman.
Among other things, what made this one refreshing was that it was delightfully missing the self-righteous tone that self-appointed mating behavior critics have made de rigueur in any discussion of male infidelity the last quite a few years. Finally … a voice of sanity!
Not that I’m a John Edwards fan, of course. Fact is, it’s hard to think of many politicians of whom I do think highly. None come to mind at the moment, but that’s neither here nor there.
What he was excoriated for in the media at the time was cheating on his wife … and then lying about it.
“… and he lied about it! …”
Got that? Not only did he BED another woman, he also LIED about it! Plus there was a bit of a flap on the paternity of his mistress’s new child, but there also a major part of the criticism was that he LIED about that as well.
Was John Edwards stupid to get involved with that “other woman”? Of course he was, as Mr. Alterman readily notes. And so have been many other political luminaries over the ages right down to the present time.
Of course, several decades ago the press was still relevant enough to focus on what a politician did on the job, when it actually mattered to the general public, rather than what he did when off the job, which is no one else’s business (other than perhaps his immediate family).
But why is anybody surprised that he would lie about it? Mr. Alterman incisively points out what should be obvious to anyone with an IQ in double digits or higher:
“… if adultery is going to happen, then lying is a given. It’s the rare marriage that allows one partner to enjoy sex outside of marriage without doing one’s spouse the favor of lying about it. Cheating and lying: They go together like, well, love and marriage.”
Edwards lied about it? So what? So would nearly everyone in similar circumstances. He’s human … where’s the surprise in that?
Another aspect I especially liked about Eric Alterman’s commentary was that he touched upon what nowadays has become a taboo topic: the question of why the guy may have cheated on his wife in the first place.
Actually, the question is not taboo per se but there is only one politically correct answer to why a guy may have cheated on his wife: “Because he’s a worthless piece of crap”. In other words, there can be no justification or any mitigating circumstances. He’s scum! Full stop.
By the way, it’s okay to raise that same question in reverse as to why a wife had cheated on her husband. And that same answer is both socially acceptable and politically correct: “Because he’s a worthless piece of crap”.
But to his great credit, Mr. Alterman did not fall back on the PC claptrap that pervades the press these days. He pointed out reports from ex-Edwards staffers of “the never-ending horror show they witnessed as the Edwards’ marriage”.
As he delicately phrases it:
“Elizabeth Edwards does appear to have been – and I’m going for understatement here – hardly the secular saint sold to us by the campaign.”
Nowadays women’s groups would go ballistic at that sort of observation. They’d insist that we’re “blaming the victim”, and that such a thing can never be tolerated!
“… blaming the victim? …”
Or at least it’s not allowed if the “victim” happens to be female. If the victim is a male (John Bobbitt, for example), then he must have done something to cause the woman to react the way she did. And that will be the focus of the analysis: what terrible thing did he do to her which in turn provoked her to react the way she did?
Kudos to Eric Alterman for a well-thought-out commentary. Those are getting much harder to find nowadays.
Stay tuned,
-Mack Doppler
