John Edwards hoped to be appointed to the Supreme Court

[cali]

<snip>

Again he looked to strike a deal, seeking a high profile position in exchange for an endorsement. Again, he assigned Hindery to reach out to Obama through Daschle, but contacted Clinton himself.

"If he couldn't be vice president," Hindery said Edwards believed then at least "he could be attorney general."

But if he were going to settle for attorney general, it was in service of a higher goal -- to be on the Supreme Court.


Hindery said Edwards would decide who to support "based on attorney general and that's who he would support." He would pick the candidate who could best "support his own evolution to the Supreme Court."

<snip>

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/john-edwards-prosecution-ends-abc-video-lying/story?id=16318393&page=2#.T6xGflJ9Z_Y

delusional, egotistical asshole.

[elleng]

1. Right, and so did I!!!

[madinmaryland]

2. Heh! I would have loved to seen the Senate hearings for him!!

[cali]

3. yikes. there's a thought.

[madinmaryland]

11. I'm sure David Vitter would have had some very pointed questions for him!!

[cynatnite]

4. Ugh! n/t

[freethought]

5. No. Sorry.

When John Edwards was running for the nomination, I liked him. I didn't vote for him but I liked him. Now I just don't know what to think of this guy. Where's his head?
An appointment to the USSC is just too important to waste on him.
What an asshole!

[sabrina 1]

7. USSC appointments have been wasted on worse.

See Scalia, Thomas especially, eg. At least Edwards, regardless of his personal problems, would have been orders of magnitude better than those two.

[fishwax]

9. if a republican eventually becomes president and wants to spend a pick on him, I'm ok with that

[freethought]

13. Hmm. Good point. n/t

[Raine1967]

20. Still have to read the rest of this thread, BUT ---

I totally agree with this assessment.

[hlthe2b]

8. I did too. How someone seemingly so intelligent can be so incredibly DUMB--beyond dumb

just astounds me. Not to mention his narcissism and absolute cretin behavior.

[freethought]

15. I am reminded of how the right tried to bash him.

One thing the hard-right did when John Edwards was running was bash him for being a lawyer. They played upon hatred of lawyers, trying to paint him as some sort of overpaid ambulance chaser whose activities add costs to everything we buy and make our insurance rate go through the stratosphere.
Then they tried to paint him as some sort of metro-sexual because of the way he kept his hair. Hell, I'm in my forties and pretty damned glad I still have a full head. They did the same with John Kerry. For the most part I dismissed all of it.

This goes way beyond anything the right tried to do. He did it to himself. I personally don't think he should go to jail if convicted. But his behavior baffles me.

[XemaSab]

18. The thing that astounds me the most is the lack of altruism and perspective

If he had been the nominee and this had come out, we would have been hosed.

Did it not cross his mind that as an ostensibly serious candidate for president literally the fate of the world could be at stake? Or did he think that somehow society's rules didn't apply to him.

[hlthe2b]

6. Geez even Greek tragedies have some kind of end...and usually only one fatal flaw...

His saga goes on and on and on and his flaws multiply daily.

[Octafish]

10. Off the top of my head, I'd say he'd be better than five on there now.

Who knows, maybe he could be Chief Justice! John Edwards is certainly better than the Iran-Contra cover-up artiste we got now.

[Ruby the Liberal]

12. Just wow. His sense of self-importance and entitlement is mind boggling.

[sabrina 1]

21. And yet, we have five USSC justices whose sense of entitlement is far more egregious

so maybe, considering the current makeup of the SC, he was correct in his assumption that he would be worthy of a position on that court.

Speaking of self-importance, Thomas, whose position on the SC was paid for by Citizens United who came to his rescue during the nomination process with money for ads which many think saved his nomination. He repaid them in a quid pro quo type gesture by not recusing himself from the vote on the horrific, anti-Democratic Citizens United ruling. So little does he respect the institution that he views himself as entitled to repay a personal debt using his position on the court to do so. Not that he didn't agree with it, personally himself. Not to mention his wife's conflicts, and his through hers.

So all in all, the thought of Edwards on the current SC, if it meant replacing any one of the five especially those who interfered in an election, violating the Constitution to deliver a win to the worst president in US History, seems almost enticing.

[Ruby the Liberal]

23. Sorry - going to have to disagree.

The makeup of the SCOTUS will fluctuate, but you will never see a 9-liberal court.

Even if that could happen, there are at least 9 eminently qualified people in this nation that can take those seats.

Edwards is history. Best he can hope for is to either go back to private practice or maybe teach law somewhere once he pays his fines and gets out of the pen.

We can do better.

[sabrina 1]

27. I was not speaking about the future. I was speaking about his ambitions and responding

to your comment regarding him having a 'sense of entitlement'. I was comparing him, at that time, to those who ended up on the SC and stating that we would have been better off if we had Edwards, with all of his personal problems, rather than Thomas eg, on the SC. I don't see why he should not have had those aspirations. Any more than Thomas or Scalia eg. He was good enough back then to be a Democratic Senator, and a VP candidate. Seems to me we would have been far better off with a Democrat on the SC, who had every right, as a citizen, to have such aspirations, than any one of the five Conservatives we are now stuck with.

[Ruby the Liberal]

29. At what time?

At the time he made the comments - when he knew that he had fathered a child and attempted to hide it while vying for the Presidency, thus putting the entire election (and party) in a no-win position?

Like I said. Dude has shown NO judgment and the LAST place I want to see him is on a bench. He isn't qualified to sit in judgment of traffic violations, IMO.

[sabrina 1]

34. If everyone who had an affair were to be prevented from being in public office,

half of Congress would have to go home. Not to mention how many presidents we would never have had.

I never supported Edwards, never really liked him, and he voted for the Iraq War making him ineligible imo as a candidate. Far more so than any affairs he might have had. That imo, was a bigger crime than what he is now being charged with, or with denying being the father of a child.

Many of our elected officials have had children outside of their marriages. Schwartzenegger being the latest one we heard about. Interesting how little attention that affair is getting.

I wonder how many secrets Larry Flynt could reveal.

But aside from all of that, you completely missed my point. Which was not to suggest that Edwards should be a SC Justice. It was to point out that we have right now on the SC at least one Justice whose presence there is and has been and will be far more harmful to this country than Edwards would be, even now.

For some reason you translated that into advocating for him to be on the SC.

[karynnj]

28. I would think he is too damaged to practice

His strength was getting a jury to believe him. Same strength that got him elected. Now, if you were arrested for something in NC would you want to risk having JRE as your lawyer? He is NOT what he was back in the late 1990s when he quit.

I can't imagine his chutzpah here. He was NEVER a constitutional scholar - he was a top trial lawyer. I really do not see that he would have been a strong candidate for the SC, even with no scandal. He was never a judge and he was never a scholar. (I also think that having never been a prosecutor, in the Justice Department or running a legal department that he would not have been a strong candidate for Attorney General.)

[Ruby the Liberal]

30. Good points.

He was a trial attorney, not a Constitutional professor/author/practitioner. No way he would have gotten through a confirmation - even without his little finance flim-flam scandal.

[sabrina 1]

35. Well, you are right in theory. We should have better candidates for the SC.

Scalia is viewed as a scholar, but is he a good SC justice? And what about Clarence Thomas?

We've had plenty of scholars on the SC but that didn't make them good for this country. What makes a good SC Justice is someone who can interpret the law and decide based on their interpretations, what is best for this country. We have had SC Court Justices who decided that not all Americans were entitled to equal rights eg. We currently have SC Justices, scholars we are told, who have ruled that Corporations are people.

I'll take someone who has common sense and is not a Corporate shill or bigot over a so-called scholar any day.

That is not to say I think Edwards should be a SC Justice, it is to say that considering the institution's history, he would be no worse, experience-wise, not considering his personal life, than many of our present and former SC Justices.

Since my point was so badly missed before, I will add that I never liked Edwards and never supported him for president.

[DevonRex]

26. Ruby, can you

imagine what the hearings would have turned into? OMG they would have tried to produce the baby as exhibit A right in front of Elizabeth. Or something as dramatic, depending on the timing. I can see it now.

[Ruby the Liberal]

31. I still shiver when I think that he could have cost us 2008.

I don't even want to think about his butt being in any position of public scrutiny. I know enough already.

[DevonRex]

32. They might have produced pictures of

his actual butt.

[Ruby the Liberal]

33. Apparently, those already exist.

Bleargh.

[Bonobo]

14. Every good thing he ever did or might have done is invalidated because

he put his penis into another woman's vagina and lied about it?

I wonder if Elizabeth Warren would be as attacked if it was discovered that she let another man (or woman) place an object in her vagina for her pleasure.

People are not all one thing.

[Nye Bevan]

19. If Elizabeth Warren repeatedly lied to her cancer-stricken husband,

and risked throwing the Presidential election to the Republicans, and cheated an old lady out of millions of dollars in an attempt to cover everything up, then yes, I do believe she would be attacked.

[alphafemale]

36. ...and had cancer stricken wife humiliate herself on national television.

...and eventually abandoned terminally ill wife to cavort with new mistress.

[Codeine]

25. 'Twas a bit more complicated than that, of course.

The Big Dawg certainly doesn't get that sort of negative treatment around here for his penile extracurricular activities, does he?

[cali]

38. No. It's not that.

JE was nothing but a scam artist- something I repeatedly warned people about in 2007 and 2008. Anyone who says he went to work for a scummy hedge fund to "learn about poverty" is a shameless liar. This is a guy who made money from foreclosures in NO.

He may not be just one thing, but the bad certainly outweighed the good in JE as far as a candidate went.

Hypocrite.

Liar.

Narcissist.

[tritsofme]

16. The funniest part is that Edwards honestly thought his endorsement would have been that important

to Hillary or Obama.

That either would offer him such a high ranking position such as Attorney General or SCOTUS is just crazy.

The man was simply deluded, he was total dud in 2008, and his endorsement would have been largely irrelevant, which I'm sure was the response of the Obama and Clinton campaigns.

[CTyankee]

17. Oy! is all I can say...

It was an appointment "in his own mind." This guy could not be serious, given what he had done and what was to be made public.

A total fantasy.

And it is sad for us who at one time supported him as a champion of the poor. Someone who really "got" health care from the very beginning.

I am more sad about this than anything else. A fine mind wasted and never to be used in anything useful.

If he goes to prison, that will be a further waste. What a bad, bad outcome for him and for those of us who originally supported him...

[JI7]

22. this was actually reported at the time, and both Clinton and Obama sides laughed

at it and didn't consider his endorsement important.

[RZM]

24. I remember listing to an interview with an Obama campaign strategist a few years ago

He basically said that the campaign was amazed by Edwards' hubris and more or less laughed off the deals he tried to pitch to them. Though he put it very gently and politely, you got the impression they thought he was a tool who was living in this alternate universe where he was a major political figure and powerbroker.

What a loser. I was neutral on him in 2004 and by the 2008 campaign, I decided that he was a fraud. While I was surprised at the specific nature of his scandal, I wasn't surprised that he turned out to be a phony asshole.

[alphafemale]

37. At least we now know why he couldn't keep his dick in his pants. There was no room.

Not with his head being up his ass and all.