So Slimy the Other Politicians Noticed

Sportswriters used to call Joe  DiMaggio a ballpayer’s ballplayer, meaning that they thought the way he played the game was so purely the way it was supposed to be played as to command attention and recognition even among the experts who had made it to the big leagues. In the same sense that DiMaggio could be called a ballplayer’s ballplayer, John Edwards is a slimy politician’s slimy politician. He began his career as  a particularly disreputable ambulance chaser who acquired a large fortune by such things as convincing gullible and scientifically illiterate juries that genetic or unexplained birth defects were caused by physicians’ errors and then persuading them with maudlin histrionics to deliver large settlements. In politics he presented himself at various times as everything from a moderate blue dog Democrat to a committed leftist, depending on the exigencies of the moment. He served one term in the United States Senate and was selected by the Democrats as their nominee for vice president in 2004.  He ran for president in 2008, attempting to leverage his wife’s cancer for sympathy and political support. Much of his campaign consisted of standing  in front of the cameras saying “look what I’ve got. Look what I’ve got. I’ve got a sick wife. Sick wife.  I’ve got a sick wife, right here, a sick wife.”  He performed  this shtick while his wife was not only sick but in fact fatally ill, and he was carrying on an affair with a young woman by whom he fathered a child. He is now on trial for charges related to  illegal payoffs to that woman.

He has become an unperson even among his natural supporters.  It is a measure of how much of a pariah the man has become  that the traditional media are careful to refer to him only as a former senator and presidential candidate and to omit that the Democrats once selected him as the one man in the country they wanted to be, as the cliché goes, a heartbeat away from the presidency.

We cannot know how the trial will turn out, but it interesting to speculate on what should be his  punishment. Many will no doubt suggest he should suffer  the stereotypical fate of weak pretty boys who find themselves in prison. I disagree with that.  I don’t think we should  want anyone to be sexually assaulted.   However it would be okay with me if they could find a federal prison for him somewhere that still had a rock pile. The notion of this repugnant character  spending a couple of years breaking rocks in the hot sun seems quite appropriate.