Today Hot Report

Imagine the audacity of it all. The wife takes care of the kids through a long family ordeal. Then the wife takes ill. The husband, whose public stance is that he supports moral behavior and all-American virtues, instead betrays his wife. It’s appalling.

That’s what they’re saying about John Edwards — and rightly so. He had the gall to have an affair while his wife was fighting cancer — and while he was running for president.

And while we’re all feeling holier than thou, maybe we should use this occasion to re-examine the past behavior of John McCain: His first wife, Carol, was beautiful enough to be a swimwear model when he married her in 1965. He went off to fight in the Vietnam war while she stayed home to raise their three children. He was captured and spent five years as a prisoner of war. When he was freed in 1973, he came home to find that his wife had been disfigured in a car wreck three years earlier. So he dumped her and married a much younger woman (who might be our next first lady).

“My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce,” Carol McCain told the UK’s Daily Mail in June. “My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens…it just does.”

There are people who knew John McCain back then who felt so betrayed and disappointed by him that they won’t speak to him today. Maybe that’ll happen to John Edwards too. It just amazes me that people can reach such incredibly high ranks in American politics and somehow think their past (or present) misbehavior won’t come back to haunt them. It absolutely goes to the character issue. So if we’re going to go down that road, let’s do it on both sides of the political fence.

I just feel sorry for the wives who have to put up with this nonsense.