The Edwards Affair

The real impact of the Edwards affair is not on his career but on his constituents. Let me explain. Although most politicians caught in a sexual scandal are finished politically like Senator Gary Hart, there are some who seem to be coated in Teflon like Bill Clinton. Edwards' campaign talked about Two Americas.

One America, billionaires, is represented by George W. Bush and, these days, some billionaires might be better served if people did not give up on their oil addiction and switch to electric cars, wind power, solar, and other alternatives. Other billionaires don't want their children living on a planet dying because of fossil fuels and are investing in energy alternatives.

The other America is the middle class and lower class (euphemistically called the working class). Edwards spoke, more than anyone else I can think of, for people on the lower end of the economic spectrum. When Edwards dropped out of the presidential race and left Hillary and Obama as the only ones in the last few primaries, those people lost just about the only strong voice they had.

I happen to have worked among the working poor. I am not talking about middle class people who have lost their McMansion during the recession and mortgage mess and had to park their Hummer due to high gas prices. I am talking about the people who work two, three, and even four jobs and still earn below the poverty line and can barely pay their bills but usually manage to do so. With Edwards radioactive because of this scandal, he cannot be considered for vice-president or Poverty Czar. He will not even be at the Democratic convention.

Remember that issues often do rise and fall with the fortunes of their champions. After the fall of Senator Gary Hart, there was no chance of getting a strong environmental president until Al Gore and Gore barely talked about the environment during his presidential campaign. He might have won more votes if he had. Certainly Ralph Nader and the Green Party proved there are a lot of green votes out there, enough to change the outcome of an election.

Poverty is not a sexy issue. Who is a national advocate for those who lost their homes in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast during Katrina, Rita and other hurricanes? Who is advocate for farmers in the Midwest who have lost or are losing their farms other than singers John Mellencamp or Willie Nelson? Neither of them is running for office. As experience proves, testifying before Congressional committees about the woes of poor Americans does no good. The poor have to have their own representatives in elected office just like any other group.

Unfortunately, the poor are usually their own worst enemy. They don't have notable political action committees. They can't afford high-priced lobbyists on K Street. There isn't a National Association of Poor People with clout like the National Rifle Association. And, worst of all, poor people are often distracted by irrelevancies like emotionalism, red herrings, and rumors. This is worsened by ignorance from getting second-rate education or dropping out or no education at all. The Republican Party knows this and engages in Machiavellian manipulation. As the Money Party, Republicans are anti-education lest the people wise up and throw them out of office. [If you doubt the characterization of the Republican Party as the party of the rich, then read "The Rich And The Super-Rich" by Ferdinand Lundberg]

Emotionalism of the poor is seen in racial hatred, hatred of liberals, and fear of forced prayer in schools.

An example of a red herring is Bush, Cheney, and McCain's willingness to force the presence of drilling platforms off the shore of states that don't want them. Whatever happened to states rights? Even oil men like T. Boone Pickens say we can't drill our way out of dependence on foreign oil. It would take time to explore and time to build these platforms. By the time the oil came on the market, as much as fifteen years would have passed and, therefore, it won't ease the current pain at the pump. Moreover, that oil would go on the world market, not to the USA, where countries like China are willing to pay extortionate prices. The oil speculators who drive up prices do their business on the InterContinental Exchange in Atlanta. Those speculators are the very banks asking for bailouts after gross financial mismanagement and the very oil companies jacking up prices and using staggering profits to fund their lobbying (of Bush, Cheney, and McCain) so that they can tear up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
They aren't even using the oil leases they have now and they want more. American oil company investment in energy alternatives is minuscule and historically used to kill innovations rather than pursue them. I can introduce anyone curious to inventors who are frustrated at seeing their energy inventions sold for little and then development never happens. Houston does it. Detroit does it. And no one ever mentions that for all the oil out there, the choke point is the lack of enough refineries to turn oil into gasoline. This is a major reason that a glut of oil can still result in high pump prices. I'm not going to advocate the building of more refineries in the USA because, as much as I hate paying a lot for gas, I hate even more the idea of putting more auto exhaust in the air and the resulting destruction of the planet.

The previous paragraph gives some idea of how complex most issues can be. Working stiffs coming in from a day or night of hard work can seldom summon the energy to read newspapers and news magazines in order to suss out the complexities. However, they (we) have no excuse for not listening to news on National Public Radio instead of conservative talk radio and turning from the sports (hey, the country is going over a cliff) and watching The News Hour, Now, and Bill Moyers on PBS. What is impressive is the amount of content that comes from poor people who pick up a camera and start documenting their own lives. But let us return to diagnosing the problem.

Rumors get spread during presidential campaigns that have no connection to reality or sane thinking. One guy was arrested in the South for plotting to kill Obama because he thinks Obama is the Antichrist. That's a laugh. We've already had three presidents who have far better qualifications for being the Antichrist: Ronald Wilson Reagan (6 letters, 6 letters, 6 letters) advocated death stars like some Darth Vader, had a wife who practiced occult astrology, and miraculously recovered from a wound. [Okay, the Chick tracts specify a head wound but let's not quibble.] Richard Nixon was the Father of Lies, a bad liar who sweated a lot on his upper lip, excommunicated from his denomination, and was quoted in a speech to a private group as saying he wanted to abolish the Constitution. George Walker Bush Jr. gets a 666 if you count Bush Jr as six letters. For those fans of Christian horror movies, The Omen suggested that the Antichrist had a canine for a mother. Bush's mother is called The Silver Fox. Bush made a deal with the devil. Bush was called Magog during his college years when he reportedly did such demonic things as brand a young woman during Skull and Bones hijinks. Even that fraternity with its horrible reputation in conspiracy circles must be embarrassed by Bush. W was power of the air (a pilot). Bush once spoke to some Amish who were aghast when he said he spoke for God as head of the religious right. As Antichrist, Bush even has the Beast (Dick Cheney) and the False Prophet (Karl Marx Rove) to complete the Unholy Trinity. So, I think that anyone who thinks Obama is the Antichrist is racially motivated. They just see the skin color and decide that black is evil. This kind of one dimensional thinking puts one more nail in the coffin of Conservative Christianity.

If my choices are an adulterous Democrat who leaves the country with a One Trillion Dollar surplus (Bill Clinton) and a Satanic Republican who sees no problem with global warming ("we can grow crops in Northern Canada") or killing off the human race, who serves Mammon, and who has sold his soul to Lucifer; then I choose the adulterous Democrat. I'd actually prefer a choice between a Libertarian and a Green but third parties are kept out of office by the two-party duopoly.

Ignorance is another handicap of the poor. If your entire world is work, sports, beer, trucks, guns, and church (a schizophrenic mix if anything is), then you will not know or care that people who wear burnooses have nothing in common with people who wear turbans. I always acknowledge in this blog that I am a Christian, that I believe in Yeshua (Jesus for those who don't know), that I read the Bible, and that I think stewardship of the Earth is a direct order from God (not to mention common sense not to poison oneself by polluting the environment you live in). I fellowship when I can with other Christians. I even have prayer in this blog but question the sanity of those who think you can force prayer in school. Whose prayer? The Our Father? Selections from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer? What about Jehovah's Witnesses, Hindus and others who pray differently? I know enough to know that I need to read other books than the Bible. I know that people who wear burnooses (the hat Arafat and Arabs over there wear) are probably Muslims but not always. There are Christian Arabs. I know that people who wear turbans are Sikhs. Muslim men can take off the burnooses anytime they want. Sikh men are obliged by their faith to keep the turban on in the same way Jewish men wear a kipah or yarmulke (which stupid people call a beanie). So I am embarrassed for that jerk in Arizona who came out of a bar after seeing planes hit the World Trade Center and murdered a Sikh who was a husband, a father, and a respected member of the business community. You can't blame ignorance on alcohol. One has only oneself to blame for that level of ignorance.

Much of the media loves to paint populist politicians as automatically bad. Well if populist means popular, then much, if not most, of the media is anti-people. I lose no sleep over media conglomerates having a bad fiscal year. They own too many radio stations with cookie-cutter formats that have no local content. Newspapers suppress freedom of speech because their legal departments forbid anonymous letters to the editor.

In America, if you try to speak the unvarnished truth, you may find your car run off the road, your house mysteriously burned to the ground, your phone calls unanswered or bugged, your children beat up in school or even kidnapped, your job has been eliminated, your insurance claims denied, your taxes audited, your military unit sent to the front lines, yourself harassed by the police, your ballot challenged at the polls, your permanent record smeared at school, your family asked to find another church, your manuscript unable to find a publisher, or your film project unable to get the green light for starters. The Bush Administration and the Republican wilding added still more dirty tricks to this arsenal.

It is easy enough to check whether the state of truth telling is hopeless: just try it yourself. If nothing bad happens to you after a week, then perhaps no one heard you. Keep doing it, it is therapeutic. Encourage others to speak out about the problems in the USA. If you get killed, then I was right. Cold comfort to you. If you attract crowds to your speeches and no one blows your head off, then I would truly be happy to have been proved wrong about how bad America is.

Let's go deeper. I've been talking about the upper lower class which has no representation but lots of taxation. There is also the lower-lower class. Then there is the lower-lower-lower class also known as the permanent underclass. Who is an advocate for the legal migrant worker? Who is an advocate for Chinese slave labor working in American territories such as the Marianas Islands? Who is an advocate for the poor of Appalachia? Who is an advocate for sharecroppers in the Deep South? Who is advocate for the homeless? Anyone who does a little research about homelessness in America discovers that it is not just Skid row drunks, unwed mothers, and orphans. It is also single fathers with children, senior citizens, sick people who ought to be in hospitals, asylum inmates turned out on the streets with no counselors or medication, retarded people who have lost their jobs, and even whole intact families (both nuclear families and multi generational).

When I sometimes rant in this blog about how stupid, evil, and crazy the American population is; some of that is letting off steam but in this case, it is a sad statement of the truth: retarded people holding down jobs until laid off and insane asylum inmates who could hold down jobs if they could afford the medication to keep themselves stable and the evil people in Washington DC kicking people when they are down. Our sports are supposed to teach us a sense of fair play. You don't kick a man when he is down. You stick out your hand and help him up even if he on the other side.

The economy is forcing us to abandon that decency. We are pouring Billions of dollars into Iraq and bases around the world when charity begins at home. Our hospitals are treating illegal aliens for free when Native Americans and other US citizens die for lack of affordable health care. Doesn't Mexico have hospitals you say? So the poor turn on each other when they should be finding the nearest Republican and some firewood. Just joking about burning at the steak. Can't afford steak. [pun intended]

The Edwards campaign dealt with the upper half of the lower class. It did not really reach down into the Lower-Lower classes who have no voice. And now that Edwards has been shown to have feet of clay, he will probably never be any advocate for them. It won't be me either because I am a private citizen with no desire for public office.

However much I feel sorry for Elizabeth Edwards and her battle with cancer, I feel sorrier for the poorest of the poor who have to still keep hoping for one of their own to get into any local office, let along the presidency. As former poor boy John Edwards himself shows, often when someone born poor gets elected, the fat salary so excites them that they forget whatever values their family and religion taught them. The good news is that some of the presidents who came from poverty turned out okay like Abraham Lincoln. The bad news is that most who came from poverty are rascals like Andrew Jackson (spoils system) or Richard Nixon (Watergate).



Dear God,
I think the United States is a pit of vipers with evil conspiracies infernally preventing progress and leaders with no moral compass, no conscience, and no qualms about ordering the deaths of Americans on American soil. Worse, they let operatives do this dirty work so that they can have deniability and pervert the legal system. Our leaders will never see the inside of the prison cells they so richly deserve. I am begging You to please prove me to be totally wrong. Amen.