KenDo

I'm late to the John Edwards pile-on, but maybe that's because I don't much feel like piling on. I just hate the way we deal with political sex scandals in this country. Even humorists suddenly get serious: Maureen Dowd, for example, adds a little more bite to her snark than usual, dismissing even what might seem like positive aspects of Edwards' mea culpa. 'Even in confessing to preening, Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic?' she yawns. Now, talk of 'self-narcissism' is taking it to a level of meta that's beyond my ken--but however vague this term is in ordinary language, aren't narcissists quintessentially incapable of precisely the kind of self-awareness that Edwards displayed?

Both MoDo and Gail Collins (GalCo? Nah, I guess we have to save that one for Gal Costa) also take Edwards to task for stressing that his wife's cancer was in remission at the time of, er, transmission: for Collins, this 'may be a new high in the annals of weaseldom'; MoDo sneers at the claim that the tryst was 'oncologically correct', and dubs it 'the creepiest part of his creepy confession'. I guess I need to go to the videotape here, but given that cheating on a wife diagnosed with cancer is gonna be the most unsavory part of the whole scandal for most people, it makes sense to me that Edwards would address the topic directly.

The problem is that Dowd and Collins don't seem interested in a more sachlich take on this sad affair. They'd rather recycle every Ken Doll/Breck Girl cliche they can find.