DeaneBarker.net

(Note: this post was original made in March 2008 to a collaborative blog run by a friend.  That blog appears to have gone offline, thus the repost here.)

I have to get something off my chest: I am so tired of people blaming their deliberate bad acts on “poor judgment.”  Today, John Edwards admitted to having an extramarital affair.  In a statement, he said;

In 2006, I made a serious error in judgment and conducted myself in a way that was disloyal to my family and to my core beliefs.

No, no, no — you did not make a “serious error in judgment.”  You did something deliberately unethical in the hopes you wouldn’t get caught.

“Poor judgment” implies that, at the time, you thought what you were doing was acceptable.  It implies that you exercised some judgment, deemed that your actions were okay, but later realized this was not so.  In these cases, you can say you exercised “poor judgment.”

But, at no time did John Edwards ever think what he was doing with Rielle Hunter was okay.  He can’t look back on this and legitimately say, “Yeah, I just judged that one wrong.”  That’s akin to trying to blow this off as a misunderstanding, or trying to imply that his perceptions were different back then, and he shouldn’t be judged in the current light.

No — John Edwards f*cked around on his wife.  He did it willfully, and he knew damn well at the time that what he was doing was wrong.  His only “judgment” was whether or not he thought he was going to get caught.

Rant over.