A dish best served cold.

We ladies may live longer, but men age better. We get saggy, they get craggy. As usual, our culture sends out mixed messages. While Oprah and More Magazine celebrate femmes who are "forty and fantastic" or "fifty and fabulous," Hollywood continues to team up George Clooney, Harrison Ford and Jim Carrey with costars young enough to be their daughters.

One of the reasons Paul Newman was so beloved, besides his charitable endeavors, acting skills and legendary blue eyes, is the fact that he remained happily married to Joanne Woodward. Women of a certain age take comfort in his famous quote "Why should I go out for hamburger when I have steak at home?" The Paul Newman phenomenon had a lot to do with why so many women liked Elizabeth Edwards. The dumpy, frumpy cancer victim married to the perfectly coiffed, eternally cute man. The tragedies they endured together! The family values! The love!

Of course, all that went out the window when the world found out dear John had an affair, and probably a love-child, with Rielle Hunter, a skanky Lucinda Williams lookalike with overly processed hair. Even worse, the dalliance occurred while his wife was recovering from cancer and during what might have been a viable presidential bid. Had Edwards' candidacy taken off, the scandal could have cost him, and the Democratic party, the election, thrusting us into an alternate reality too horrible to contemplate.

Time passes. Tabloids move on. Cancer metastasizes. Poor Mrs. Edwards is terminally ill. She has three children and a husband she claims she's still - oh please! - "in love with". Her days with her beloved family are cruelly limited by her disease. And instead of making the most of the rest of her life, she's away on a book tour for her tell-all tome, narcissistically titled "Resilience". It's like Stephen Hawking calling his memoirs "Genius" or Giselle naming hers "Perfection".

How can Mrs. Edwards put her children, now all old enough to understand and be humiliated by their father's infidelities, through another media assault? Why would she leave behind a book that casts their only remaining parent in a negative light? In three consecutive interviews, Elizabeth informed us that "All she ever asked from John was that he be faithful." Repeatedly pointing out that she's an army brat, she describes her humble origins. They "never had a lot, but they had enough". Consequently, she "doesn't care about diamonds"- she just wanted her man to be true. Well, diamonds may not do it for her, but square footage is the girl's best friend. Elizabeth, the twins and John, self-styled champion of the underclass, live lavishly in a 28,200 square foot home, which includes a high school sized gymnasium where John can play basketball if Obama ever visits (highly doubtful).

So it's not like they need the money. The book puts John and his bad behavior right back in the spotlight, and Elizabeth's impending death will be the coup de grace to his career in public life. Apparently, revenge is sweeter than the eight year old twins. And John isn't the only partner in the Edwards marriage with character flaws.





Personally, I always thought John Edwards looked like a slimmed-down Bob's Big Boy. And unlike Paul Newman, he DID go out for hamburger...