How Come Sarah Palin's 17 Year Old Daughter is Fair Game for Pregnancy Jokes, But 50 Year Old Senator John Edwards and His 40-Something Year Old Babymama Aren't?

Why isn't the press asking John Edwards and Reille Hunter if they always practiced safe sex?

A bit of news on this front. First up, Elizabeth Edwards is borderline delusional, and by "borderline," I mean "fully."

"If you take that piece [my husband's longterm affair with the woman who'd replace me after I died of cancer, and his siring of an illegitimate daughter by her] out, I do have a perfect marriage." --Elizabeth Edwards on Oprah.

And except from head to toe, I am Gina Lollobrigida. (Yes, am feeling retro today.) Excuse me if I seem flippant, too, but I just watched a woman claiming to be Elizabeth Edwards tell Oprah and all of us out in TV Land that it's immaterial to her if her husband made a baby with his mistress, and the whole thing was kind of surreal. "Completely extraneous to my life,'' is how she put it.

Still, she slapped the nameless blond around pretty good. (Nameless because the one condition placed on the interview was that Rielle Hunter's name would not be spoken. The Voldemort clause, I guess. "This person,'' is what Elizabeth called her.) And of her husband, John Edwards? "No one's perfect,'' she said. That is one lucky son-of-a-mill-worker.

...

By default or design, Elizabeth is not really a member of the reality-based community. She has, by her own account, constructed her own preferred version of events. So of course she doesn't want to know if that's his baby: "Actually, there's not much reason for me – this is the part where you have to concentrate on your own life and this doesn't – whatever the facts are, it doesn't change my life in a sense.''

When Oprah remarks that hmm, she doesn't know a lot of men who would run off to a hotel somewhere in the middle of the night to hold a baby that wasn't theirs, she repeats her husband's lie – or maybe he'd repeated hers: "Golly, then you don't know that many politicians. We do it all the time. Holding babies is what we do.'' We, she said. We politicians do it all the time.

A little story about St. John, Patron Saint of Mill-Workers and Class Warriors:

Just a week or so before my interview, Elizabeth Edwards was honored at the Time 100 gala in New York (to celebrate the magazine’s annual roundup of the most influential people in the world), and my friend went over to her suite at the Regency hotel with a manicurist and a makeup artist to help her get ready. Midway through the process, John Edwards storms in, barely speaks and goes into another room. Five minutes later he comes back out, announces he needs the room and throws them all out in front of a speechless Elizabeth. Her hair had been done, but her makeup wasn’t finished and neither were her nails.

I can only imagine that at least part of such a scene had to do with the fact that the night’s event was about her and not him. This is a guy who lost his cool on the trail when someone had the temerity to interrupt his stock speech with a question; I saw him go ballistic on a heckler dressed like a giant waffle who had followed him and Kerry to a series of train stops. (Kerry, wisely, made a joke of the guy, while at one point Edwards – in a bit of after-the-fact irony – stuck his finger in the man’s face and shouted, “My wife and children are on this train, it’s time you showed them some respect.”)

And one last bit: Edwards' staffers said they would have sabotaged the campaign to prevent Edwards from gaining the nomination, had he ever threatened to win it.

True? Who knows. They sure kept quiet when they were on his payroll.

posted by Ace at 03:06 PM

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