The American Spectator

Is anyone surprised that a federal grand jury has handed down a six-count indictment of John Edwards? (Four counts involve illegal payments, one involves conspiracy, and one involves false statements, according to the New York Times.)

This infamous ambulance-chasing lawyer from North Carolina, after all, made his career — and untold millions — playing fast and lose with the law. So this latest blemish on his reputation is not surprising. In fact, it was sadly predictable.

Of course, Edwards has gotten lots of ink for cheating on his wife, Elizabeth Edwards, and for publicly humiliating her by fathering an out-of-wedlock “love child” with the tabloid princess Rielle Hunter.

According to the Washington Post, the federal grand jury “had been examining Edwards’ role in funneling money from political donors to…Hunter, allegedly to cover-up [their] extramarital affair.”

That’s damning, but the biggest scandal is not Edwards’ tawdry and gratuitous affair. The biggest scandal is that the Democratic Party nominated this man for the vice presidency, and that the legacy media did absolutely nothing to seriously vet him. Instead, Edwards was given a pass and treated as a left-wing Johnny Appleseed.

In truth, though, Edwards is a monument to narcissistic self-absorption. He has always been about himself only and the pursuit of raw political power. Everything else — even his wife and children — is of secondary importance to him. That this left-wing lizard got even remotely close to the White House is a sad commentary on the state of our politics, our culture and the news media. Good riddance.

Update: Over at The Corner, The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector has an excellent post on Edwards’ phony pretensions to fight “poverty” in America.

Of course, Edwards never really understood or cared about “poverty.” The issue was simply a vehicle for him to gain traction politically. Thus, as Rector points out, Edwards

lectured the public endlessly about children in poverty, painting pictures of toddlers with empty stomachs living in shacks. But he never discussed the causes of child poverty. These are: very low levels of work among poor parents (even during economic boom times) and the collapse of marriage in low-income communities…

As the nation’s most vocal anti-poverty warrior, Edwards always maintained a pious silence about topics such as the causes of poverty and the size of the welfare state.

Instead, living in a $5 million mansion and sporting $450 haircuts, he intoned endlessly about little girls with empty stomachs who walked to school, on cold wintry mornings, without even a coat to keep warm. Behind the empty rhetoric was a man with vanity and ambition, and not much else.