I think the standard explanation of the trashing accorded the foolish Governor Mark Sanford (who in embarrassing, and by now truly surreal fashion, confessed, and confessed, and confessed to an affair with an Argentinean girlfriend) and the tsk-tsk treatment of former Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards — who, in grotesque fashion, fathered a child with his mistress, lied about it on several occasions while he tried to gain political mileage from his ill wife, all as he concocted an alibi that his aide, not he, had really impregnated Rielle Hunter — is that Sanford suffered from the addition wage of hypocrisy.
Does that also excuse the press’s actively covering for Edwards? Because that’s what it did — it’s not just tsk-tsking here, but deliberately not reporting things that reporters knew to be true, because they didn’t want to hurt the Democrats.