Someone raised the question of why Sen. John McCain has been silent about this story. Perhaps there's a clue in comparing comments from McCain and Edwards during the Clinton impeachment hearings.

McCain said "I do not desire to sit in judgement of the President's private misconduct. It is truly a matter for him and his family to resolve. I sincerely wish circumstances had allowed the President to keep his personal life private. I have done things in my private life that I am not proud of. I suspect many of us have."

On the other hand, John Edwards said “I think this President has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen."

It's not the affair that's the big problem, it's the hypocrisy of lecturing others about their morals and private lives when one's own conduct couldn't bear the same scrutiny.

If the government was comprised solely of those who have never cheated, we'd have a lot fewer senators and representatives and women might actually become the legislative majority.

But it's the self-righteous attitude of politicians like Edwards, Gingrich, Spitzer and Craig, not their marital fidelity, that's the problem.

You have a good point about marital infidelity not being limited to men, I can't recall an elected woman official who was found to be having a sexual indiscretion but that could be because there are still relatively few of them.

I don't think the fact that someone is having an affair is anyone's business except the people involved nor should it disqualify anybody from office.

As many have mentioned, some of the nation's greatest presidents would never have been elected if we had worried so much about public officials' private sex lives in the past.

The media is a huge part of the problem, feeding what seems to be the American public's insatiable appetite for gossip, especially about sex.

The Gary Hart-Donna Rice scandal opened the floodgates for journalists to act like private detectives in a divorce suit rather than doing the kind of investigative work Woodward and Bernstein did with Watergate that brought down Richard Nixon.

But the media wouldn't do this if they didn't get huge audiences for it. When Anna Nicole Smith died, it was covered 24/7 on MSNBC and my husband kept asking me "Why the hell is this news?"

It may not be sexy to discuss winning "The War on Poverty," which seems to have become a war on the poor, and the stripping of our constitutional rights by the Bush administration.

But these issues matter a lot more than who John Edwards, John McCain or Bill Clinton may have had sex with.

It is increasingly rare to be able to have a conversation about issues without it disintegrating into name-calling and attacks on personal character.

The only places I regularly see serious discussions of the issues are C-Span and occasionally PBS.

It's much easier to scroll a headline "JOHN EDWARDS ADMITS AFFAIR" and then to debate if this is as bad as Bill Clinton's indiscretion with Monica Lewinsky or John McCain's leaving his first wife than to investigate things like why Bush and Cheney haven't been impeached for their actions over the last eight years.

And it must draw a lot more viewers or I doubt if they'd keep doing it.

You asked, "Is it only me? Or there is somebody else who finds hillarious the fact that all the uber-feminist Broadsheet readers are trying to justify the adultery of a man?"

I certainly hope you are the only one who makes the leap from people saying that this situation is primarily a personal matter between John and Elizabeth Edwards to your argument that then domestic violence should be considered "personal between two people." Affairs generally don't result in people dying.

What you call "personal matters" such as reproductive choice and divorce have become politicized because they are governed by laws that say what we can and cannot do.

If John Edwards was not famous, we wouldn't be talking about this topic. And I see a big difference between what Edwards did, as scummy as I may personally find it, and what Sen. Larry Craig (Republican) and Gov. Elliott Spitzer (Democrat) did, because both worked hard to criminalize the same conduct which they were involved in.

Perhaps there are parts of Salon that would be more to your taste than Broadsheet, a place many women readers visit to be informed, not insulted and mocked.

My last letter was primarily a reply to somebody who said if this situation is a private affair, so is domestic violence since it only involves two people.

The difference I see between Edwards, Sen. Larry Craig and Gov. Elliott Spitzer is that Craig and Spitzer were trying to send average people to prison for the same behavior they were exhibiting in private.

But that in no way excuses Edwards from setting himself up as somebody who is morally superior to a man like Bill Clinton. In an earlier post, I quoted those 1999 comments regarding Clinton's impeachment by Edwards: "I think this President has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen," Edwards said.

I do find Edwards' hypocrisy "breathtaking" to use his word. And the more facts that come out about the amount of money Hunter has been given and the continued prevaricating on Edwards' part, the more "disrespect" I feel for him.