John Edwards is the new Clinton, Spitzer, Craig

Leonard Pitts Jr. reports:

There is obviously no way to quantify this, but I regard Bill Clinton as the most thoroughly humiliated person in all of human history. Who else even comes close?

On Sunday, it will be 10 years since that astonishing day a sitting president gave a nationally televised address in which he admitted that, yes, he'd had a sexual relationship with a young intern, and that all his previous statements to the contrary -- to his family, to the media, to the nation -- were baldfaced lies.

You gazed upon that astonishing spectacle, gazed upon the utter debasement of the highest public official in the land, and you said that here was an object lesson to which other public figures were surely paying close attention and from which they were surely drawing the obvious lessons: Keep it in your pants, boys; in an era where media are 24/7, 365, and that old gentleman's agreement you once had with them to keep private peccadilloes private has long since vanished, there is no woman fetching enough, no sex amazing enough, to justify such complete and utter humiliation.

This belief was, of course, naive.

We soon learned that Jesse Jackson wasn't paying attention. Nor was former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Or Sen. Larry Craig. Or Motown Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Last week, another name was added the ranks of the obviously inattentive: the golden boy himself, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.

You'll want to read the whole thing.