Vast Landscape of Vanity

What is truly frightening about some of the people who run for president is the vast landscape that is their vanity and the dense depths of their stupidity.

I don’t know which would be more of a headache, being the public relations advisor to Tiger Woods and Lindsay Lohan or being a campaign advisor to John Edwards and Herman Cain. There is no amount of money, none, that would tempt me to take either of those jobs.

You can fix stupidity.

But you can ask it to leave the room.

To be honest, I couldn’t face  my mama and look her in the eye again if I had to lie as much as these people are required to.

Do you think their business cards read Liar for Hire?

Lying, as you may recall, was the original sin.

I wish the Church would take up a rallying cry against deception with the same fervor they have against abortion or homosexuality.

Deception is the root of all sin.

And stupidity.

How smart does Bernie Madoff seem now, sitting in a jail cell during yet another Christmas season? His eldest son dead as a direct result of his own actions. He killed that boy as surely as if he’d strangled him to death with his own bare hands, instead of letting a noose from a rafter do it.

All the money in the world is of little solace when your child dies. There is nothing, nothing comparable to having earned the respect and admiration of a child. Particular your own child. It’s a priceless treasure. Bernie Madoff traded that away.

So did John Edwards. His children have been more faithful to John Edwards than he’s ever been to them.

I’m sure you are as baffled as me over how men like Edwards, and now Cain, are able to convince themselves that they can run for the highest office in the land in a culture of 24-7 news and no one is going to discover that they’ve been cheating on their wives and lying about it.

Cain is still in denial. Edwards might be, too, except for that little issue of a paternity test.

Cain says he’s rethinking the toil that all these nasty rumors will take on his family.

“It’s just the way it is, but I’m not going to allow this sort of thing to cause me to drop out simply because it’s tough on me. I don’t want it to be tough on my family. And there comes a point that if it’s tough on my family, I have to consider that at that particular point in time,” he said.

Asked whether he would drop out if the race became too tough, Cain said: “I’ll make that decision depending upon the circumstances and how it is impacting my wife and my family. That’s my number one concern by all of these accusations.”

Cain’s number one concern by all these accusations is not whether there is any truth to them, but what kind of impact the headlines will have on his bid for president.

Once he drops out of the race, and yes, I’ll bet you a dozen Yankee Dimes he will drop out, Herman Cain might want to make his next call to a divorce attorney because I’m betting that his wife has already made that call.

One of the smartest and bravest thing Elisabeth Edwards did during her lifetime was divorcing John Edwards.