Edwards - through the fire before the race started

Name the candidate for the nomination for President who was Bill Clinton's lead attorney in Clinton's Senate impeachment trial, whose oldest son was killed in a freak car accident and whose wife is currently fighting breast cancer. The media don't like him, so they only story they have reported on him is that when he had a barber visit and cut his hair in advance of a major campaign function, he paid the man $400.

Yeah, John Edwards, the man who understands "All right we are two nations."

The Press doesn't like him, so they miss the real story of Edwards. But Charles P. Pierce gets him, and writes of the campaign by his fellow members of the Press who are working to destroy his candidacy in Equire Magazine:

the political culture seems to be determined to fag-bait John Edwards out of the race this time around. Channeling the conservative id from the swamps of its birth, as always, Ann Coulter flatly called him a "faggot" at a conference of conservative activists, and Rush Limbaugh regularly chaffs him as "the Breck Girl." From there, apparently, the affair of the haircuts has mainstreamed Coulter's position into more polite precincts. In April, Maureen Dowd wrote a column in The New York Times that speculated that the country was not ready for a "metrosexual in chief," comparing Edwards unfavorably with her dear departed Irish-cop daddy, who used to get his hair cut at the Senate barbershop for fifty cents. You could almost hear the gentle ringing of sputum in the spittoons. Thus are the issues. Thus are the watchdogs. Thus are the politics while people are dying.

But what can we expect from the American hack media who are still proud of the way they derailed Nixon's 1960 effort to become President when they focused on Nixon's heavy beard and poor makeup during his TV debate with John Kennedy? It has taken them a while, but the media has been able to shift all consideration in the election of the President way from the competence and demonstrated ability to the fantasy views of the candidates provided by his art directors and set designers.

What do we get now? Whatever it is, it is NOT an evaluation of competence and leadership ability. In a recent debate

John McCain pointed out that in his experience, which is considerable, torture doesn't work. On this, he was disputed by a former mayor of New York, who once was tortured by the thought that his second wife would not vacate the mayoral digs in favor of his second mistress, and the former governor of Massachusetts, who once was tortured by the fact that gay people were getting married. Toughness was now a performance skill in a cowardly country taught to fear the best things about itself.

A candidate's actual biography doesn't matter; George H. W. Bush flew fighter planes when he was a teenager, and he couldn't overcome the "wimp factor" against Ronald Reagan, whose primary combat experience was battling his way to the bar at the Brown Derby. In the three major national elections of his life, George W. Bush, who couldn't find Alabama while he was serving in the National Guard, defeated three men -- Al Gore, John McCain, and John Kerry -- who had volunteered to go to Vietnam, and he did so by out-butching them. Kerry's awkwardness in hunting clothes somehow trumped Bush's fear of horses.

Thanks to the American political media we get candidates who in real life would be considered more worthless than cardboard cutouts of candidates, but our media proudly puts these cutouts into office.

Then they take stenography of the lies the cardboard cutouts they set up on stage in front of them and give us things like a war in the Middle East built on fantasies of bloodless Republican Rambos and incompetence such as that demonstrated by Michael Brown and his destroyed FEMA which couldn't even find New Orleans right after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

But don't count Edwards out yet.

The numbers are good for him in Iowa, but the numbers are always good for him in Iowa. In 2004, it was his surprising second-place finish in Iowa that catapulted Edwards into the top tier of candidates and, eventually, made his selection as John Kerry's vice-presidential nominee possible.

Iowa is still the first place where real voters will tell us who they want. If the failed hack media can't totally hide him behind their fake cardboard cutouts and other media lies the voters have a real opportunity to bring sanity and a good man back to the White House for the first time since the Republicans bought and stole the office in 2000.

The Republicans have already demonstrated what they can do - not just nothing, but less than nothing. They destroy everything they touch, and they have spent nearly eight years now demonstrating how truly bad their sick, unrealistic and Un-American beliefs can be when put into practice. Someone has to come in, take over government and start to repair the damage done by Bush, the Republican Party and the failed American political media.

America needs John Edwards.