Double Standards

If the 'liberal media' is so in the tank for Obama, why does McCain get a pass on marital infidelity while the stupid libido of John Edwards - who isn't even a candidate anymore - is nonstop news?

Personally I am outraged by the sheer idiocy of Edwards, a man who was my first choice in the primaries. How could he do such a stupid thing, and then how could he - and Elizabeth - believe it could be put behind them as he continued his presidential candidacy last year?

The answer of course is that plenty of other candidates have done so. Bill Clinton for example. And Bob Barr who is running as a libertarian right now. And John McCain. So why is this an issue about Edwards, who is out of the race, and not about Barr. Or McCain who is very much still in the race?

Was it because McCain's was almost 30 years ago? When he was a mere youth? (He was about the same age then as Obama is now). Were the circumstances of Edwards affair worse than McCain's?

If John Edwards' infidelity is news, and he's not a candidate for anything, why isn't John McCain's? He reportedly had numerous affairs in the years after returning home from Vietnam to a beautiful wife who had been disfigured in a car accident, and ultimately, by his own reports, he zeroed in like a laser on beautiful a 25-year-old heiress upon meeting her one evening in 1979 while he was still married, promptly lied to her about his age, and almost as promptly left his wife for her. We all extol John McCain for enduring 5 years of extreme hardship in Vietnam. But aren't his first wife's circumstances much like Elizabeth Edwards'? After all, the first Mrs. McCain waited in agony (and presumably fidelity) during those five long years for her beloved husband to return from Vietnam, raising their children while he was away and undergoing dozens of painful operations herself, only to be repaid by a philandering husband who ultimately left her for a younger woman.
- Drew Weston

Watch how Sean Hannity and his fellow cons fall all over themselves when Alan Colmes asks them if they are applying a double standard to Edwards and McCain:



Of course, McCain is excused because he spent 5 and 1/2 years as a POW. (That's his 'little black dress' - appropriate for any occasion.) But what about during his 2000 campaign? Why isn't the media falling all over itself to remind the viewers of allegations that McCain's own campaign had to intervene to keep him away from a pretty young lobbyist?

Is it because Republican sex scandals don't count if they don't involve children or homosexuality?