A couple political things before bed

First, Edwards. I gotta say, I never cared much for him. I always thought he was kind of a phony, and I never understood the Left's love affair with him. Well, turns out he had another love affair. With a woman other than his wife. In 2006, just as he was kicking off his presidential campaign.

Ezra Klein says it best:

No one forces you to devote your life to national advocacy of important issues.
But if you decide to do follow that path, with all the plaudits and moments of
roaring applause it entails, you have to make certain sacrifices, and shoulder
certain realities. Among them is that if you falter, you can harm all that
you're advocating and deny help to all whom you claim to represent. I don't know
if it's true that Edwards' affair started and ended in 2006, but if so, that's
actually the most morally unforgivable of possible timelines. If Edwards had
won in Iowa and captured the nomination, this could easily have lost him the
election, and thus destroyed the country's chance at health reform, withdrawing
from Iraq, and so forth. This reaches back and recasts his candidacy as an act
of extraordinary selfishness. That's not to say it was conscious -- we all
contain multitudes and we all compartmentalize mercilessly -- but it was
gambling with the fates of the very people Edwards was running to help.

The narcissism on display here is just mind-boggling. If Edwards really believed all the things he purports to believe, how could he dare jeopardize the fate of the entire country over his failure to control his dick? It would have been slightly more forgivable if this had occured well into the campaign; it would have been too late to do anything about it. Just press ahead and hope it doesn't come out. But he went into the race with the full knowledge that this story could break at any time.

I feel bad for his wife, who has to deal with this and her cancer, and who, frankly, seems to be to be far better candidate material than her jerk of a husband. I'd like to see her run for Congress or the Senate, health permitting, of course.

Anyway, let's not forget that McCain has very similar skeletons in his closet, having left his disfigured but faithful wife Carol for greener pastures, ie. the younger, richer, and better connected Cindy Lou Hensley.

And with that said, I think it's a good time to post this video, a collection of some of the little gaffes that McCain has made throughout the campaign, courtesy of TPMtv. For a fun thought experiment, just try to imagine the media reaction if Obama had made all these boo-boos.