Month: August 2008

A commenter at Kevin Drum responds:

A Jordanian chap named Abdullah
for favors is paying top dollah.
And who stands to gain?
A man named McCain.
So why won’t the press raise a hollah?’

And why should she lie about this? Her statement:

Our family has been through a lot. Some caused by nature, some caused by human weakness, and some – most recently – caused by the desire for sensationalism and profit without any regard for the human consequences.  None of these has been easy.  But we have stood with one another through them all.  Although John believes he should stand alone and take the consequences of his action now, when the door closes behind him, he has his family waiting for him.

John made a terrible mistake in 2006.

The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me. And we began a long and painful process in 2006, a process oddly made somewhat easier with my diagnosis in March of 2007.  This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well.  Because of a recent string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication, because of a picture falsely suggesting that John was spending time with a child it wrongly alleged he had fathered outside our marriage, our private matter could no longer be wholly private. 

The pain of the long journey since 2006 was about to be renewed. 

John has spoken in a long on-camera interview I hope you watch. Admitting one’s mistakes is a hard thing for anyone to do, and I am proud of the courage John showed by his honesty in the face of shame. The toll on our family of news helicopters over our house and reporters in our driveway is yet unknown.  But now the truth is out, and the repair work that began in 2006 will continue.  I ask that the public, who expressed concern about the harm John’s conduct has done to us, think also about the real harm that the present voyeurism does and give me and my family the privacy we need at this time.

Do women feel it the most?

They start in Athens where a joint is lit. It seems a good time to listen to Eddie Izzard – but the language is NSFW:

"I think this President has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen," – John Edwards, on Bill Clinton, 1999.

A reader reminds me of Shrum’s take:

Kerry talked with several potential picks, including Gephardt and Edwards. He was comfortable after his conversations with Gephardt, but even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he’d never told anyone else—that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he’d do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade’s ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before—and with the same preface, that he’d never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn’t pick Edwards unless he met with him again.

When they did, Kerry tried to get a better personal feel for his potential number two; as rivals for national office since 2000, shortly after Edwards had entered the Senate, the two men hadn’t spent a lot of time together. Kerry also wanted a specific reassurance. He asked Edwards for a commitment that if he was chosen and the ticket lost, Edwards wouldn’t run against him in 2008. Edwards agreed "absolutely," as Kerry recalled him saying. If Kerry had shared this at the time, I would have told him what I did later: it was naive to think he could rely on a promise like that.

A reader writes:

One of the readers who responded with some disgust at your "ageism" toward McCain suggested that Obama may be just as much of a risk because his mother died of cancer and the incidences of some cancers are dependent on genetics, whereas Momma McCain is alive and kicking, so maybe McCain will live to be 95.

1) I don’t think we have to worry about Obama dying from ovarian or uterine cancer, which is what killed his mother. Meanwhile, John McCain has had a deadly form of cancer already.

2) In any event, the age question, in this case at least, is not so much about mortality but ability and the brains of these two men. People in their seventies tend to have cognitive impairment. Cognitive impairment can be a big problem, especially if the sufferer is the leader of the freaking free world. Barack Obama is far less likely than McCain to suffer from cognitive impairment or senility. But to top it off, McCain really does exhibit signs of age-related cognitive impairment.

So, to sum up, McCain has had a deadly form of cancer, he is 71, and he does sometimes seem like a doddering, irrational, unpredictable person. Meanwhile, Obama is much younger, has not had cancer, and shows no signs of cognitive impairment. In terms of who we should worry about the most, health-wise, there’s simply no contest.

Yes, cheating on your wife is bad. Cheating on her when she’s been diagnosed with incurable cancer is just caddish. So maybe that’s why Edwards isn’t conceding he is the father:

Elizabeth Edwards was diagnosed with incurable cancer in late March of 2007. Rielle Hunter’s baby was born in late February of 2008. That means that if Edwards is the father, he was definitely still carrying on the affair with Hunter after he knew his wife’s cancer was back.

So when do we get the Maury Povich paternity test? And when will we hear from Rielle? It seems to me that she was obviously the source for much of the Enquirer’s reporting. Then there’s this strange detail: Edwards is insisting he didn’t love Rielle. That should keep her quiet, shouldn’t it?

If that was the goal of MSM reporters, it appears to have been misplaced. Edwards says he told his wife of the affair two years ago. Of course, putting her through the media spotlight is another matter. But still, the less you know … There is this pleasing wrinkle:

According to people close to the Edwardses, Elizabeth Edwards has secured a primetime speaking role at the Democratic National Convention; John Edwards, as of this point, does not, and people close to him think he will beg off and not attend the convention so as not to distract Obama. Obama aides would not say whether either Edwards is on the schedule.