This time my hero so neatly encapsulates the reason that the John Edwards scandal was not nearly so hot in press as the Mark Foley and Larry Craig scandals were.

After Obama had been nominated and Edwards was history, a few press grandees conceded that yes, maybe there was a legitimate story there, but such a sordid tale was never going to tickle the fancy of their refined sensibilities. Oddly enough, this consideration never seems to come into play with, say, Mark Foley, the Florida Republican hounded from public life after some overly tender emails to one of the more fetching Congressional pages, or Larry Craig, the Republican senator caught playing some ill-advised footsie with an undercover cop in the Minneapolis airport men’s room. Admittedly, these sex scandals are less “sordid” than Senator Edwards’: for one thing, there’s no sex in them—just some unrequited cyber-billets- doux in Foley’s case, and a bit of club-footed George Michael stall-divider semaphore in Larry Craig’s. British Tories at least have the consolation of the career-detonating sex scandal; Republicans have to make do with the career-detonating no-sex scandal.

Remember. Mark Foley wrote some weird emails to a teenager. Larry Craig may or may not have sought companionship in an airport bathroom. John Edwards trotted out his dying wife as a campaign prop at the same time he was boffing a pretty skuzzy campaign contractor and funneling campaign cash into her bank account to pay for their child.

Put differently, Foley acted creepy and Craig stupid as they inched across some moral boundaries. Edwards, on the other hand, blew across any number of moral, ethical, and legal lines like a turbocharged rocket sled. Somehow, though, the media was only interested in getting the Republicans while giving the Democrat a free pass. But maybe it wasn’t the politics, as Steyn suggests, but instead the fact that the Foley and Craig scandals were PG-12 and the Edwards scandal was NC-17 – and the latter certainly wasn’t fit for a family newspaper.

Posted by: Greg at 09:55 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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