British historian and writer Paul Johnson devoted his book Intellectuals to the irony that the personal lives of people who dwell in the rarified air of political righteousness are usually dissipated and dishonest. He concluded that the more dedicated the political activists, the more unsavory their personal habits in proportion to their zeal to save the world. Johnson’s theory applies more broadly today, as one after another of the torch-bearers for the downtrodden find themselves under investigation for sleazy personal behavior.

John Edwards, the champion of the dispossessed, is drowning in a putrid sea of scandal. The matinee idol-cum-advocate for the redistribution of wealth has been outed for his sordid affair with a campaign video freelancer who gave birth to their love child while Mrs. Edwards battles cancer — and worse, allegedly set up a male co-worker as the presumed father. The extent of his duplicity matches the political extremes of his campaign rhetoric.

And US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a delusional virago dedicated to imposing the socialist party line in Congress, bilks taxpayers so she can lord around like Queen Elizabeth with a retinue of attendants and a palatial private jet to accommodate her entourage. Now she has been caught in a colossal lie about her knowledge of CIA interrogation techniques, creating national security repercussions ringing ’round the world. While Edwards and Pelosi claim the disenfranchised as their constituencies, they enfranchise themselves with the usual trappings of sex, money and power.

The former governor of North Carolina is in the act, too. Mike Easley finds himself the object of a grand jury investigation for using elected office to elevate himself into the upper echelons of greed and squalor. He called on his political donors to fly him around the state and nation in fancy private jets to avoid the public record log for the perfectly nice plane provided by us dumb taxpayers. Easley’s flunkies also clued him into potentially lucrative real estate deals and landed a sinecure at NC State University for the Lady Easley that reeks of favoritism and cronyism.

The Raleigh News & Observer nailed Easley, forcing federal prosecutors to impanel a star chamber to get to the bottom of the governor’s shenanigans, treating the public to another spectacle of questionable ethical behavior by political blowhards. But sleaze has been trumped by the questionable and third-rate response by officials at NC State who cut the deal to hire Mary Easley at the request of the governor’s rent boy McQueen Campbell. While in office, Mike Easley arranged for Campbell to be elevated to chairman of the school’s board of trustees where Campbell, it appears, returned the favor by arranging for the school to hire the governor’s wife for $850,000 over five years.

NC State’s Chancellor James Oblinger praised Mary Easley’s appointment at the time and cleared it with UNC system President Erskine Bowles. All appeared above-board in their delusional world where insularity and the perceived power of their positions insulated them from reality — and from the wrath of the lowly taxpayer, more and more a pawn in a dark new age where political entities rule by fiat. But thanks to the N&O, and to new Governor Bev Perdue, who released documents the Easley gang hid from public view, a wrecking ball crashed through their oblivious smugness.