Speaking to the Truth

Maureen Dowd plunges another dagger into the heart of the matter with her latest NY Times op-ed:

I had dinner once with John and Elizabeth Edwards, when he first burst onto the national scene.

Looking across the booth at her grinning, boyish husband, she told me that it was irritating to be married to someone so comely who looked so much younger.

She was smiling, but she was telling the truth. The Edwardses reminded me of the Quayles — smooth, pretty boys married to tough, smart women they’d met at law school.

Elizabeth Edwards would have made a wonderful candidate herself. But she poured everything into John. And then John betrayed her. And then John betrayed his staffers, going ahead with the 2008 campaign, letting his disciples work around the clock because they believed in him and what he was running on, even though the Edwardses knew it could implode at any minute because of John’s entanglement with Rielle Hunter.

Like Monica and Gennifer before her, Rielle was not a discreet choice. She inspired the literary character of Alison Poole, “an ostensibly jaded, sexually voracious” New York party girl who had the lead in Jay McInerney’s novel “Story of My Life” and in a short story in his new book, “How It Ended,” as well as a couple of walk-ons in novels by Bret Easton Ellis.

What unimaginable stress, to learn that you were trying to make your husband president at the same time his mistress was making a baby that could well be his. And while you were raising young kids and battling deadly cancer.

“He should not have run,” Elizabeth Edwards writes in her new book, “Resilience.”

John told her a little about Rielle a few days after he announced in 2006, and she told him to drop out to “protect our family from this woman, from his act,” she writes.

...

She may be smart, but she doesn’t seem to know much about men.

Like Hillary with Monica, the feminist struck out at the girlfriend, implying that Rielle was a wacky stalker.

“We’re basically old-fashioned people,” Elizabeth told O magazine. “So this was a pretty big leap for him. Maybe it’s being so different is what was attractive.”

She’s still helping her husband hedge on Rielle’s baby, whom she refers to as “it,” telling Oprah that she has “no idea” if the baby is John’s, and adding: “It doesn’t look like my children, but I don’t have any idea.”

Asked by Oprah in a taping for Thursday’s show whether she’s still in love with her husband, she replied, “You know, that’s a complicated question.”

The really complicated question is what she hopes to gain from this book.

Go read the whole article. There are more gory details of hypocrisy and self-serving lies. A lot of people wasted their time on this dog. I thought his platform for the presidency was good because it spoke out for the working poor. But he ended up being another Bill Clinton, i.e. he couldn't keep his pants zipped. How many times in history have the common people been betrayed by leaders who are burning with zeal to lead but in fact are really burning with the eagerness to exploit their position and fame to get under the skirts of adoring females?