Who’s Her Daddy?

Okay, enough with all this healthcare trivia. Let's turn to something really important, like John Edwards and Rielle Hunter's baby girl. Howard Kurtz has the goods.

I'm not betting against the National Enquirer.

If the supermarket tabloid says there's medical evidence that John Edwards fathered the baby he denies is his, I assume it's true.

After all, the Enquirer not only broke the Rielle Hunter story, it's been right every step of the way.

Who, you might ask, really cares at this point? Edwards is washed up politically, and most people assumed the 18-month-old girl is probably his kid.

But it seems to me that the man who put himself forth for last year's Democratic presidential nomination -- and who could have been vice president if Sen. John F. Kerry had won Ohio in 2004 -- has now lied twice. First he denied the affair with his former campaign videographer. Then he acknowledged it in a "Nightline" interview but said the baby wasn't his.

There are a lot of sex scandals bedeviling both parties and arising in a lot of different parts of the country. As Kurtz notes, this one is rather special. Edwards came within a few counties of being a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. He is a major league scoundrel, and a shameless liar.

He had an affair with Rielle Hunter while his wife was being treated for cancer. He lied about it publically and lied again about being the father of Hunter's child. But best of all, in my view, he briefly persuaded a loyal if somewhat confused campaign aid, one Andrew Young, to falsely claim paternity. Edwards is a piece of work.

But the real scandal here is that we learned about this only through the dogged journalism of the National Enquirer. Now I like to think of myself as an inquiring mind that wants to know, as the Enquirer's slogan used to go. I don't think I ever purchased as issue, but I have always surveyed the cover as I piled bundles of celery and boxes of Raisin Brand onto the supermarket conveyer belts. It's nice to know when a four year old girl gives birth to a two-headed Elvis clone. Occasionally I have even picked it up and turned to an article. Once I learned that 12 U.S. Senators were space aliens. I correctly predicted eleven of them in advance.

Were it not for the Enquirer, we might never have known just how utterly appalling Edwards really is. You might have thought that the New York Times would be interested. After all, in February of the last election year, the Times ran a major article hinting at an affair between John McCain and a lobbyist. The article consisted entirely of innuendo, unsupported by a single piece of evidence. Surely the hint of scandal in the Edwards camp, first reported by the Enquirer in October, 2007, was beneath the Times' exacting standards.

The NYTs and the rest of the mainstream press circled the wagons around Edwards. As long as he was remotely credible as nominee, he enjoyed protection. Fortunately the inquiring minds at the Enquirer kept at it, and now we learn that Edwards is about to confess paternity. Edwards is toast. But this episode should be deeply embarrassing to the American Press.

Comments

[FascistSocialist]

A few things... You seem to care about infidelity to one's wife. That's fine, but for me it seems to be more of a personal thing, not necessarily reflective of a person's character and probably not a huge influence on their policy positions. People get divorced and have bad relationships all the time that they seek comfort from in the arms of another person. Some gay people are wed with families and are completely sexually unfulfilled. There are a lot of reasons that can drive someone to be sexually unfaithful in a marriage. Who are we to judge the validity of someone's emotions and traumas?

Honesty is important too, so when the inquiring minds start to inquire, one might hope that the truth would be forthcoming, but in matters of love and such people don't always act rationally, or might even prefer to keep their personal issues personal.

That being said, there are a couple circumstances in which extra-marital affairs peak my interest. When fidelity in marriage is a campaign issue, when "sanctity" becomes a policy priority of government (which I find silly, since when does government have anything to do with sanctifying anything?), and when a person vilifies homosexuality and then acts contrary to their policy viewpoints that hypocrisy is particularly satisfying and poignant.

[A.I.]

Decent enough post I suppose, but a lot of trouble to go to just to take a shot at the NYT's. Would it not be easier and more to the point to criticize them for the no-fact-check Judith Miller, stenographer to Scooter and Dick fiasco?

[KB]

FS: I think you mean that infidelity only counts against conservatives. Maybe so, but I think that this attitude has done a lot of damage to your own side. Imagine what Bill Clinton might have been able to accomplish in his second term if he hadn't spent so much time negotiating his own lies. Moreover, John Edwards did use his family as part of his campaign image, including his wife's health problems.

Like most Americans, I do think that a line should be drawn between public and private worlds. But imagine that you were considering whether to hire someone who would be responsible for your money and a lot of other people's money. Imagine that some of them are orphans. Now you find out that this guy has been funneling money from his last job to pay for his mistress's apartment, and her silence. Do his opinions on gay marriage really matter to the decision?

A.I.: The NYTs is the most famous American newspaper. The McCain piece was pure yellow journalism. That matters. The double standard matters. And it wasn't just the Times. Virtually every important newspaper ignored the story, even when the evidence started piling up. This guy might have been president. So, yeah, I think it was worth a blog.

[FascistSocialist]

I think you missed my point which was that I think the worst part of most of these situations is the hypocrisy. Like Larry Craig who "supported the Federal Marriage Amendment, which barred extension of rights to same-sex couples; he voted for cloture on the amendment in both 2004 and 2006, and was a cosponsor in 2008." "Craig voted against cloture in 2002, which would have extended the federal definition of hate crimes to cover sexual orientation. This legislation was passed in 2007 in both the House and the Senate as the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007. Craig voted against the measure." But himself was either gay or bi-sexual as he was picked up in Minneapolis for hitting on a man in a bathroom stall.

Or any of the "defense of marriage as an institution" folks who are so vitriolic in their defense of the "institution of marriage" then shit all over it by destroying their families with extra-marital affairs.

I don't care about what Bill Clinton did or didn't do in office and it was stupid as hell to investigate him in the first place. It was also stupid as hell for him to lie about it under oath. He should have fessed up and moved on. Same with Edwards. Lying about it makes it worse, even if it's a natural reaction... but once you're caught, you're caught... give it up.

My point basically was this: who cares if bill clinton cheats? he never got sanctimonious about defending marriage as a sacred whatever the hell. That's his own deal. [[talking exclusively about the cheating not the lying etc.]] Larry Craig trying to get jiggy with a dude in an airport bathroom is something no one should care about, except that the man categorically hates gay people. It's really sad for him as a human being for one of two reasons: he either hates himself for being gay, or he doesn't really hate gay people he just acts that way publicly for political reasons. Either way it pretty much makes him a monster.

[james]

this is amazing article, there is a similar article on the website www.whooopsamerica.com about john edwards and his baby... it's a shame that this is what is happening to our once valued political leaders

[KB]

FS: Either you are going to separate private behavior from public action and positions, or not. Hypocrisy is relevant only if private conduct is relevant. If it doesn't matter what Bill Clinton did in the Oval Office when the cameras were not turned on, then it doesn't matter what Larry Craig did in the airport bathroom. You want it to matter only for the other side.