Bloodthirsty Liberal

Ditto:

To get the obvious out of the way: I loathe John Edwards. I loathe him as a slick ambulance-chasing trial lawyer, as a preening poseur of a presidential candidate, as a multi-bazillionaire “advocate” for “the poor,” as a third-rate sob sister peddling faux-Dickensian guff about entirely mythical “coatless girls” lying in their beds shivering at night because their father was laid off at the mill. I loathe everything about him except his angled nape, which I must concede, having been pressed up against it in a campaign crush in New Hampshire, is a thing of beauty, and well worth every penny of whatever Rachel Mellon paid for it.

And that’s before we get to the affair, and the denial, followed by the admission of adultery but only while his wife’s cancer was in remission, and then the admission of non-remission adultery but certainly not leading to any love child, and finally the admission of a non-remission adulterous love child, and the realization that the sainted, stricken Elizabeth was less the victim than a co-strategist in the massive Edwardsian fraud that was his 2008 presidential campaign, and a full participating partner in an even creepier political marriage than the Clintons’.

Oh, and while we’re at it, I loathe the American media, whose peculiarly contemptible combination of partisanship, snobbery, and self-neutering of any basic journalistic instinct might easily have led (were it not for the candidacy of Barack Obama) to this preening metrosexual slug’s becoming president of the United States.

All that said, his trial is a disgrace.

…

Edwards now faces 30 years in jail, for the crime of getting a couple of pals to pay for his baby’s diapers.

…

As bad as Edwards’s behavior is, the Justice Department’s is worse. The urge to ensnare in legalisms every aspect of human existence — including John Edwards’s rutting — will consume American liberty.

‘Nuff said.

I’m not saying I didn’t look forward to having Bill Clinton back in the limelight, but in retrospect I have been disappointed.

Especially considering:

Andrew Young, once an aide and good friend to John Edwards, told a court today how the pair became increasingly paranoid in their attempt to cover up his affair with mistress Rielle Hunter and how it eventually destroyed their relationship after the two men turned on each other.

Taking the stand for the third time today, Young told how Edwards said life inside the North Carolina gated estate he shared with a cancer-stricken wife angered by his affair had become ‘a living hell.’

…

The August 2008 exchange, also recounted in Young’s tell-all book about the Edwards scandal, reads as if pulled from a political thriller.

Young has been involved in the saga from the beginning, as he initially tried to cover up Edwards’ involvement with Hunter by claiming paternity of the former senator’s love child because Edwards hoped to be named as vice-president to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.

That meant the child’s paternity needed to remain a secret but Edwards promised Young he would come forward once he dropped out of the 2008 race.

…

The once-loyal aide testified that he had, by this stage, grown sick of the cover up and urged Edwards to confess to the affair, otherwise he himself would make it public.

‘He looked at me and said, you can’t hurt me Andrew, you can’t hurt me,’ before running away from the car, Young testified.

Because Edwards was close to being named then presidential candidate Obama’s vice president, the most important job was to cover up the affair no matter what.

…

He is a key witness in Edwards’ criminal trial. The former senator is accused of conspiring to use secret payments from two wealthy donors to hide Hunter during his White House run. Edwards has pleaded not guilty to six counts related to campaign finance violations.

Edwards has denied knowing about the money and his attorneys claim that Andrew Young and his wife, Cheri, siphoned off the bulk of it to pay for the construction of their $1.5 million house near Chapel Hill.

Edwards’ attorneys will get a chance to cross examine Young later on Wednesday, a day after Young said the candidate once called his mistress a ‘crazy slut’ who others wouldn’t believe was having an affair with him.

And to think we could have watched this [bleep] storm play out in the West Wing!

Who am I trying to kid? The media would have stuck their pudgy little fingers in their ears and hummed tunelessly to ignore this story. This account is from a British newspaper because I couldn’t find it in my Boston Gob. Lord knows what—or whom—Bill Clinton is up to these days, as the compliant Democrat-media complex conveniently ignores his nocturnal commissions. But could they have ignored this? I think I know more about the sex life of Mitt Romney’s Mormon ancestors than I do about John Edwards’ and Bill Clinton’s wandering willies.

As frequent readers of this blog know, we don’t link to The National Enquirer. This is a first. This is worth it.

She defines the old saying: Don’t get mad; get even.

IN a devastating act of ultimate revenge, a dying Elizabeth Ed­wards recorded a bombshell secret videotape for prosecutors – nailing her cheating husband John as he will stand trial on charges that could land him behind bars for 30 years.

That’s the stunning secret behind the federal indictment brought against the disgraced former presidential candi­date on June 3 – following a two-year grand jury investigation into whether he illegally used campaign funds to cover up his affair with his then-pregnant mistress Rielle Hunter.

“Elizabeth wanted to exact revenge against John for destroy­ing their 33-year marriage and family by cheating with Rielle,” source close to the scandal told ENQUIRER.

“It was Elizabeth’s idea to secret­ly record a video and tell what knew of the affair and John’s horrific betrayal.”

Before her death in December 2010 at age 61, Elizabeth got newly engaged daughter Cate, 29, to agree that if anything happened to John, she would take care of the youngsters with the help of relatives and friends.

“It was then – without Cate’s knowledge – that Elizabeth turned the video camera on herself. She passed the video to a close friend and asked that it be sent to prosecutors,” said the source.

“On the secret video, Elizabeth spells out EVERYTHING she knew.

“Elizabeth wanted to haunt John and Rielle – literally from her grave – and she has”.

STBH (sucks to be him)

- Aggie

He used it to cover up an affair.

…

The investigation appears to have zeroed in on money from a 100-year-old campaign supporter and attempts to hide Edwards’ affair with a campaign staffer.

Former Edwards aide Andrew Young wrote in his tell-all book, “The Politician,” that heiress Rachel “Bunny” Mellon gave Edwards a total of $700,000 as a gift. The so-called “Bunny money” helped fund the cover-up of Edwards’ affair with video producer Rielle Hunter, who was pregnant with the former U.S. senator’s child.

Bunny Money! Gotta love it.

- Aggie

Like everyone else, we were sad to read of her death. But I had a nagging problem with the hagiographies written about her. But I didn’t want to write that, not on the day of her death. I wouldn’t have written anything at all had I not looked up the source of my doubts—her portrayal in Game Change, the story of the 2008 presidential campaign.

What I learned made her more human, less saintly, and her passing more personal to me:

Some of Elizabeth Edwards’s closest aides would like to respond to the relentlessly negative portrait of her that emerges from a new book on the 2008 campaign.

They say it’s all true.

But they would also like readers of the book to consider something else: If you had to go through what she did, how would you have acted?

Edwards, who has read “Game Change” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, takes issue with just one part of the book, which she remembers differently. If she did, in fact, threaten to cut off health insurance to her husband’s 2008 campaign staff if her family didn’t get it first, she told POLITICO through her allies, her behavior was “inexcusable. “

“She’d be the first to tell you she’s opinionated, blunt and difficult,” said Jennifer Palmieri, a confidante of Edwards who served as spokesman for John Edwards’s presidential campaign.

“No one would laugh more than her at the notion of ‘Saint Elizabeth.’”

By all accounts she was a brilliant lawyer; more so than her no-good husband. But she also relished her role as a mother—hence the two “litters” she and John had (two children born around 1980, two born around 2000).

Imagine the betrayal, then, that played out so publicly in 2008:

During the campaign and its aftermath, Edwards learned that she has incurable cancer, while confronting the reality of an unfaithful and lying husband, a broken marriage and a child borne by her husband’s mistress. The string of psychological blows was so enormous it wasn’t until just recently that Edwards could finally absorb and accept them all, according to these friends.

“I would hate to be judged by how I would respond during that time under similar circumstances,” said John Moylan, the campaign’s South Carolina state director. “Elizabeth is a real person. It’s a mistake to miss that on either end of the spectrum.”

The shattered image of Elizabeth Edwards is one of the most revelatory parts of “Game Change,” and the passages are among the most difficult to read: Seething through the telephone as she tells a long-time aide he’s dead to her; haranguing her husband in cars, hotel rooms and in an airport parking lot where, incoherent and inconsolable, she tears open her blouse to expose the effects of her cancer and screams, “Look at me!”

…

“I think, sadly, the gist of what they describe is what happened. But I don’t know that they set out to portray this as the sum total of her,” said Palmieri.

…

“The real Elizabeth is both sides of the person people know. She’s intelligent, warm and incredibly thoughtful,” said Jentleson, who remembers that during the 2004 campaign, she spontaneously offered him the family’s kitchen table after learning he’d moved into his first apartment.

“But she’s the first to admit that she’s opinionated and she has a temper. Those of us who have known her for a long time experienced both of those. If you only saw the good stuff, the bad stuff is shocking,” he added.

…

Andrea Purse, a press aide, was among those who stayed through the bitter end, largely because of her loyalty to Elizabeth Edwards.

“The reason people on the road loved her was because she’s so honest and she doesn’t watch every word,” she said. “If maybe that led her, in a tough situation, to become emotional, well, that’s why her friends love her. She is who she is, and she doesn’t make apologies for feeling things.”

I don’t know any saints, so the passing of one doesn’t move me much. Anyway, if they’re true saints, they’re going to a better place.

But I know people who’ve had cancer, and I know people who’ve died from it, and I know women betrayed by a**holic men.

She suffered all that in the pages of the National Enquirer, and understandably lashed out on occasions. Like a human being raging at they dying of the light. So I am truly sorry for her death.

Sorry, dudes, but what part of Haiti don’t you understand?

Hundreds of displaced families live perilously in a single file of flimsy shanties planted along the median strip of a heavily congested coastal road here called the Route des Rails.

Vehicles rumble by day and night, blaring horns, kicking up dust and belching exhaust. Residents try to protect themselves by positioning tires as bumpers in front of their shacks but cars still hit, injure and sometimes kill them. Rarely does anybody stop to offer help, and Judith Guillaume, 23, often wonders why.

“Don’t they have a heart, or a suggestion?” asked Ms. Guillaume, who covers her children’s noses with her floral skirt when the diesel fumes get especially strong.

A suggestion? Get out.

Six months after the earthquake that brought aid and attention here from around the world, the median-strip camp blends into the often numbing wretchedness of the post-disaster landscape. Only 28,000 of the 1.5 million Haitians displaced by the earthquake have moved into new homes, and the Port-au-Prince area remains a tableau of life in the ruins.

…

But the government of Haiti has been slow to make the difficult decisions needed to move from a state of emergency into a period of recovery. Weak before the disaster and further weakened by it, the government has been overwhelmed by the logistical complexities of issues like debris removal and the identification of safe relocation sites.

…

Since early May, President René Préval has personally focused, in granular detail, on returning about 11,600 Haitians camped in front of the National Palace to the Fort National neighborhood. But while Fort National is now a beehive of cleanup activity, no transitional shelters have been erected there yet.

In contrast, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, working directly with a hands-on mayor in the Carrefour municipality in metropolitan Port-au-Prince, has already moved more than 500 families from its large tent city into simple pine houses whose concrete foundations incorporate recycled debris.

The contrast couldn’t be clearer: the church has already put hundreds of families into homes; the government hasn’t put one. It reminds me of the early days after Katrina.

It’s so hard to blame the victim here—especially so many victims, and so miserable—but this is what Haiti is.

What passes for government in Haiti has never seen to the goodwill of its people. Why should it start now?

The big heart of the United States responded as it usually does, with millions of dollars and materiel and personnel—and uncountable additional aid from private donations.

But it also responded with the lesser angels of its nature:

Edwards is refusing to follow in the tradition of other disgraced figures like Tiger Woods and Eliot Spitzer, who initially kept low profiles after they were publicly humiliated. On the contrary, since January… there have been frequent Edwards sightings around Durham. On a given night, he might pop up at The Federal, a dimly lit Durham dive bar, or The Wooden Nickel, a bar in nearby Hillsborough that features “Club 69”—an honor bestowed on patrons who consume at least one drink from every bottle behind the bar. (“Club 69” members have their portraits engraved on hand-carved wooden plaques lining the wall.)

Sherman finds unflattering moments even in Edwards’s Haiti relief trip. He describes one cocktail party in which Edwards “regaled the group with tales from his trip to Haiti, talked about his newfound bachelorhood, and joked about how young women flirt with him.” Another scene has Edwards at a prom-themed party “dancing to everything from salsa to Wreckx-n-Effect’s 1992 rap hit ‘Rump Shaker.’”

Aside to JE: “Me love you long time” is not a flirtation, it’s a marriage proposal.

But that explains a lot. There’s a lot of rump in Haiti, and some of it’s still shaking.

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.