Questionable candidate for a precedent ...

...about a questionable candidate for President.

Suppose you have a boyfriend. He's a jerk, but you can't see it. Sure, you've heard rumors, but you don't believe them. Your friends don't like him. They prefer that black guy who was interested in you. You know, the one who you didn't think was liberal enough? The relationship is making you miserable. Your boyfriend (let's call him John) takes all your money and makes you follow him to godforsaken towns to be with him. You are tired and stressed out all the time, but you don't want to admit you are unhappy because you are sooooo in love.

Then, once you have given all you have to give, he breaks up with you! You are devastated, but you pick up the pieces and move on with aforementioned black guy who turns out not to be as awful as you thought he was. Then all of a sudden, you are minding your own business and BOOM your friends start gchatting you "Did you know that John cheated on you? John is a coke dealer now! Remember when you LIKED him? I heard he is going to jail. Did you know about this? " You haven't thought about the relationship for weeks and all of a sudden you are barraged with emails reminding you just what dbag you were dating and what an idiot you were for wasting your time with him.

Welcome to the life of a former Edwards campaign staffer.

For reasons that should be obvious at this point, I generally try to eschew any Edwards related news, but when JRE's indictment popped up on my google news feed this morning, I couldn't resist.

According to Outside the Beltway "Individuals familiar with the probe have said that investigators are focusing on whether money paid to Hunter and former Edwards campaign aide Andrew Young constituted campaign donations, since the funds helped Edwards’s presidential campaign by keeping the affair secret."

According to CNN.com "The government is believed to be building its case that Edwards violated campaign finance law based on an 11-year-old advisory opinion issued by the Federal Election Commission, which asserted that a gift to a candidate for federal office would be considered a campaign contribution."

Those are two slightly different things, right?

It seems, and I could be wrong, that if the money went right from the donors to Hunter, it was not technically a gift to Edwards, but did obviously impact the campaign. Like I said, I haven't been keeping up, but that seems like a dangerous precedent to set.

Does this mean I can go out, do something that impacts your campaign, and then get you brought up on FEC charges? Where is the line drawn?

If indeed Edwards knew about the funds and potentially even approved them (he says he didn't but, I bet he did), then that is much more clear cut. Even if he didn't (he did), John Edwards deserves what's coming to him. Unfortunately the courts can't mandate 24-hr call time.

PS. Just when you thought it couldn't get more eye-rolly, as I am about to post this, the $400 haircut rears its impeccably groomed head.