John Edwards wants to be one of the head lawyers going after Volkswagen in its emissions ‘scandal.’  If you don’t remember, the very short version is that the company got caught fiddling with emissions requirements; they coded their cars to provide one kind of nitrogen oxide emissions for official testing and another kind of emissions for the open road**.  There’s a lot of money on the table; Reuters reports that the class action suits theoretically represents up to a half million car owners and leaseholders.  And if the lawyers – ah, ‘plaintiffs’ – win, then a huge hunk of whatever settlement gets settled ends up in those lawyers pockets.  In short: the jackal pack has smelled a wounded wildebeest, and they’re even now sharpening their claws and preparing their billable hour sheets.

And John Edwards wishes to be head jackal in that pack. Now, to be fair: this is the sort of thing that John Edwards used to do, before he unaccountably managed to become a Democratic Senator from North Carolina and a Vice Presidential candidate and a contender for the Democratic Presidential nomination and this is the point where the term ‘love child’ comes into the discussion.  As does the phrase ‘somehow managed to get cleared of illegal campaign contributions involving said love child.’ My point is that this is, sadly enough, not really a surprise.  Ambulance chasers are gonna chase ambulances. It was inevitable that John Edwards – did I mention that he’s a disgraced Democratic politician? – was going to go back down this road. The real tragedy is that there are people out there that have voted for him in good faith; and many of those people are perfectly decent people who didn’t deserve to be so blatantly lied to by the man.

No, seriously. Surely you have a family member or friend who voted Kerry/Edwards in 2004. They’re all right otherwise though, right?  They just got suckered by a bunch of professional con artists, that’s all.

Moe Lane

*Title cheerfully ripped off from here.

**We discussed this issue earlier here.  As that link might suggest, I would have nothing but admiration for what Volkswagen did if it were not for the minor problem that Volkswagen took federal subsidies for being so ‘green’ with its nitrogen oxide emissions. That kind of spoils the fun for me that I normally feel whenever I see a company engage in creative chicanery to get around stupid and poorly-thought-out government regulations; it stops being civil disobedience and just becomes fraud.  I suspect, however, that the settlement isn’t going to be all that remunerative for the plaintiffs anyway.  Now, the plaintiffs’ lawyers, on the other hand…