OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
There is no honor, it is said, among thieves. The only honor you will find these days, it seems, is among the whores.
Take John Edwards, who came frighteningly close to the White House. Twice!
He is a lying, cheating, philandering bucket of scum who denied paternity of his own child — oh, that most indelible scourge on the very poor he claimed to champion.
All the while fornicating and lying and videotaping his fornication and lies while his wife — crazy though she was — lay dying, breastless, in savage grief.
No friend of the poor, Mr. Edwards used them as stage props in his campaign for the glorification of — what? His precious hair?
Which now suffers the indignity of $35 clippers. Ha ha! It is the only justice we can hope for. Can’t look to federal prosecutors for that.
Then there is Congress, where Mr. Edwards was once a titan, roaming the wide hallways trailed by a bevy of staff, generously paid for by — well, suckers like you and me.
In their never-ending efforts to track down villains alongside whom they might not look so bad, members in both chambers of Congress have hauled in Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan.
Congress wants to know how it is that Mr. Dimon managed to lose $2 billion in one quarter. If there is one thing Congress doesn’t like, it is competition.
So they demand all sorts of answers from Mr. Dimon as they themselves pile up $2.3 million in debt every minute. After a two-hour hearing, they have run up our tab nearly $300 million. The easy cliche would be to say that “losing $2 billion is all in a day’s work” for Congress, but that would actually be a below-average day ($3.3 billion).
In the quarter so far that Mr. Dimon lost $2 billion in private funds, Congress has flushed away $190 billion in public money — money wrenched from our hard-working hands under the threat of jail, at the point of a gun.
While I do not mean to defend Mr. Dimon, he is infinitely more defensible than the rest of this crowd.
Meanwhile, in a jail cell on Rikers Island sits Anna Gristina, the so-called “soccer mom madam.” Authorities have accused her of running a high-end prostitution ring in New York City.
She has been stuck in Rikers since February because, it is reported, she refuses to provide information on five powerful johns that prosecutors are after. Earlier this week, Ms. Gristina fired her lawyer because, she said, he too eagerly basked in the circus glare of her case.
Maybe she ran whores, but at least she’s honest. And she’s not stealing our money.
• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com.
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