Published: August 15, 2008 10:00 am            

‘Fooling around’ is always a choice

You have to understand this one fine thing about me. I don’t believe that people “fool around.” I don’t accept that an individual will make a commitment to another and then decide to violate it.

And it is a decision. Things like that don’t “just happen.” A decision is always made to violate the sacred trust of a marriage when the individual making the confession says that “it was just one of those moments – nothing long-term or important.”

What? Is it implicit in that admission that the commitment wasn’t important, therefore the violation of it “only a very serious mistake.”

Do you realize that we have come, on two occasions, very close to choosing John Edwards as our president? Do you realize how very close the vice presidency (which he also almost won) is to the most powerful position on earth? One heartbeat is all. Sound simplistic to you? Let it sound so, but don’t deny it.

After years of reports of the North Carolina senator’s love affairs, he finally came clean (well, not really clean) about his affair with a political staffer on his presidential election team. She was a pretty videographer, who had no experience in videography, who traveled with him to film his campaign activity. For this professional service, paid by the grass-roots citizenry of our country – from the poorest of the poor, she received as much as $100,000. I make less than $35,000 for doing something that I know how to do, that I have over 35 years of experience doing.

Did I ever make the wrong choices somewhere along the line!

However, I digress.

His excuse was that he went through a psychological time when everybody was telling him he was special, when he started to believe his own hype, a phenomenon that caused him to believe that he could get away with anything. Can you say, “Ten feet tall and bullet proof?” Well, he called it invisible.

Guess that explains going to a posh hotel, spending five hours with a woman not your wife and her infant child, and walking out past The National Inquirer reporters whom you have known were stalking your every waking hour – maybe even the sleeping, too.

Where the dignity of the presidency of the United States fits in here I cannot imagine.

I’ve come to this about all that:

I don’t want to know that his affair was short-lived.

I don’t want to know that the affair “happened” while the terminal breast cancer of his wife of 32-years was in remission.

I don’t want anybody to think that they can throw this admission out on “trash day” (White House terminology for a short weekend news cycle when the public’s head is turned). Did John Edwards toss out his little admission, on the weekend night that the Olympics opened for the eyes of billions of people, thinking that after the eye-popping spectacle the people would forget a startling confession of adultery in a presidential candidate?

Even he can’t be that naïve.

I don’t like anybody whose behavior can make me defend The National Inquirer.

I defended his $500 haircut, while his sick wife has the worst hair ever in public service, because he can decide that. While deciding to have a $500 haircut may speak to his priorities, it doesn’t proclaim that he is necessarily the low-life that we now know him to be. As long as he can still make the Mercedes payment, his other vanities can’t hurt anything.

But, he called himself special. The media called him narcissistic. Saint Susie would have called it self-absorbed – and you cannot be that way. I call it a character flaw exacerbated by an undeniable sense of entitlement. Oh, and it’s a sin, also.

I honestly don’t know what this man did, because his history of honesty is not all that shiny. I find it hard to digest, or even believe, that people continue to place themselves in such an undignified position. Undeniably, when you consider all that would have to go into achieving sex under closely-watched situations, it implies a lack of dignity.

So, don’t break my heart by insisting that such a family man, with such family values, married 32 years to his college sweetheart, could be so undignified.

Love? I can accept. Commitment? I expect. Undignified? I can’t imagine.

Let’s cut this guy loose. Already now!

        

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