Opinions

Look away! Look away! (Alex Wong/ - GETTY IMAGES)

There are some places where I strongly, strongly recommend against trying to Meet Someone.

In the self-help aisles of bookstores. In a police line-up. Speed dating. At STD clinics. On any reality television show dedicated to Meeting Your Soulmate that includes a hot tub.

One that didn’t make the list was At John Edwards’ Corruption Trial, specifically, sitting behind the table as the defendant.

This seemed to go without saying.

Is there any public figure so deeply and uniformly despised as John Edwards?

This is a rhetorical question. The answer is no.

Offered the choice of taking a cross-country road-trip with a human-sized cockroach or the former Kerry vice presidential candidate, most people, after a brief moment of internal struggle, would choose the cockroach. “Maybe we could discuss Kafka,” they would suggest, timidly.

John Edwards is the sort of person that if you found him on the bottom of your shoe, you would hold your nose and scrape him off. He has systematically ticked off every one of the Unforgivable Public Figure Offenses: He cheated on his dying wife. He tried to pass off his child as the work of a staffer — and used, it is suggested, campaign money to do so.

When 1,200 people demanded proof that Barack Obama was born in the United States, Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett sought verification from the state of Hawaii.

But when more than 18,000 people signed a petition demanding proof that Mitt Romney was not a unicorn (unicorns, as the petition pointed out, are ineligible for the presidency of the United States), Bennett remained silent.

In fact, he called the motion “ridiculous.”

But is it so ridiculous?

Here is a chart.
Also, the unicorn has limited executive experience, but on the other hand it was never involved in the closing of a steel mill. (Honestly, I think this is some of my best MS Paint work yet.)

Please, stop. (Mark Gail - THE WASHINGTON POST) Marion Barry is one of the few political figures I know whose way of getting himself out of holes is to dig a larger, more disturbing hole.

He couldn’t even apologize for his racist comments about Asian shop owners (“We got to do something about these Asians coming in and opening up businesses and dirty shops.”) and Filipino nurses (“It’s so bad, that if you go to the hospital now, you find a number of immigrants who are nurses, particularly from the Philippines.... And no offense, but let’s grow our own teachers, let’s grow our own nurses — and so that we don’t have to be scrounging around in our community clinics and other kinds of places — having to hire people from somewhere else”) without digging another hole.

He told a community meeting that: “The Irish caught hell, the Jews caught hell, the Polacks caught hell.... We want Ward 8 to be the model of diversity.”

The Post reported:

“Asked later about his reference to “Polacks,” Barry at first denied using the word, then retracted it. “I meant Poles.”

Wow.

That’s what it used to look like. (Mario Tama - GETTY IMAGES) Journalism, they tell you, never goes out of style.

People have a fundamental hankering for news. They always have. News at its most primitive level is simply an expansion of the possible subjects for gossip, and gossip has fueled our conversations ever since we first sat around fires roasting large hunks of mammoth meat.

“Garg Who Kills Most Mammoths will not make a good chief,” we said. “Urm Who Paints The Caves is worthier.”

“No,” someone said. “Urm Who Paints The Caves couldn’t spear a mammoth if his life depended on it, and I hear he’s cruel to his tame wolf-hound.”

“I hear Garg eats tame wolfhound.”

“There was a very interesting study,” someone else would chime in, “that every seven minutes conversation automatically stops because we have to listen for approaching predators.” (The person who begins most sentences in conversation with the phrase “There was a very interesting study” is a recognized type who has been around for centuries.)

The conversation would dutifully stop.

“I don’t hear any predators,” someone else would say.

We would continue chewing our meat in silence. “It’s been a while since we had a good stoning,” Zurg Who Watches Too Avidly The Noisy Talking Heads would conclude. “We should get on that.”

Remember how fun this was the first time? (Gerald Herbert - AP) The Romney campaign is now offering, as an incentive to donors, the chance to win a dinner with Donald Trump — and Mitt Romney.

A dinner with Mitt Romney is bad enough.

But there are a good number of people out there — Mitt Romney used to be one of them — who would give you $3 if you said that you would ensure that never, at any point in their lives, would they be forced to eat dinner with Donald Trump.

I am not one of those people. Today I inadvertently ate lunch with the next president of the United States, a gentleman who approached me on the street as I sat ravenously consuming a box of macaroni and cheese and informed me that he was leading in the polls with 1/3 of the American vote. All he had to do to win was live until September, he said, and the secret police would take things from there. I am not making this up.

My point is, I will eat dinner with anyone, as long as it’s dinner.

It’s not the idea of dinners with celebrities that is so novel. President Obama, in his fundraising, has gone so far as to invite you to spend the evening with him and Bill Clinton. Maybe they can do as Romney suggested and have a beef with each other.*

But the appeal of the Romney-Trump dinner is more than that. It is not just that you get to fly somewhere and enjoy a nice meal.

It sounds like a nice package. The website informs you that: