I've become increasingly depressed by the candidate wars on this site lately. Not the fact that we get entrenched and dispense with civility, but the increasing frequency with which some members of this community abandon honesty in order to score points for their chosen candidate.
Ultimately we are all Democrats and we ought to guard all of our candidates against unfair attacks. With this in mind - as an Obama supporter I call your attention to an extremely unfair hit piece on John Edwards on the front page of MSN.
More after the jump.
If you go to the MSN landing page you'll see a picture of John Edwards with the caption:
John Edwards
Analysis: Where did his millions come from?
Click on it and you'll see an article By Tim Middleton:
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com...
The headline reads:
How John Edwards makes his millions grow
Investments in limited partnerships, an offshore hedge fund and subprime-mortgage lenders have made this wealthy presidential candidate even richer
From the article:
Edwards is running as a populist, but profits on his stock investments alone would distance the candidate from the cause.
Edwards has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital gains from stock in Apple (AAPL, news, msgs), BP PLC (BP, news, msgs), Burlington Resources, Medtronic (MDT, news, msgs) and Schlumberger (SLB, news, msgs), the chief rival to Halliburton (HAL, news, msgs), where Vice President Dick Cheney was once CEO.
Please note that the word in bold were bolded in the article itself. I show you this to point out how they disgustingly tried to make it look to the casual user that somehow Edwards had invested in Haliburton. Could this possibly be an accident?
The gist of the article is clear. Edwards has benefitted from the very system he decries. This criticism is all well and good, but I for one am sick and tired of the media calling hypocrisy every time a Democratic candidate who stands for anything positive turns out to be less than perfect.
The system John Edwards became rich under was the system of the day. He would like to change it to one that is morally defensible. In order to do so was he supposed to operate under a different set of laws in order to look free of blemish?
As I made clear in my intro, I am not an Edwards guy. I don't believe that Edwards has taken a greater hit in the media than any of the frontrunning candidates - and I surely don't buy the "they fear him" mantra of many of his most ardent supporters. But I also think that ALL Democratic candidates take too many unfair hits in the media, and many of them even take unfair hits here at DKos.
I implore everyone here to register a complaint with MSN for this hit piece, and I additionally ask this community to treat all of our candidates as if they were your candidate when these attacks come out. W eneed to circle the wagons. Failing to do so weakens us all.