JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

Nothing about this John Edwards affair, a phrase we can apply literally, makes sense.

First, why is it any of our business, instead of simply his and Elizabeth's and the kids' and that wild gal's, that the guy messed around?

Edwards is not president. He's not running for president. He's not going to be president.

He's a twice-failed presidential candidate who couldn't deliver either his home or native state to the Democratic ticket on which he was placed as the vice presidential nominee four years ago.

He's no longer even in the U.S. Senate, where, I'd wager, adultery is not unheard of. And he's not under investigation by a special prosecutor presuming to ask him about any sexual extracurriculars and charge him with perjury when he denies them under oath.

Didn't we go through all of this a few years ago and determine that extramarital sex, even by a sitting president with a tender-aged intern, is no big deal?

Second, we already knew that Edwards was a spectacular phony possessed of little to no redeeming value. We didn't need to learn that he was cheating on his cancer-stricken wife and lying through his teeth about it to form that judgment.

We knew it when he pretended to be on a "poverty tour" and came to Helena, where there's plenty of poverty to tour, and stayed a few minutes, only long enough to get his picture taken with the mayor.

We knew it when he founded a nonprofit center ostensibly to fight poverty and used the money to reimburse himself, a multi-millionaire trial lawyer with a 28,000-square-foot home who got a $400 haircut and was plugged into a Wall Street hedge fund.

We knew it from Democratic consultant Bob Shrum's book, which tells this story: When Edwards was chatting with John Kerry in 2004 about the prospect of the vice presidential offer, which Edwards wanted badly, Edwards told Kerry he was going to tell him something he'd never told a soul before. It was that, after his son Wade had died, he climbed onto the dead boy, hugged the body and promised himself and his departed son's memory to work henceforth only to make life better for others.

After Edwards left the room, Kerry told aides that he hadn't been moved because, actually, Edwards had told him the same story a year before, complete with the same preface that he'd never told it to a soul before.

Shrum wrote that Kerry was so chilled by Edwards that, for a while, he resisted advice to select Edwards as his running mate.

Third, we are told that this is an important news development because it will keep John Edwards out of Barack Obama's cabinet. But aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves? Anyway, has marital fidelity ever been required of cabinet members? How, then, did Henry Cisneros get to be Bill Clinton's secretary of housing and urban development?

Fourth, we are told that it is valuable to hear Edwards say that his political celebrity fed his narcissism and sense of invincibility. But isn't that simply a case of one rationalizer's verbalizing a near-universal political truth?

Fifth, we are told that the revelation is important because it means Edwards will not be permitted to speak at the Democratic National Convention, where 19 delegates technically are his.

And why not? They say it's because he cheated on his wife and lied about it. They say you can't have a guy like that speaking at the Democratic National Convention.

But then we learn that Bill Clinton is going to speak.

On the Republican side, a guy named John McCain, who became involved in some seemingly romantic way with his current wife while still undivorced from a woman who'd been badly injured in a car wreck, is said to be among the speakers.

Odd. Very odd.

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.