• Electing a decent president

Your Aug. 12 editorial concerning the fall of John Edwards is a textbook example of the “shoot the messenger” mentality cloaked in the mantle of some fleeting‚ “moral high ground.”

Edwards’ admission came only after he realized that no one was buying his denials. To suggest that the public is “gleeful” that he was caught or that few can cite Edwards’ positions on key issues, you err in making huge assumptions about your readers, assumptions that are downright insulting.

I can’t name one person I know who is gleeful, but I can name a few people, myself included, who are disgusted by the sheer chutzpah of a man who made his fortune by manipulating juries with cheap emotional appeals, all in the name of “compassion” and dares to run for high office while cheating on his dying wife. Yet, by your logic, we’re the bad guys because we don’t like it.

The National Enquirer may not be the most respectable media outlet, but they did the public a service by exposing what the biased media knew about and chose to sit on.

You are almost right about two things: We are not quite a nation that elects leaders on personality (that can be traced back to the 1960 election), but we elect them on what we think their personalities are. Edwards’ projection of a charming Southern boy has been exposed for what it is: A facade.

So what’s the other thing? We are not becoming a nation of hypocrites. We’ve been one for many years. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t want to elect a president who is decent. Clearly, Edwards is not.

Robert Kumpel

Valdosta