Collateral

Cheating on your wife who has stage-4 breast cancer is not exactly the classiest act of political self-immolation one can imagine...indeed, Mr. Edwards will have the rest of his life to try to sink himself into some suitably inobtrusive cause (a la Gary "No Nukes" Hart) and ponder ruefully his place in the pantheon of cad-dom.

However, for all the dashed hopes and eggs-on-faces of his formally ardent supporters, a side-effect of this scandal no one could have sensibly foreseen is this:

(CNN) — Author Jay McInerney may have John Edwards to thank for a likely influx
of book royalties.
His twenty-year old novel [The Story of My Life], based on the life of Edwards'
mistress when she was a young adult, is soaring in sales rankings — so much so
that the book's publisher has commissioned an additional 2,500 copies for print
on Monday.

ARGH! This book is SUCH a mess that it defies adequate defamation! All of the worst 80s cliches ham-handedly told in a first-person SO shallow and ditzy it's beneath serious consideration at all, much less Joe and Sally CableNews hearing of it and paying any more than 25 cents at the local Goodwill for it. Even more repulsive than the rubbernecking at this presumed "portrait" of Ms Hunter is the fact that no one seems to REMEMBER it's trash. It was reviled on publication as crap and no one knows this? We're in worse shape than I thought.

Plus, Jay himself is such a maroon - he was (probably) mean to Marla Hansen even! Bah!