Andrew Young, John Edwards' "Butt Boy"

Not literally, but he was Edwards' most diligent and dedicated sycophant, at least according to this profile.

This falls into the category of "not important from a news perspective but kinda interesting and weird from a human perspective."

Worth reading in full. A deeply weird portrait, a cross between Dennis Finch from Just Shoot Me and the sycophantic psychopath Will Patton played in No Way Out.

And John and Elizabeth Edwards come off no better.

Young sometimes described himself as Edwards’s “special assistant” and dreamed of serving in an Edwards White House. Other aides, with a combination of disgust — and, perhaps, a bit of envy — referred to him as Edwards’s “personal servant,” or worse, Edwards’s “butt boy.” The relationship was so intense, at least on Young’s side, that it generated friction between him and Elizabeth Edwards....

“John was his idol — his hero — and probably who he considered his best friend and his mentor,” said Tim Toben, a former John Edwards supporter and friend of Young’s....

Young’s friends describe him simply as a “totally devoted” believer who was “taken advantage of,” in the words of one former staffer. Those close to both Young and Edwards describe the staffer’s passion in intensely emotional terms. Starting soon after Edwards was elected to the Senate in 1998, staffers began describing Young as intensely “jealous” of others who were close to the senator.
“He believed that Edwards was the next Kennedy,” said a person who was close to Young. “It’s not enough to say that he idolized the guy — there’s something deeper and weirder than that.”

...

Elizabeth Edwards, meanwhile, had been leaving messages on Young’s and Young’s wife’s voice mail, two sources say Young told them, demanding that he reassert his paternity to clear the cloud over her husband. The Youngs returned to Chapel Hill, and they heard that Elizabeth Edwards had been spreading the rumor that, among other things, Young had stolen her late son Wade’s baseball card collection, which he denied. The (New York) Daily News reported that she had been attacking Young’s character in pseudonymous blog comments.

...

Young’s friends say he decided to write a book only after he decided that the Edwards would never set the record straight and after he read Elizabeth Edwards’s description of him as a “pathetic,” grasping male mirror image of Hunter.

“They look at our lives, which from the outside, in particular, are pictures of joy and plenty, and they want it for themselves,” she wrote of Hunter and Young in “Resilience.”

...

And Young, with all the fury of a spurned lover, may be holding out yet another threat to his old idol, if it comes to that: an explicit videotape, two people who have seen it said, of Edwards and Hunter together.

“It’s his hole card,” said the source.

I don't buy the sex-tape crap, but assuming it's legit: Enjoy thinking about how Andrew Young came to have it. As in -- cameraman? John Edwards wouldn't be content with the crap angle provided by a stationary camera, after all.

Stuff I cut out: Elizabeth Edwards suspected, rightly, that Young had helped facilitate her husband's affair, and thus the constant disparagements. But at the same time she's lobbying this guy to keep claiming, absurdly, to be the father of the kid. While she slams him publicly. Not smart, Elizabeth.

Also cut out: Young did everything for Edwards -- well, lots of menial type stuff -- and Edwards kept denying him anything like the serious job he wanted.

It's this kind of stuff that really, really makes me want nothing at all to do with this bizarre world of politics.

Thanks to Larry.

Oh, By The Way, Allah? This is a Beta Male.

posted by Ace at 07:50 PM

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