A very strange column in USA Today defending John Edwards as a "victim of the morality police":
The decision to prosecute Edwards makes the Justice Department lawyers look more like morality police than defenders of the American political system. The stretch they are making to link the money from Mellon and Baron to Edwards' presidential campaign seems to be a thinly veiled effort to criminalize the adultery of a high public figure — for no good reason other than moral outrage.
It's easy not to like Edwards. Only 3% of respondents in a recent CBS News/New York Times poll said they have a favorable view of him. Thirty percent said the first thing that comes to mind when they think of him is that he cheated on his wife, who died in 2010 after a long, public battle with cancer.
But my gut tells me that the case against Edwards springs from the worst intentions of Puritanism, rather than the best values of the American legal system.
Boy. I know we've had some interesting debates about political morality and whether public lives should be judged by the sins of private lives. But Edwards sank to such low levels of sordidness that it seems to justify even the harshest judgment for moral misdeeds. He didn't make a mistake in judgment -- he showed a completely amoral lack of judgment. And the more we learn about the truly strange Rielle Hunter, the more bizarre the idea seems that Edwards was ever taken seriously as a candidate:
Hunter would use the cash to pay her California “spiritual adviser” for consultations — at $8,000 and $1,000 a pop, Cheri said.
The loopy Hunter once even consulted her guru simply because a waiter brought the wrong kind of dressing for her reuben sandwich, Cheri said.
