By now everyone knows about John Edwards’ humiliation of both himself and Elizabeth (and their children!) at his own hands. Hopefully people have also had an opportunity to read and digest her statement, which I found pretty extraordinary (as I find her extraordinary — and what DOES it say when again and again the women these politician men are married to are more than their men are?).
I don’t know quite what to say about the whole thing. Of course it was disappointing – AGAIN?!?!? (meaning yet another philanderer?) Why can’t men control themselves? What was he thinking? How on earth did he think he’d ever, ever be able to keep that under wraps? And so forth. In the final analysis, though, I really feel there are so many more important things going on and this just isn’t my business. Or shouldn’t be. Yes, sure it’s a character issue, and it’s a women’s issue as well. Here’s a wonderful take on that point:
These affair go to show how much farther women’s rights need to go, that we are so willing to discount the broken promises these men made to the person who was supposed to be the most important person in their life. Granted what they stand for is much more important to the world at large but this says a lot about how they view womens value.
And so it does, so it does. The reminds me of something I’ll pass along (again and again and again if I have to): I’m always way leery of the men who proclaim just how much they LOVE women. Too often they love to “love them” (euphemism for have sex with them) and then they love to leave them, often without all that much ceremony. These men can be exploiters, as John Edwards has shown himself to be.
The single thing I’ll say to his credit is that he probably correctly pointed out part of the problem: his own narcissism (and do his $400 hair cuts really help that?)
Meanwhile, of course he’ll have defenders. Here’s one from symbolman:
Re: Edwards. Thomas Jefferson slept with his Slave, yet we still have a Free Country…
And leave it to that particular privileged white male to not even notice that some of us STILL aren’t as free as others of us, and that includes the women among us and the minorities among us. The lad got quite testy when it was pointed out to him, too, that someone who is a slave pretty much by definition doesn’t have the ability to consent freely and so the technical term for intimate relations of that sort is RAPE. Have a look at the little temper tantrum that fact provoked:
23. Dont twist my words please…
Oh! I forgot… Men BAD! Women GOOD!
Guess I’m just another BEAST, like any male who dares disagree with you.
Your shrill, unabating rants take the use of the word “Rape” to new levels, used so much that it nearly ceases to have any Meaning.. Like saying the word “Bird” 10,000 times until it becomes Abstract.
Please Stop villifying people you Dont even KNOW by shanking them with your twisted definitions of exactly what they Were NOT even implying.. You are making a mockery of these issues, damn near a parody of what the rest of us plain old decent people already KNOW as fact..
I always wonder just WHO killed all of your puppies and waved them in your face?
You know, a person CAN be a sexual bigot, it’s not only applied to RACE..
The funny thing is, this response is so way over the top, so disproportionate, such a shriek and so shrill in tone himself, that he loses tremendous credibility in the process. One thinks to oneself: did he just have those arguments laying around ready to use and he didn’t see any reason not to, because they certainly don’t apply to THIS discussion. Silly boy, that’s foolish and makes him look foolish.
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