Monday, August 11, 2008

Small Lies and Big Lies, Part 2

The Edwards affair saga continues to get 24/7 media coverage now that everyone is openly talking about it following ABC News confirming what the National Enquirer had been reporting for months.

John Edwards apparently lied about when he started having his affair with Rielle Hunter, which once again throws off his carefully crafted timeline. Friends of Rielle say that the affair started well before the Edwards campaign hired her. I still don't get how Elizabeth can stand to be in the same room with him, but she's busy crafting lies of her own.

USA Today says that we deserve the 100% truth and they don't accept Edwards' current spin on his affair with Hunter.
As lies and half truths tend to do, Edwards' words, and these circumstances, beg follow-up questions too numerous to list here.

Edwards had dismissed the Enquirer stories as "tabloid trash," but his denials ended Friday, when he issued his mea culpa in an interview with ABC News and a written statement. It was timed — coincidentally, we're sure — to coincide with the opening of the Beijing Olympics. Edwards said that he told his wife, Elizabeth, about what he says was a brief affair in 2006, and that the timing of the pregnancy meant he was not the father. Yet Elizabeth, who is battling an incurable form of cancer, was apparently unaware of Edwards' recent visit to Hunter, an incident detailed in the Enquirer. The latest twist — that Hunter won't submit the child to a paternity test — won't help put this story to rest. Maury Povich's show couldn't top this.

Politicians having affairs and thinking they are untouchable is nothing new, of course. A sinners gallery includes former presidents John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston, presidential candidate Gary Hart, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer. To name just a few.

Yet Edwards' transgression — indeed, his excuse — would test the patience of his most ardent supporter: I did it, but only while my wife's cancer was in remission. This suggests that the one-time rising star of the Democratic Party has not yet made contact with human reality and believes he can dissemble his way out of this, à la Bill Clinton.

The decent option is to tell the public the whole truth, without lawyerly equivocations. Then he has the difficult task of healing his family. He should recall his own wisdom in 1999, when with great clarity he described Clinton's affair as "breathtaking" for its "remarkable disrespect … for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter."
That's what makes Edwards seem so smarmy here. It's not that he had an affair - lots of politicians have done that. Presidents have had them.

It's the circumstances behind the affair and what he claims happened that has his lies tied into knots. He wants people to believe that he had an affair, but only while Elizabeth's cancer was in remission. The moment it came back, he broke things off with Rielle.

Once again, it makes no sense why he would claim that he broke it off, admitted the affair to Elizabeth, and then had to slink into the Beverly Hilton on apparently two occasions to see Rielle and ostensibly her (their?) baby.

The moment he admits that he was continuing his affair with Rielle while Elizabeth's cancer was no longer in remission will destroy every last scintilla of respect anyone has for the guy and would make him radioactive politically. There are some places that even politicians wont go.

That's why he's pushing this meme that he broke off the affair specifically before Elizabeth's cancer came back. He wants to maintain the possibility of salvaging a political future. What I don't get is why Elizabeth would go along with this. Her statement on John's affair doesn't push for him to get a paternity test to clear his name.

It's a most curious omission from her defense of her husband, which when taken with the fact that Rielle's lawyer refused to state that the reason she wouldn't call for a paternity test was because she knew the father to be Edwards' former staffer, Andrew Young.

And if you think that the media coverage of the Edwards affair wasn't news or didn't have an effect on the Democratic party nomination process, know that if the media had done its due diligence and discovered that Edwards was cheating on his wife when her cancer returned, it would have killed his campaign, and given Hillary a serious boost to the point that we'd be talking not about Obama's ascendancy, but about Hillary's historic nomination.

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