Now, for crying out loud. Here is a CNN article that has Wal-Mart accusing former United States Senator and Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards of cutting in line to get one of the new PlayStation 3 game consoles.
The ex-Senator and potential 2008 Presidential hopeful (please the court, the state requests permission to chuckle) acknowledged that someone on his staff had contacted Wal-Mart and dropped Edwards’ name inappropriately. The article says that Edwards says that the staffer was trying to get a console for himself, but Wal-Mart says that the staffer was trying to procure a console for the ex-Senator’s family.
Edwards has lately been criticizing Wal-Mart - correctly - over its labor standards (they refuse to let their employees form a union, and the average hourly wage at Wal-Mart is about $9), and Wal-Mart seems to be stomping on this faux pas pretty hard in an effort to make the ex-Senator look bad. This is the same company that had to stop using its “Buy American!” slogan because it turned out that most of the clothes they sold were actually being made overseas. It’s also the same company that has two-thirds of its stores in states that went for Bush in 2004.
Here’s part of what the Wal-Mart statement said: “While the rest of America's working families are waiting patiently in line, Senator Edwards wants to cut to the front.” Picks on the ex-Senator by name and says nothing about the staffer who actually tried to cut the end-run-around. That’s what CNN has on their web site, not the complete statement. MSNBC has the same article, which came from the Associated Press and does not include the full text of the statement from Wal-Mart. Probably doesn’t matter, though - the above quote is clearly meant to take a direct shot at Edwards and is simply mean-spirited, when both sides acknowledge that it was an Edwards staffer who committed the gaffe.
It’s just petty, Wal-Mart taking a shot at a Dem because they know they can. He’s not even really a contender for the 2008 Democratic nomination for President - and never will be, as he is far too close to John Kerry. If the Dems lose in 2008 - and it’s a distinct possibility, even with Bush as unpopular as he is, because the GOP will nominate either Rudy Guiliani or John McCain - it will be because John Kerry between now and then says or does even more to drag the party down. Guiliani is a head-case and a publicity hound, but on the plus side, he has no radical right-wing agenda; and McCain, one of the few Republicans who will actually work both sides of the aisle, is probably as good as the Republicans get - and is far more electable now than he was in any of the previous campaigns in which he has run.
At this point, it boils down to four heavyweights, and a lot of little guys who may or may not get to move up the line if someone ahead of them steps aside - and that could happen, as has already been seen with the announcement by Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia, that he would not run for President in 2008.
That leaves Hillary Clinton (the frontrunner) and Barack Obama for the Dems, and Rudy Guiliani and John McCain for the GOP (they might as well be neck and neck). John Edwards is an afterthought, and this Wal-Mart non-story is just petty bullshit being trumped up by Republicans who are pissed off that they lost Congress in the midterms. They should be more pissed at their President - because the American people voted mostly for Dems on November 7th not because they thought the Dems were better, but because they associated the Republicans with Bush and finally voted, as they should have in 2004, to dump him and his politics and his attitude and his policies.
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