In her surprisingly beautiful memoir, Resilience, Elizabeth Edwards puzzles that the man she built a life with, including a 30,000-plus square-foot homestead, could fall like Dominoes for such a tacky pick-up line ("You are so hot!") and, by implication, for such a tacky broad (a woman whose very name, Rielle Hunter, seems to say, "Bad blonde highlights, courtesy tin foil scraps.")

In the hilarious romp of political man-boys behaving badly - cue Clinton and Livingston and McGreevey and Gingrich and Craig and Vitter and Spitzer and Ensign and now Sanford - I can only wonder, What if the gender table were turned? 

Imagine a high-profiled female politician standing at the press conference lectern, muttering the inane mea culpas of the philandering men:

Kathleen Sebelius: "It depends what the definition of sex is is."

Sarah Palin: "My truth is that I am a gay American."

Hillary Clinton: "And so oddly enough, I spent the last five days of my life crying in Argentina."

Jennifer Granholm: "I did nothing wrong at the Minneapolis airport elaborately tapping my foot in a bathroom stall."

Better yet, just imagine these women's husband's sticking around by the press-conference lectern to hear such gibberish.

Or just think of the hypocrisy. Republican Senator David Vitter, of Louisiana, frequented the DC Madam and the Canal Street Madam, yet fiercely advocated abstinence-only sex education and amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage!  Or better yet, could you imagine a Congresswoman sponsoring the Child Modeling Exploitation Prevention Act of 2002 to outlaw web sites featuring sexually lewd images of minors  and then trading sexually lewd  instant messages with, well, minors?  ("Don't Ask, Don't Email!")

Why don't women leaders get snared in such scandals? Do women lack the hypocrisy gene?  (Apparently not: Sarah Palin supports abstinence only education for all youth!)  A golddigger is a hooker - only smarter.  Perhaps less male golddiggers prowl Capitol Hill for prize prey.