Friends

I know this has no real import on any real policy or anything, but watching this Andrew You/John/Elizabeth Edwards beef unfold is sort of amazing to me. I haven't fallen out with a friend since high school, but I like to think if I did, I wouldn't discuss that fall-out publicly. I'd like to tell you that this a totally moral stance, but it's also a stance based on self-preservation. I think slamming your friends publicly is the kind of suicide bomb that gets the slammer and the slammee all at once. Jay-Z had it right:

A wise man said don't argue with fools
Cause people from a distance can't tell who is who.

Or that just conclude that everyone's dirty. Hip-hop has been long on this, and as a younger man it was kind of entertaining. And then Tupac and Biggie were dead. The whole time they were after each other I kept thinking, "If this nigger was so dirty, how were ya'll ever friends?"

I don't know. I guess rappers get a pass for youth. But then you see something like this Jenny Sanford interview and you get the sense that your whole notion of who wronged who is probably incomplete. I can't recall--all at once--felt bad for someone (I thought she was embarrassing herself, and lacked the self-awareness to understand that) and been appalled by them (mocking slave labor, really?) at the same time.

It don't make Mark Sanford right. It just demonstrates why, when these people bring their cases to us, we really need to be on some "that's between you two" shit. We don't know these people. And they should know we don't. It's like that other Jigga line--You can pay for school, but you can't buy class.