Maybe you have all had affairs, and I am just naive. But the one time I tried to kiss another person (when I wasn't even yet married to my partner) I started to cry I was so aware of the betrayal. If politics is all there is to life, then have at it: there is no such thing as personal integrity. Fine. But are you willing to live with the consequences of this in your actual life? You don't mind being lied to, cheated on, bypassed (even when you are dying of cancer)? You don't bat an eyelash when a friend, with cancer, is being cheated on? I don't get it. If life were only politics, fine. But these comments suggest that personal morality should be done away with. It is not, by the way (personal morality) an invention of the religious right. Lying has always been considered cowardly (in every ancient culture we have written evidence of.) So sad to see this behavior defended as if it is ridiculous to focus on morality. It makes me think the defenders do not understand how important their own personal morality is (or that they have just already been victimized in this way/ or been the victimizer and are projecting.)

Anyone who has lived through a severe illness or other near- or actual- tragedy knows what it feels like to be able to handle nothing else. So this article is suggesting that there are good reasons for cheating on a spouse with cancer? I don't know anything about Edwards' wife, but no person is able to ably handle sexual betrayal (is anyone going to acknowledge the emotional pain and exhaustion that always comes from this?) and cancer. It is too much. To put that much on one person is sick. John Edwards is a very, very bad person. No attempt to relative ethics or to act as if ethics does not exist (only politics!) will work to change what has always been true. People who harm those closest to them intentionally are not good people, full stop. Most of us do not do this, and please, Joan Walsh, do not try to make us lesson the standards for human decency because you also care about politics.

There is a website deciever.com that has the most extensive investigation into this, and one comment on that site speculates that Hunter has borderline personality disorder, which encourages a sort of idealization of focussed-on people; and Edwards is textbook narcissistic, just as he said, I suppose (I don't think the diagnosis includes that you can recover from it!). So possibly she was idealizing him and he was, well, believing it. Good for them. I mean, I imagine they have a future. But what would someone like Elizabeth Edwards have ever seen in a narcissist? They are not (according to the descriptions I've read) good parents; in fact they are huge burdens on their children. Just don't get it.

Also, the interview with E. Edwards on this site in 2007 has her saying, "There's just a lot less investigative reporting on political campaigns than there should be."

We are to believe she really said this while covering up her husband's donation-funded affair? It's not possible is it?

I just wish some honest, decent people would run for office. Once in my lifetime.

I kept thinking about it all day, it has been haunting me with your phrases sort of popping back up into my mind throughout. I just wasn't aware of all that you pointed out, and it is helping me organize my thoughts on alcoholism. Thank you.

Fine, she can criticize all of this but where are her reasons? If you want to be a priggish moralist at least tap into moral reasons for your views. It seems so short-sighted to criticize people for buying, for what they eat, for how they stay happy. It has always gone on. In even ancient Greek times people were overweight, people looked for happiness apart from their marriage, in little crafts, and people (including the author, who I imagine has no background in humanities or she would sound smarter) have always bought crap.

What a mean study. Yes, people are tackier than you. Was that the point?

I am not a psychologist or a neuroscientist, so I only have older philosophical theories to go on. But the Stoic view on "evil" has a very different take than the one presented here. The idea is that people who are bad in a spectacular way are no different than the rest of us who are bad in a small way. I thought this ancient idea was captured perfectly by a scene in the show The Sopranos that had Tony ripping out a recipe from a waiting room magazine. This is an example of the small acts of selfishness that we engage in on a daily basis. Given the opportunity, many of us might do the larger scale thing. How many Madoff's might there be among us? The only difference between him and some of the jerks we normally interact with might be what the Stoics called a kind of "greatness" (not in the sense of good, of course.) He might have had less fear and been more brave, bold, better able to caculate than the rest of us (I guess brain studies could show this)-- but when it comes to his ability to ignore the harm he was doing to others-- to push it out of his mind-- he might have been doing something not much different than what we do when we lie to someone for whatever reasons we tell ourself.

The post by USERNAME has such a great idea. Why doesn't this happen? Any lawyers on who can tell me? Those caught dealing drugs lose their property immediately, right? In that case it is not even for restitution. Why can't this be the standard for Madoff?