John Edwards Will Fuck Your Shit Up:
Here's what the Rude Pundit said a couple of months ago about John Edwards:
"It’s gotta be Edwards – the exuberance to balance your severe gravitas. In fact, having Edwards out there would allow you the freedom to be yourself: serious, thoughtful, considered. In the last generation, we've learned that a good Prez/VP combo is a yin and yang thing. Clinton was all party guy and Gore was the fused spine. Bush and Cheney are a natural combo. Gore/Lieberman lost because, rightly or wrongly, it was impossible to perceive them as anything other than a couple of stiffs. Bush Sr. was, ironically, the smart, experienced one to the facade of Ronald Reagan. Putting Edwards on the ticket is only a positive. It gives you a chance in a couple of Southern states. It makes everyone look forward to the Edwards presidency. And an Edwards/Cheney debate would just be more joy than one should be allowed in a lifetime. Edwards puts you over the top. Edwards makes people leave Nader behind. Edwards makes you hip. He makes you win the college girl vote by gettin' their panties all wet and sticky. And you win the college guys because they love drinkin' with a redneck. Fuck, just put him on the goddamn ticket and don’t listen to the wonks."

The savage dogs of the Bush/Cheney campaign already have their talking points posted so Republicans, scared shitless by this duo, can have stock phrases like "most divisive" ticket and "out of the mainstream." The best line of this great mountain of fly-ridden horseshit is this: "Senator Edwards delivers his pessimism with a southern drawl and a smile, but his message of a divided America rings hollow in the ears of an optimistic America that is united in meeting the tests of our times with strength and hope." So, let's see if we've got this straight: on fucking Independence Day, Bush said, "There's no such thing as perfect security in a country as big as ours. And the threats to our homeland are very real. We know the terrorists want to strike the United States again. They do because they want to disrupt our way of life. They want to spread fear." And he said it in such a cornpone accent that immediately banjos started dueling and tourists started being sodomized by hillbillies.

There will be time, there will be time to parse out such words about Edwards by comparing them to the actions by Dick Cheney and George Bush. Much will be made by the GOP about how Kerry's "first choice" was John McCain. But howzabout we spin it like this: McCain thought about it. And even though he's gotten back in line, he thought about it, enough to talk to Kerry at least a few times. What's that say about Kerry? What's that say about Bush? As this is being written, the link to the "Goddamn, We're So Fucking Scared of a Kerry/Edwards Ticket" List of Fun Facts is being overwhelmed, so we'll get to more of that later.

Here's the things about Edwards the trial lawyer: he was on the side of the good guys against corporations, as he writes in his autobiography, including the case of "Valerie Lakey, the 5-year-old injured by a swimming pool drain [that had sucked out her intestines] whose manufacturers had not only ignored previous injuries caused by the drain but had also failed to warn purchasers that tiny errors in installing it could prove deadly." A good trial lawyer is a son of a bitch on behalf of the little person; he's a mean, vicious motherfucker who will rip out the spinal cords of corporate lackeys and their whore attorneys and leave them paralyzed, immobile, unable to do anything but weep and pay damages. And Edwards brings the noise even when he's questioning a judge. Here's the National Review, appalled, appalled, at how Edwards went after Charles Pickering in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. The article concludes with, "A man willing to do what he did to Pickering might not be quite the good guy he says he is." And the answer to that is that you don't want your trial lawyer to be a good guy when he's in court. You want him to be an eviscerating monster, prepared to lay waste to those who think they are entitled to crush you.

Finally, on the personal story front, Edwards is hard to beat: poor kid made good, son of a mill worker now a millionaire. And a man who lost his 16 year-old son. That kind of tragedy makes a politician even more frightening to his opponents: Edward's faced the darkness, man, and come out the other side. Anything Bush/Cheney wanna throw at him is gonna be meaningless.

Tomorrow: Since John Kerry took the Rude Pundit's advice for Veep, he'll give Kerry free advice for his nomination speech.