John Edwards' Fighter For Himself

The National Review reports:

In today’s leisured, affluent, and globalized world, few elites are old-fashioned populists or on the perilous barricades of the civil-rights movement. Those who say they are — mostly the Democratic candidates — show us almost daily the contradictions and absurdity of it all.

John Edwards rails against the corporate elite and its strangulation of the little guy. But nothing in Edwards’s own life (even aside from the haircuts, sub-prime mortgage investments, and “John’s room”) would lead one to think he could ever be serious. When he speaks to a University of California audience on poverty, he takes not $5,000 or even $10,000, but $55,000, from the public coffers.

When he won lawsuits as an attorney, whether against doctors or the American Red Cross, he often gobbled up not several hundred thousand dollars, but millions, in cuts. This money did not come from the hides of moustached bandits in mahogany boardrooms; the costs were eventually borne by taxpayers or passed on to consumers. Thank God for winner-take-all capitalism.

Heh.