Bloodthirsty Liberal

I should have known that by the time the John Edwards story began to make even my stomach curdle, it was ready for its close-up (after hair and make-up, of course):

Back before they realized John was knocking up videographers while his wife lay dying, Edwards’ staff worried that his beverage choices were too girly:

He had very weird soda preferences. For the longest time it was all Sprite Zero. And then at one point the word came down that he would no longer drink Sprite Zero. He would only drink Diet Orange Sunkist. And Diet Orange Sunkist can be very difficult to find on short notice. It had to be in cans. It could not be in bottles. We’d pick him up at the airport you’d have to have a cooler of that and white wine on ice.

Whoever plays Edwards has to have the hair, above all else. Costner would need augmentation in that department (but not others, so we hear!), and Clooney doesn’t reek of white trash.

The late John Ritter is a dead ringer for Edwards…:

But also just plain dead.

Ed Norton might be right…

No, look over there—to the right. The dude. Oh, for pete’s sake, men are such pigs:

There, see the resemblance?

And we know he can play debased and deranged:

Anyway, where were we?

We all bought the spin. Until the pregnancy stuff surfaced, it wasn’t that crazy a story, just a report that he had an affair with a videographer. But when the other layers came out—the child, and the timing with Elizabeth’s cancer—it became more monstrous.

…

Listerine heiress and Jackie Onassis bosom buddy Bunny Mellon’s “Bunny money” also played a role:

Everybody knew about the Bunny money, though not that it was part of that [the sex scandal]. Everybody knew ‘Bunny money’ as this rich heiress who thought [Edwards] was the reincarnation of Robert Kennedy. You sort of pieced it together by working backwards: You hear the story about Rielle living in a house, and you know she doesn’t have an income. You know that Fred [Baron] has a billion dollars, and you know Fred would do anything for John.

That’s when I knew it had to be a movie: when the loaded dowager (played by Joanne Woodward? Shirley MacLaine? Betty White?) believed Edwards to be the second coming of RFK. And why not? Another cut-throat with nice hair and a long trail of mistresses in his past—Edwards could play him in a movie.

I see the picture opening up with panning shot of devastation and ruin: Haiti after the quake. We hear moans from the dying and cries of children lost and frightened. Violins play a dirge of heartbreaking poignancy, its march-like rhythm matching the stride of a determined man. Just then, the pan reaches the beach, and one man is shown walking seemingly from nowhere out of the surf. He is there to help. He is there to make it better. He is there to sue.

Asked about Edwards’ recent camera-friendly trip to Haiti, the staffer comes as close to rolling his eyes as one can by telephone:

I think there is less than zero chance of him ever having a public career again. And I am absolutely positive that he will try. He’s addicted to it. He needs attention. … He was the kind of guy who’d been told all his life he was the golden child. I think that’s what Rielle tapped into. She told him he was the golden child, and I think he liked to believe that.

…

The guy needs professional help. There’s a big-ass screw loose in that guy’s head, and unless he gets professional help, it’s going to stay loose.

And there’s your working title: Big-Ass Screw Loose.

The New York Times? Are you kidding me? USA Today? Is that supposed to be funny?

There’s only one publication to turn to when you want unvarnished truth (and the latest on Brad and Angelina’s sex life—which is the same thing, really):

No sooner than John Edwards admits paternity to the world, and jets off to Haiti presumably for penance to aid the victims of disaster with no cameras (Hello, CBS - what ARE you doing here?) then he gets into a row with baby mamma Rielle Hunter over the health care of their daughter Frances Quinn.

Historically, (look it up) John Edwards was a huge proponent for health care coverage for all Americans when he was running for president.

But the disgraced former candidate recently balked at paying a $5,000 dental bill for his love child daughter, who is uninsured, say sources.

Edwards’ mistress Rielle Hunter took their daughter Frances - who turns 2 in February - to a dental specialist in Charlotte, N.C., in late December because the child had developed tooth decay.

“Rielle can’t believe that she had to have her lawyers fight with John’s attorneys to get this taken care of,” said the source.

“Frances is doing fine now, but Rielle is still fuming mad that their daughter has no insurance and that she had to beg John to foot the dental bill.”

Edwards made health care a big part of his campaign when he was running for the White House, before The ENQUIRER exposed his extramarital affair.

Take your typical WaPo dispatch or NYT monotone, and see if it matches that lively writing style. You can’t make it past the first sentence.

In other news:

Nicole Richie has gone on a crusade - a health crusade!

She’s vowed to boost the health of two of her closest friends - actress Mischa Barton and celeb stylist Rachel Zoe.

The health-conscious reality star - who has overcome her own eating disorder and drug problems - is encouraging pudgy Mischa, 24, to lose weight and Rachel to add 15 much-needed pounds.

Finally! Health care, terrorism, the economy—and not one word spoken in the nation’s village square about what’s happened to Mischa Barton!

I ask you:

I’m not a nutritionist like Nicole Ritchie, but weight doesn’t seem to be her biggest problem. How about a little positive reinforcement, Nikki? She looks like she could use it.

PS: Let’s try that experiment.

NYT:

Advocates of more aggressive steps to address the national debt failed Tuesday in their effort to create a bipartisan commission to press for tax increases and spending cuts, but President Obama now plans to establish a similar panel by executive order in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.

The proposal for a commission died when its supporters could not muster enough votes in the Senate to push it ahead, reflecting unwillingness among many Republicans to back any move toward tax increases and objections among Democrats to the prospect of deep spending cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.

Okay, it could be worse, I guess.

Like this:

When President Obama appears before Congress and the nation on Wednesday night to deliver his State of the Union speech, his goals will be to reset his agenda, assure his demoralized party that he has not given up on key priorities and try to convince a skeptical public that he can still change Washington.

After which, he will walk across the Potomac (or will he merely part its waters? tune in to find out!) and heal the wounded at Walter Read.

Some of you may recall my use of pictures of hot babes to illustrate a point. Olivia Wilde, Jessica Alba, Kate Beckinsale are common eye candy here.

Move over, girls. We got a new babe:

I guess that should read a new “baby”:

Confirming what practically everyone already suspected, John Edwards confessed Thursday he fathered the baby born to his ex-mistress — an admission that came just ahead of a bombshell book by a top aide to the former Democratic presidential candidate.

Edwards had long denied the girl, Frances Quinn Hunter, was his, even after he admitted cheating on his wife with the child’s mother, Rielle Hunter. Hunter had been hired before Edwards’ 2008 White House campaign to shoot behind-the-scenes video of him.

“I am Quinn’s father,” the 56-year-old former North Carolina senator said in a statement. “It was wrong for me ever to deny she was my daughter and hopefully one day, when she understands, she will forgive me.”

The confession came ahead of the Feb. 2 release of a book by former Edwards aide Andrew Young that is expected to describe how Edwards worked to hide his paternity with Young’s help.

…

“Get a doctor to fake the DNA results,” Young quoted the candidate as saying. “And he asked me … to steal a diaper from the baby so he could secretly do a DNA test to find out if this (was) indeed his child.”

I hope for her sake she forgives him. It’s hard to carry around the amount of hate and contempt he deserves (and has fully earned) for one’s whole life.

Others are less forgiving:

Praise rolls in from across the world and the blogosphere from media outlets lauding The ENQUIRER’s vindication of its historic and exhaustive investigation into The John Edwards Affair.

Top Media pundit Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post Tweeted:
Score: National Enquirer 2, John Edwards 0.

As ev knew, Edwards lied twice, about affair and then the baby. Monumentally dumb
What about the idiotic Edwards pal who claimed he was the dad? He gets a book deal!

Paul Wachter, Sphere.com writes: Biggest Edwards Shocker: Enquirer Was Right!

From Gawker.com: A Pulitzer Prize for the National Enquirer?

“It’s not the first time this has been suggested. But, on the morning that John Edwards completely vindicates their reporting, and makes the outlets too squeamish to follow it up look silly, we’d like to re-state the case.

What’s a philandering, lying, deceiving, moussing, Democratic son of a bitch to do when his world crumbles before him?

Join others whose world has crumbled:

Even if you give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’s there because he wants to be there, not because he’s simply looking to rehab his image, why wouldn’t he wait until he’s back in the country to affirm paternity of his kid? Putting out that statement today while he’s in the ‘quake zone chatting up cameramen makes him look even greasier than before, which is almost unimaginable at this point.

Unimaginable? Not really. BTW, good to see the US armed forces included plenty of hair product among their relief supplies. A little highlighter wouldn’t go amiss.

I write this not just to micturate all over John Edwards’ political career (though I really did have to go), but to remind readers exactly how corrupt, how venal, how low-down and loathsome the mainstream media is. They should all hope some day to be as honest (and correct!) as the National Enquirer. I’d believe Maury Povich over David Gregory any day.

To think that the coverage of the unfaithful Republican Governor of South Carolina (who should resign for using state resources to carry on his extra-marital affair) got more coverage than this Democratic former VP candidate (who but for a fluke of history in 2000 might have just completed his first term as President) and strong contender for the top job, who denied paternity to a little girl, hid in a janitor’s closet when cornered by a reporter, betrayed his cancer-ravaged wife, and lied and lied and lied and lied and lied (and gelled and gelled and gelled, etc.) is proof not that the independent press is dying, but that it is already as dead and stiff as some of those heartbreaking Haitians Edwards is seeking to exploit.

Later, I’ll tell you how I really feel.

Are you my daddy?

A man who once claimed to have fathered the child of John Edwards’ mistress says in a book proposal the former presidential candidate is the real father and that Edwards and worked with his campaign finance chairman to hide that secret, according to a newspaper report published online Saturday.

The New York Times said the book proposal by former Edwards aide Andrew Young states he helped facilitate the affair between Edwards and Rielle Hunter. According to the newspaper, Young wrote that Edwards once told Hunter they would wed after Edwards’ wife, who has cancer, died.

Edwards told Hunter that the ceremony would be held on a rooftop in New York and the Dave Matthews Bands would make an appearance, the newspaper said, citing its examination of the book proposal.

Your humble correspondent is flummoxed. What is the lowest depth? I thought Idi Amin or Jimmy Carter had plumbed the deepest recesses of the human soul, but Prell-man has plummeted past them straight into the ninth circle of Hell.

We’re all adults. So I ask which is worse, denying your own child, or planning your next wedding while your current wife is dying of cancer?

Discuss.

Not a site I frequent too often, but maybe that should change (from John Edwards to a naked Jessica Biel in one click—awesome!):

Once again, the National Enquirer is way out ahead of the “real” media on the John Edwards story. One month ago today, the Enquirer reported that Edwards is under federal investigation for allegedly paying off his mistress and babymama Rielle Hunter with campaign funds. Now the Associated Press is confirming it:

Failed presidential candidate John Edwards, whose political action committee paid more than $100,000 to his mistress’ company, acknowledged Sunday that federal investigators were looking into how he handled his campaign funds…

…

His political action committee paid Hunter’s firm $100,000 for video production in a four-month span in 2006, and then paid an additional $14,086.50 on April 1, 2007. At the time, the PAC only had $7,932.95 in cash on hand, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission.

That same day, according to the records, Edwards’ presidential campaign paid the PAC $14,034.61 for what is listed as a “furniture purchase.”

Ouch! I’m sure Rielle is thrilled that she got paid for being a piece of furniture. Well, technically it’s true. He did spend a lot of time on top of her. He almost certainly must have left some stains.

And when he went away, he didn’t take her with him.

Hey, before you complain, I clicked to this from HotAir. But who would complain? This is priceless material.

John Edwards’ political career lies cold in a shallow grave, where it belongs, but it’s worth remembering how close a man like this came to the executive branch of the the government:

After the former presidential hopeful confessed his betrayal, Elizabeth Edwards writes in her new book, “I cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up.”

Elizabeth, 59, who is terminally ill with cancer, speaks in far more detail than before about her husband’s infidelity in her new memoir, “Resilience,” due to be published May 12 by Broadway Books.

…

But she had actually wanted him to quit the race to protect the family. Edwards admitted the hanky-panky to her days after declaring his candidacy in 2006 - almost a year before the National Enquirer reported it.

She was afraid of the destructive questions Edwards’ affair with videographer Rielle Hunter would raise.

Later events proved her right. “He should not have run,” she says.

…

Even when Edwards confessed to his wife, he lied, claiming he had slipped up just once, Elizabeth writes. His original version of the story “left most of the truth out,” she writes.

So he lied when he confessed to her, yet still put her through the humiliation of the inevitable discovery of the affair—even after her diagnosis of terminal cancer.

And I know people who cried when this became public because they knew his career was over. We should have prayed, in gratitude.

Don’t bother calling me after May 12th:

You’d think after the chaos last year surrounding former Senator John Edwards’ personal life, his wife, Elizabeth, would not be looking for more publicity — or inviting questions.

But on May 12th, Broadway Books, a division of Random House, is releasing a new short memoir by Elizabeth called “Resilience,” a follow up to her best selling “Saving Graces.”

Edwards insiders are wondering if “Resilience” will be a tell-all, tell-some, tell-none, or an exercise in denial. The Broadway Books catalog says Edwards has written “an unsentimental and ultimately inspirational meditation on the gifts we can find among life’s biggest challenges.”

The publication of “Resilience” may not prove so inspirational to one reader, however: Rielle Hunter, the woman who gave birth last year to a baby girl whom many speculate was fathered by Edwards. Hunter has privately told friends that the child is Edwards’. Sources say the resemblance is as good as a paternity test.

Kid has a lot of hair, huh?

I recall the genuine sadness people expressed when they learned the sad truth of John Edwards. But they quickly fell in love all over again with Barack Obama.

Haven’t we all learned, however, that love on the rebound rarely ends well?

CNN didn’t really write this, did they?

Can John Edwards mount a comeback?

I’ll refrain from comment: it’s too easy.

I assume that everyone knows that the tabloids had the story of John Edwards and his affair with a videographer, Rielle Somebody, whose real name is Jane Smith or something close (my apologies to all the Jane Smiths out there.) They had a baby together. For a year the MSM declined to comment because… well, they said it was because they couldn’t trust the source, but we all know that it was because he is a Democrat. The tortured explanation offered by the ombud at the NY Times is one of the greatest pieces of media hypocrisy in recent memory.

Now, within hours of John McCain introducing his VP pick, Sarah Palin, some lefty bloggers started a truly gross rumor that her baby, Trig, you know… the one with Down Syndrome… was actually her daughter’s baby and that Palin had covered for her daughter by pretending to be pregnant. How long did it take for this to appear in the MSM? Two hours? Three?

If you think about those two stories, you will know everything that you ever need to know about “journalistic ethics”.

- Aggie

The Democrats are the Palestinians of American politics: faction-ridden and always blowing up (and some of them none too kind to Jews). Next victim, Elizabeth Edwards:

It seems an odd way to treat a woman with incurable cancer wronged by a cheating husband, the latest in a series of deep hardships in life that includes the death of a teenage son.

But some former followers have questioned the recklessness of keeping the affair under wraps even though her husband — a former U.S. senator, two-time presidential candidate and the 2004 vice presidential nominee — said he confessed the affair in 2006, before the campaign began in earnest the next year.

“I think she’s complicit,” said Brad Crone, a Raleigh-based Democratic consultant. “Obviously, she knew. While she’s the victim, she clearly didn’t stand in the way of the cover-up.”

…

In a post on the liberal blog Daily Kos, where Edwards has her own diary, she pleaded for privacy and later seemed to explain why she stuck by her spouse and his presidential ambitions.

“An imperfect man with a truly progressive vision who spoke to and for those whom others ignored? Yes, that is who I supported,” she wrote. “An imperfect man who had come to face his own imperfections and was seeking to redeem himself to those closest to him? Yes, that is who I supported.”

Some responded to the affair with words of kindness, while others angrily suggested that keeping the secret was no less a sin that the one committed by her philandering husband.

“She knew president with this bomb waiting to go off. She did. She kinda loses my sympathy,” wrote one poster.

“I believe we are all owed a huge apology, not self-serving claims for pity by both John and Elizabeth Edwards, who both knew about the affair and both decided to go forward and seek the Democratic candidacy, regardless of the Titanic risk,” wrote another.

…

Elizabeth Edwards … explained why she stayed silent after her husband told her of the affair: “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.”

Works for me.

Look, John Edwards had no business running for president after the affair. None. What if he had won the nomination before the news had become known? What if he had been selected as VP? Single-handedly, he would have crashed and burned the Democrats’ chances for the next eight years (likely). And the left-wing crackpots are blaming the humiliated wife with incurable cancer? Who buried her son?

Somebody should have made sure John Edwards didn’t run, and maybe that someone was her. But to blame her in the cover-up of her husband’s shameless affair—wow, you people are the Usain Bolts of despicableness, taking the record lower every day.