The John Edwards Rielle-ity Show

My eagerness for the summer return of the “Dallas” reunion soap is being usurped by my ardor in following an even more salacious drama.

The scandal shows share similar casting. One stars a Hagman, one a hag woman.

I’m talking, of course, about “The John Edwards Rielle-ity Show.”

You’d have to go to HBO’s “True Blood,” a show that stars vampires, to match a plot line that features so many soulless, sinister beings.

I contemplated Edwards in this 2010 piece in which me and some buddies were trying to determine the world’s worst man. As it was a golden era of men behaving badly, it was a lively discussion.

Tiger Woods was having his shenanigans play out; Georgia authorities were weighing whether to charge Ben Roethlisberger for raping an underage drunk; and Jesse James was being castigated for dumping America’s sweetheart for a Nazi. A Nazi!

And then we had John Edwards.

Worst man in the world?

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

I almost hope it emerges through expert defense testimony that Edwards is, indeed, a vampire. That would at least explain some of his behavior.

He must have felt so God-like thinking he was going to get away with it all.

He might have, too, had it not been for National Enquirer (same with Tiger Woods, too). I mention that out of pride of my 10-year association with them and because the mainstream media covering the trial insist on snubbing their journalism derring-do.

Now observers are eager to learn if Rielle Hunter will take the stand.

Guaranteed, “The Stand” wasn’t the posture Edwards thought of when he first laid eyes on Hunter.

I strain to avoid superficial observations about people unless they’re clearly superficial people so I think we’re on safe ground here judging both Edwards and Hunter.

She’s an aging slut, one who’s not aging well. She looks like the kind of groupie a more discriminating Mick Jagger would have passed off on Bill Wyman. 

And Wyman, himself an historic slut, would have had a great time with her. She looks like she’d be splendid fun.

For one afternoon.

She doesn’t look like the kind of girl for whom you’d chuck your family and your reputation. Construction workers would be reluctant to introduce a woman like Hunter to mom.

Before I fell for my sweetheart, I had enough of a worldly past that I think I can describe the momentary attraction of women like her.

They’re easy. They’re experienced. They’re insatiable. Yes, there’s a base appeal to a sexy woman who is willing to give up her body for reasons zoo animals instinctively understand.

If I could go back in my past and address, rather than undress, those women of low reputation a wiser me knows exactly what he’d say . . .

Thank you! Thank you very much!

But I was in my 20s, single and carefree about society’s opinions -- and, boy, the more things change the more they stay the same, I guess. And, to be fair, being seen with me wasn’t exactly launching any of these girls into circulation at any of the area debutante balls.

But how Edwards, a man with everything to lose, fell for her and allowed her to trainwreck his entire life is an unfathomable mystery. How could he have so little regard for his family? For his supporters? For his country?

We’re talking about a person who will go down in history as one of the most vile and manipulative people the world’s ever known, someone so beyond redemption it’s a virtual certainty they’ll go to a grave destined to be unmoistened by the tears of all but a sad, lonely few.

And that last paragraph isn’t referring to Hunter.

Next to Edwards, the gold-digging whore’s the class act.

Who's the worst man in America?

I’ve tried in vain for the past week to calculate who’s the worst man in America. The competition is just too, well, stiff.

Is it Tiger Woods? Ben Roethlisberger? John Edwards? Jesse James?

It’s an engaging topic among worldly men like myself. We’re the kind of guys who understand every single motivation a man could have for cheating on his wife.

Marriages go stale. Passions cool. Temptations beckon.

So men come at the topic with a slightly more sympathetic angle than would, say, a jury composed of 12 angry married women.

But the other night five of us were discussing over beers just which of these four men is the biggest disgrace to those of us who lug around the Y chromosome.

The misbehavior of each is so operatic that we were unable to agree on a clear winner, and by winner I mean loser. For that, we’re going to need spreadsheets, categories, assigned points and about eight more pitchers of beer.

We all agreed that Roethlisberger is the biggest jerk because his misdeeds are just a few splashes of DNA-testable material short of criminal. You’d have to give a ton of points for non-consensual acts.

He’s clearly the most stupid of the four. He could have been living Tiger Woods’s illicit life and no one would have cared.

So while he loses points for being a single man on the prowl, he gets a bunch for raping drunk women he should be sending home in cabs. And, remember, points here determine who is the most despicable.

I wouldn’t want any men to read this and think me and my buddies are going to buy them a beer and salute them for doing things for which they should be slugged.

The other three are married men involved with consensual adultresses.

So give Woods, Edwards and James points for being married. The marriage vow should still mean something and with our calculations it does.

But who among that trio is the worst cheater?

Tiger wins on volume, but loses points because, clearly, he felt no emotional attachment to these women who were either hookers or have undergone extensive plastic surgery to ensure they’d look like hookers.

Jesse James is an interesting contestant -- or should it be detestant?

He didn’t cheat as much as Tiger, but he gets a lot of points for cheating on America’s sweetheart with a Nazi. A Nazi!

“My wife says she feels no sympathy for Sandra,” Dave said. “She says she should have known he was a scumbag because his last wife was a porn star.”

Excellent point, but still . . . a Nazi! Plus, the news broke the night of her Oscar celebration so he gets incidental creep points for that. And if we’re giving Tiger 5 points for each women he’s cheating with, we’d have to give James 50 points for choosing to cheat with . . . a Nazi!

That brings us to John Edwards. One category is “Man with the Most to Lose.”

Edwards runs away with this one. Think of it: this could all be happening while he was president. It’s not much of a stretch.

The right despises Obama. Just imagine what Beck, Hannity and Limbaugh would be saying if our president was flying Air Force One to Charlotte to visit his mistress and their love child.

He loses points on the adultery scale because it was only one woman and he did have a caring relationship with her. But he gets huge points because he got her pregnant, blamed it on a buddy, and because his wife was battling cancer during the affair.

This is visceral with women. They just hate Edwards for that.

With most women, the rankings are Edwards, Rothlisberger, Tiger, and James.

Guys are more nuanced. We see mitigating factors.

With Edwards, we see it as a man trapped in a marriage that had broken down. We think Elizabeth should have said, “John, we had a nice run, lovely kids, etc. But I now see you’re unhappy and want to spend your life with the comely and new-agey Rielle. Go! Be free! Just please don’t bring her to my funeral. That’d be tacky.”

We can’t help it. That’s just the way we think.

So after an evening of boozy consideration, I still can’t decide who’s the worst.

For now, our only logical conclusion is this:

Not only do we men have penises, alas, sometimes we just can’t help but act like them, too.

Male birth control with teeth

It’s becoming clear that mankind will never have successful birth control until a drug is designed that diminishes the length of a man’s penis every time it has unprotected sex.

For the good of steadfast families and population control, this drug should be mandatory for all males over the age of 15.

Three weeks into the scandal, I continue to be amazed at the recklessness of Tiger Woods. Here was a man with so much to lose. Clearly, risking his family, his vast riches and his prestige didn’t matter to him.

So what’s the one thing that really does matter to him?

Anyone need three guesses?

It’s impossible for me to be detached from a subject to which I’m so attached and which, coincidentally, is so attached to me, but for the good of my brothers this drastic solution must be considered.

I’ve seen too much wreckage involving men I admire to stand by without addressing the subject -- and there’s no other way to put it -- head on.

It’s happened with Tiger, John Edwards, David Letterman, Bill Clinton and even Charles Kuralt, the late more-wholesome-than-milk broadcaster whose homespun “On the Road” reports made him part of every home in America.

In fact, that was particularly true with homes in both New York and Montana. Shortly after his starspangled death on July 4, 1997, it was revealed that he’d for nearly three decades kept a shadow family in Montana, which kind of made him a polygamist with frequent flyer miles.

I don’t think anybody gets into a marriage and plans on having it end with tawdry infidelity. But it happens all the time.

Why the young Tiger wanted to get involved in the pretense of marriage is a mystery when it’s clear all he wanted to do was spend his idle hours dabbling with hookers or women who devote hours to makeup, wardrobe and costly reconstructive surgery to ensure they resemble hookers.

It’s more complex with men like Clinton, Edwards and certainly Kuralt.

I have a theory that our rampant infidelity is a result of the grinding boredom that comes with man’s ever-increasing longevity.

Think about it. Just 250 years ago, the average life span in America was about 40 years. Strong and faithful men with names like Miles would get married at about 18 years old and swear before fellow pilgrims that, “By God, I’m going to be true and faithful to Hester for the rest of our natural days.”

Then Miles would get to be about 38 years old, he’d say, “I am so sicketh of Hester. Our marital relations have soured, her figure has lost its sturdiness and she never did learn to roast a goose the way mother did. Oh, well, I’ll be dead in two years. Might as well sticketh it out.”

Our life expectancy has been extended dramatically, but young people still feel family pressure to marry in their still ripe 20s.

I was able to resist those pressures and didn’t marry my sweetheart until I was 33 (three years after we began a sinfully sensible shack up).

Men wouldn’t get in so much trouble if they’d had a grandfather like mine. I remember leaving home to attend Ohio University back in 1981. He pulled me aside and said, “Boy, just keep your pecker in your pants until you’re 30 and you’ll be fine.”

I thought of Papa anytime I got into trouble that stemmed from disregarding his advice.

If I ever have a grandson, I’m going to tell him what Papa told me and amend it to address times sure to be even more sex-obsessed than ours “. . . and if you fail to do so, be sure to put condoms on everything and three condoms on some things.”

And the world spins on with fresh reports that Elin Woods is going to shorten the marriage that, I’m sure, both she and Tiger hoped would last forever.

Tiger could lose a whopping $500 million.

He should consider himself lucky. Nobody would blame her if she drastically shortened something that clearly means more to him than marriage.