Politics is a dirty business and it seems to attract a breed of human that I would describe as being scum. This past week, several of my favorite scumbags were back in the headlines, while yet another joined their ranks and managed to drag everything down to a new low.
I will start out by mentioning John Edwards, who you may remember as the one-time democratic vice presidential candidate and former presidential candidate. He was squeaky clean and Kennedy-esque, with a southern drawl and a lovable wife who, following his political defeats, beat cancer.
Of course, Edwards flushed his saintly image down the toilet after screwing around with his videographer, abandoning his ailing wife for this woman and fathering her child.
He denied paternity until he no longer could and paid his baby’s mama hush money, possibly from his campaign funds.
As if everything else about John Edwards was not bad enough, it was revealed this week that his lover apparently forgot to turn off the camera.
Yes, Edwards has joined the likes of Carrie Prejan, Paris Hilton and Screech from “Saved by the Bell,” as there is a John Edwards sex tape floating around out there.
I have had nightmares ever since I found out about this.
Such a sick tale in politics is not uncommon, and in Edward’s case it is almost to be expected from somebody who seemed too good to be true in the first place. But it was a surprise—not just to us, but to his wife as well, I would assume.
The same cannot be said for South Carolina’s Governor Mark Stanford, whose poor wife knew that it was coming all along. Stanford was caught in Buenos Aries cavorting with a model while he was supposed to be hiking the Applaciation Trail and being the chief executive of his state. His now-estranged wife has a book coming out in which she reveals that Stanford flat out refused to promise fidelity in their wedding vows.
Both Edwards and Stanford only caused vast emotional damage to their spouses.
These two women will have scars on their hearts for the rest of their lives, but at least their warped spouses were well enough behaved to not scar their bodies. In order to find that breed of scum, we must look eastward, across the river into Illinois.
In last week’s primaries, Scott Lee Cohen, a Chicago pawnbroker, got the democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor, though he had been asked to step down after revelations that charges had been filed against him for assaulting his girlfriend and that his ex-wife had complained of physical threats and his prescription steroid abuse.
In Cohen’s case, we have a man that has not even been elected to high office yet, but is already a scandal. With Edwards and Stanford, we have men who, at least outwardly, seemed to be prudent men who shocked the public when their dark inner selves became headlines.
With each of these men, we have personalities that we love; they each have some kind of likable nature that we identify with. This counters with the nature of their horrifying deeds, which have deeply hurt those that are closest to them.
When taken together, each of these men border on being sociopathic, but we put our trust in them.
And this makes me wonder whether this is a profession that attracts such people, or if it is us who refuse to look within them and see who they really are.
Andy Phipps is Science/Health Editor and a columnist for The Current.
2 Responses to “What is it about politics that attracts scumbags?”
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The reason we have don’t have men and women of a high caliber in politics today is because we, as a people, haven’t put much value on such. We were only interested in their sex or race or party or whether or not they were good-looking or well-spoken. We never asked ourselves if they had character or high morals or were men or women of integrity (because we didn’t think that was important), and we never bothered to check out their background or voting record (in the event they already held a public office). In many ways, and I hate to say this, but our elected officials are a direct reflection of what we have become ourselves as a people. As a country, we have told God we don’t need Him, trashing the 10 Commandments by allowing them to be removed from our schools. We’ve replaced His absolutes with our own and ours don’t work. We’ve grown complacent and have taken our freedom for granted and, as a result, are unable to recognize when there’s a Trojan Horse is in our midst. Ask yourselves who your heroes are. Who are your role models? Are they men or women who don’t have very high moral standards or ethics? If so, that will affect your life choices, including political candidates. We had the privilege of living in the greatest country of the world, but we didn’t take seriously the responsibility as its citizens to try and elect leaders of the highest caliber. We only paid attention to what they said, but not what they did.
In the end, the people are to blame. The people are the ones that keep voting for republicans and democrats. People never vote for who they truly feel could run, they only vote for what they think is a lesser of two evils.
The republicans have taken religion and made it political instead of religious and have thus ruined religion and caused themselves to be major hypocrites by spouting one thing but doing another.
The democrats don’t know how to unify and stand their ground are just plain wimpy.
And the only people that speak up are the crazies such as the tea party who are the last thing that could ever represent america.
the problem isn’t the politician. Its the people.