Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.  You know what the worst part of it is?

That this guy was there with his friend Jerry Jones – and that he had a good time.

He should NEVER have a good time.

And speaking of folks who should never have a good time, of course Dick Cheney is perennially on my list (and I suspect that his ood times are few and far between – just look at that snarl).

Then there’s John Edwards.  Looks like there’s a new book coming out that covers, among other things, John’s rise and fall.  The John and Elizabeth part is a tale of hubris, ego, and emptiness.  The Book is titled Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, is being released tomorrow, and covers the 2008 election … check out the NY Magazine excerpt in  St Elizabeth and the Ego Monster.  Here’s a snippet that speaks to the “St. Elizabeth” aspect of this cautionary tale:

No one in the Edwardses’ political circle felt anything less than complete sympathy for Elizabeth’s plight. And yet the romance between her and the electorate struck them as ironic nonetheless—because their own relationships with her were so unpleasant that they felt like battered spouses. The nearly universal assessment among them was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing.

With her husband, she could be intensely affectionate or brutally dismissive. At times subtly, at times blatantly, she was forever letting John know that she regarded him as her intellectual inferior. She called her spouse a “hick” in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks. One time, when a friend asked if John had read a certain book, Elizabeth burst out laughing. “Oh, he doesn’t read books,” she said. “I’m the one who reads books.”

During the 2004 race, Elizabeth badgered and berated John’s advisers around the clock. She called Nick Baldick, his campaign manager, an idiot. She accused David Axelrod, his (and later Obama’s) media consultant, of lying to her and insisted that he be stripped of the responsibility for making the campaign’s TV ads. She would stay up late scouring the Web, pulling down negative stories and blog items about her husband, forwarding them with vicious messages to the communications team. She routinely unleashed profanity-laced tirades on conference calls. “Why the fuck do you think I’d want to go sit outside a Wal-Mart and hand out leaflets?” she snarled at the schedulers.

Sure makes me appreciate the Obamas.  Seriously.

Meanwhile – the soon-to-be released book got Harry Reid apologizing and reveals the now-familiar trash talk of the McCainiacs about Ms. P.

There’s a collection of additional tidbits compiled in The Atlantic … all geared to whet the appetite … and successfully so, IMHO.

About Obama himself the book includes plenty of observations about his manner and temperament, many astute and some original, though no earth-shattering revelations. The chapters about John and Cindy McCain’s relationship are fascinating; the coverage of McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin is mostly familiar ground. There are insights about the way the Bush White House perceived the McCain campaign, although they can be summed up as: not very well.

There are telling anecdotes, such as when Ed Goeas, a pollster for Rudy Giuliani, responds to Judith Giuliani’s query about how she could best help his campaign: “First of all, you’re his third wife. What you should try to be is humble.” (Page 290).

Political scientists aren’t going to like this book, because it portrays politics as it is actually lived by the candidates, their staff and the press, which is to say — a messy, sweaty, ugly, arduous competition between flawed human beings — a universe away from numbers and probabilities and theories.