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| NC Senator John Edwards, wife Elizabeth on left, 3 children |
From Denny: In a politically motivated desperation move Obama has ordered
the Dept. of Justice to go ahead and prosecute populist former Senator John Edwards when they could have settled this out of court without all the publicity This is an outrage and a complete waste of taxpayer monies.
Obama desperate to win in 2012 and fears other Democrats could challenge him
What is really going on here? Well, for one Obama is running scared politically since his poll numbers are sagging miserably. He and Team Obama desperately fear a front runner dark horse could appear out of nowhere to grab the Democratic nomination away from Obama. Clearly, they - Axelrod and Plouffe - believe the one possible dark horse with the personal fortune to do it is
John Edwards.
Why Edwards is not the dark horse challenger
Of course, as usual, Obama and Team Obama have calculated wrongly. Edwards is not known for spending his fortune for charities or politically. He did spend a measly $5 million to win his initial senatorial campaign against racists in North Carolina. That was a cheap investment for a political time heavily weighed to his side.
When he ran for president, twice, he did not use his own fortune. Since the mistress scandal broke Edwards has kept a low profile. Does that sound like a guy trying to run again for any political office?
Yeah, but what about the court case you ask? Maybe that's why he is staying out of sight? Partly. The real reason is because his children have been dragged through the mud, courtesy of the media and the Republican political strategists who saw him as a serious contender since he was a populist.
Political muckraking now from Obama Democrats as well as the Republicans
How many times does a man have to say he is sorry for bad judgment? How many times do his children have to hear in the national news how a gold digger went after daddy and had his love child to trap him and loads of money? How many times do the political strategists get to drag his family through hell and back again and again? How many times does the media get to make money off recirculating the same tired headlines?
Political sex scandals
Usually, I don't bother to write any serious posts about sex scandals, especially politicians. Everyone knows they are often dead marriages or in the last gasps of dying. Most politicians just try to look good for the cameras. Come on; Republican Senator John McCain is known for his Washington mistresses for decades yet there is no prosecution of him. Democrat Senator John Kerry is known for his sweet young thing aides as mistresses, often conveniently bought off right before elections and sent out of the country. No prosecutions there either.
George Bush
Republican Presidents George Bush 41 and 43 are known for their numerous affairs they managed to keep out of the news most of the time. After all, that's why CBS News Anchor Dan Rather was pressured to be fired by Bush 41 because Rather exposed a 20 year affair, and news video of the woman getting on the plane one mid-afternoon streaming news I happened to witness. (Not much of the rest of country saw it as it was shut down immediately. She had been appointed to a cabinet job no less.) No prosecutions. Democrat President John Kennedy was known for his wild liaisons - which the press chose not to disclose at the time. (Oh, that the press could be that classy today.)
Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy and mistresses
Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower - before he was president - had a long time British mistress while commanding in WW2. And we all know about Democrat President Bill Clinton and his fondness of young aides at the White House. OK, the Republicans wasted $60 million dollars of taxpayer money to try and impeach him, fiercely angering the public but they did it anyway.
And those other Senators
Remember Republican Senator Vitter with his whore house connections in New Orleans? What about the recently resigned Republican Senator John Ensign, who had a long running affair with one of his married aides. Worse that aide was married to another of Ensign's aides he worked with every day. Talk about surreal. Or how about Democrat New York State Attorney General Spitzer and his love of prostitutes, now a CNN talk show host?
What is there about Edwards that Obama fears?
After all the sex scandals Obama could go after happening today, instead he is chasing after a guy that did wrong five years ago. What is suspicious here? So, doesn't it make a person wonder why the Chicago political machine of Team Obama is so intent upon destroying Sen. John Edwards, a progressive before anyone named themselves a progressive? Hmmm... let me count the ways:
* John Edwards hates lobbyists and said they should all be run out of our government
* John Edwards said Big Business should be reined in - especially Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Insurance, Big Banks who hate Edwards with a passion
* John Edwards stood up for the middle class
* John Edwards promoted unions (the Koch Brothers especially hate Edwards on this one)
* John Edwards promoted women's issues
* John Edwards was against predatory lending (those high interest rates on your credit cards and other loans)
* John Edwards promoted government paid health care
* John Edwards promoted government paid college educations
* John Edwards was serious about dealing with poverty in America
* John Edwards promoted improving, repairing and building up our infrastructure to the level of new technology
* John Edwards dismissed Axelrod and Plouffe from his presidential campaign, at the behest of wife Elizabeth who did not trust their judgment. Sounds like she was on to something. It also sounds like Team Obama is running a political vendetta. They also took John Edwards' political platform on the way out the door.
Political opportunists experiencing blowback
The list goes on and on. Apparently, the man was ahead of his time and the country was too mesmerized with a younger candidate in the form of Barack Obama. Well, Team Obama and Obama himself adopted John Edwards' platform, claiming it as their own and won the 2008 election. Apparently, America was in the mood for a populist, just not the guy with the original ideas.
The real problem is that Obama and Team Obama have clearly run out of ideas because they never understood how to implement another man's platform. Opportunists are like that: they don't have an original thought. Instead, they take other people's ideas and claim they are their own, grabbing headlines and grabbing credit. What is going on in politics today echoes what we see every day in the corporate world of bad bosses taking credit for what someone else did. Now it's come home to roost on Obama about Edwards.
Obama has wrong advisers
The biggest problem for Obama now is that his administration no longer has anyone to feed him great ideas. He has relied too much upon only the Ivy League educated model to disastrous results. He does not have a cross section of society advising him. Too many PhD's without much life experience is a mistake. Not enough generalists - too many specialists and experts in narrow fields - not enough of those who have learned from the hard knocks of life. You need them all.
CIA Director Leon Panetta
Even CIA Director Leon Panetta has finally admitted to the same conclusion for the CIA personnel profile. I've been trying to tell these guys for years to quit with chasing after this flavor of the moment or that. Too much of the same group think going on creates blind spots where an administration can get crushed or outmaneuvered much too easily.
The Edwards marriage
What are the two biggest outrages here about Obama choosing to nastily prosecute Edwards? Well, for one thing that irks me is how the children have to relive all this ugliness yet again. Daily they will be reminded at school and in the news about their father, their dead mother and now the former gold digger mistress.
The reason I never bothered to talk much about the Edwards marriage is because it was clear they were disintegrating. Couples who experience the death of a child, especially if it was the first born, rarely stay together. It is a high incidence of divorce. Yet John Edwards hung in there with his wife as she grieved so much she was going to their son's grave every day for years. She never did get over it.
Then stage two of a disintegrating marriage when a couple loses a child. The spouse that can't let go of the child and accept their death turns on the spouse trying to keep their head and their emotions above water to function. Elizabeth turned on John.
Then stage three of a disintegrating marriage. John stayed with his wife anyway as she berated him, blaming him for their son's death. He kept taking the abuse because he knew she was abusive out of grief. He loved her.
Then stage four of a disintegrating marriage was when Elizabeth grieved too much and for too many years that she finally stressed out her immune system, developing end stage cancer. She wanted to die when her son died, like so many parents when they lose a child. Years later she finally got her unspoken desire.
When cancer patients turn on the people closest to them: their spouses
Then the ugliness in the marriage got kicked up a notch. Have you ever been around a loved one or friend facing death from cancer as they go through treatment? It isn't pretty. And they get really mean. I am saying, they get excessively mean.
Too many times I've witnessed spouses turning on the healthy spouse, hurling terrible words like "I've never loved you. I only married you because you were my second choice. You are a terrible parent. I hate you." That litany can go on for months - and even years - as the cancer patient experiences ups and downs in their treatment and journey toward inevitable death.
Just how much can any spouse take after being so soundly rejected for over a decade? Most people would have finally turned to an affair. OK, most people would never have hung in as long as Edwards but the man really loved Elizabeth beyond good sense. It was only after cancer treatment he finally began his process of the journey of emotionally leaving. Perhaps he was finally emotionally saturated. Perhaps he had finally run out of patience. Who knows? The point is he was ripe for a sweet-talking gold digger to come along. Why is any of that a surprise?
Outrage prosecuting Edwards instead of ills of the country
So, a sitting president, in a desperate political move to eliminate any and all political opposition for his reelection, decides to prosecute a disgraced and broken man. Edwards is done politically, long before this court case. Edwards has much long time repair work to do with his children. Edwards has to finish grieving over the death of Elizabeth.
For President Obama and his DOJ to advance to prosecuting John Edwards is a disgrace to the Democratic party. It's a disgrace to the Obama administration, revealing just how nasty and ugly they are willing to get by dragging children through the political mud just to win reelection. Just how depraved is this White House and Team Obama? Answer: apparently, depraved to the level of depraved indifference.
What will happen as a result of this prosecution in regards to Obama?
A lot and it isn't going to be pretty. People will hear again the campaign speeches of John Edwards as a call to help the middle class that is currently experiencing a downwardly mobile crush. The health care plan of John Edwards - with a public option - will be recirculated and more favorably compared to Obama's.
Then there is the friction of lobbyists and Big Business and the people will remember the populist that spoke their anger, their hearts. He was the original, not the imitation. His name was Senator John Edwards.
What should be prosecuted by Obama and the DOJ
Since Obama and Team Obama seem clueless as to what they should be prosecuting here's a short list:
* Halliburton - VP Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, kept his stock while VP, provided no-bid contracts for his old company while in office for 8 years
* Koch Brothers and Wisconsin Gov. Walker - yet more no-bid contracts
* Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld and VP Cheney - the coverup of torturing prisoners against the Geneva Convention, as well as serving up lower level officers for jail time instead of themselves who ordered it
* Sec. of State Rice - who clearly dismissed 9/11 evidence given to her by the outgoing Clinton administration, clear evidence of an impending attack
* Wall Street - the famous financial meltdown and no one went to jail
* Karl Rove - for his oversight of the stealing of two presidential elections by redirecting voting machine tallies from all the states and running it through his "correction" tallying computer and then sent it back to the states for them to announce how Bush had won when he did not.
* the list is endless for all the abuses that should be pursued.
Fire Eric Holder
It's time for the sorry excuse of a DOJ under Eric Holder to get serious and do some real investigation and prosecution that is long over due in this country of open political sores. Piling on to John Edwards like some dog you want to beat repeatedly for the mistakes you are making is a bad excuse.
It's time Obama start acting like a president and go about the work of improving the economy, reining in Big Business, offer a public option health care plan, rebuilding the infrastructure on a huge scale and using the might of the federal government to create massive job growth in a hurry.
Obama is now the bully
For Obama and Team Obama to act like a pack of bullies, piling on to a broken man, now a single parent whose children are still grieving for their mother, is despicable. If Obama and his strategists think they will pull up presidential poll numbers by piling onto John Edwards, beating him again and again for something he did five years ago, think again. All it does is backfire. You and your politically motivated DOJ look bad, really bad, really really bad.
Obama goes on TV talking about bullying when the reality is he is a bully. I am not well impressed with that image. Going after Edwards is bad politically since it also gives grist to GOP hopefuls who will howl with glee Obama is eating his own.
Obama loses support and voters
In fact, if Obama proceeds with this nasty prosecution he will find me no longer willing to vote for him. I will campaign
against him for 2012. I am so furious over this ugly attitude, and national political behavior the public unceasingly says to stop, I will cross the line and vote for the
worst Republican I can find. After all, what does it matter any more when the Democrats are acting
exactly like the Republicans? The country is already doomed.
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