Doesn’t it strike you as odd that of the two most recent losing Democratic presidential tickets, in 200 and 2004, the erstwhile vice-presidential candidate has become either a pariah in his own party (Joe Lieberman) or, well… this guy:

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That would be John Edwards, ambulance-chasing poseur, fraudulent populist and all-around bad belly.  Even his long-suffering wife, Elizabeth, has finally had enough.

Hard to believe a major political party would run a first-term senator, little-known outside his home state, and then not vet him, isn’t it?  Even harder to believe that the Mainstream Media would later consciously and deliberately cover up his extramarital hanky-panky and love child while he was a candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination, and instead give us the myth of the good family man, with the wife suffering from incurable cancer, the champion of the Little Guy and the man who proved, once and for all, that there really are Two Americas — and that he lived in both of them.

From Byron York, charting the Edwards’ camp’s amazement that the media let him skate as long as it did:

In July 2008, the [National Enquirer] published a detailed account of Edwards’ visit with Hunter and the baby at a Los Angeles hotel. “Andrew, they caught me,” a tearful Edwards is quoted as telling Young in a phone conversation. “It’s all over.”

Surely now, Young thought, the press would jump on the story. But it didn’t happen, at least not quickly. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the broadcast networks and the cable news outlets — none reported the story.

An explosive scandal had been kept out of the press for months at a time when the man at the center of it was an important player in national politics. Why? Young thought it was because the Edwards camp so tightly controlled information that journalists weren’t able to find sources to corroborate the Enquirer’s reporting. Perhaps that was part of it. But the fact was, many editors and reporters just didn’t want to tell the story.

How is this possible?  And is it finally time to scrape off all those “Kerry-Edwards” campaign bumper stickers? Any suggestions you have to explain this obviously aberrational example of grotesque media malfeasance happily entertained here.