As the trial starts, get ready for a lot of talk about John Edwards:

CBS News) With opening arguments in the trial of former U.S. senator and presidential candidate John Edwards set to begin on on Monday, a CBS News/New York Times poll shows that public opinion of him has plummeted since he was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2007. Now, he is now most known for cheating on his wife.

The CBS/NYT poll reveals that only 3 percent of those polled hold a favorable view of Edwards, who has been charged with misusing campaign funds. That is down from 30 percent in 2007 when he was running for the Democratic nomination, which is also the last time the question was asked among registered voters.

Since 2007, Edwards’ unfavorable ratings have risen eleven points, from 30 percent to 41 percent today. However, half of those polled are undecided or don’t have an opinion of Edwards.

What Edwards did to his wife was horrible, but not unprecedented. There is still a candidate in the GOP primary who cheated on a wife while she was going battling cancer:

When Newt’s first wife Jackie was still in the hospital recovering from her third cancer surgery, Newt came to her bed and — by his own admission — “argued” with her over the terms of the divorce that he wanted (and she didn’t). Newt also graciously told one of his aides that “She isn’t young enough or pretty enough to be the President’s wife. And besides, she has cancer.” Later it emerged that he had been having an affair with a younger woman, Marianne. But his second marriage — to Marianne — wasn’t much smoother either. In fact it was very similar. After Marianne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Newt told her about an affair with a younger woman, Callista, that he had been having for six years. She says that Newt didn’t ask for divorce this time — he asked her to have an “open marriage” where he could also sleep with Callista. Marianne refused, and they divorced.

Then we also had all the ethics problems with Newt as Speaker of the House, some which may have become legal issues if not for his position in the government.

But we live in the IOKIYAR society, where the party that preaches the higher moral standard gets away with taking the lower moral road. When Eliot Spitzer was busted paying for high priced call girls, he was forced out of office. David Vitter, a Republican Senator from Louisiana has been implicated in a very similar scandal, yet he continues to serve. Not only that, but when CNN hired Spitzer to host a show, Republicans screamed about it.

The list goes on…

There are morally corrupt and criminals in every party, yet it seems that the left is by far receives more public scrutiny than the right. Mark Foley was a Republican Congressman engaging in sexual conversation with minors under the care of the House. He even had to be escorted away from the dorm of the Pages by security one night. Yet that was not as bad as Anthony Weiner sending a picture of his man parts to a girl of legal age on the internet.

Double standards? Yeah – there are tons of them!