John Edward’s Timing & Questions, Too–UPDATED

The John Edwards affair leaves so many obvious questions unanswered. Here are my suppositions after the whole thing:

1. The affair began before the job offer to Rielle Hunter
2. Elizabeth Edwards new about the whole thing
3. The baby is Edward’s
4. Hunter has been paid handsomely to prevent the paternity test, everyone knows the paternity anyway
5. Edwards DOES love Hunter and would like to parent the child
6. The affair with Hunter is on-going
7. Edwards would divorce his wife but it doesn’t look good to dump a woman with cancer, and they agreed it wasn’t good for the greater good.

This may be the most cynical take on the whole thing, but the facts certainly could support it. Who knows? John Hawkins has a slightly different take:

I do have a working theory about why Edwards came forward with an admission of the affair that opened up all these cans of worms. There’s no way to know for sure whether it’s right, but it would explain what happened:

ABC had the goods on Edwards and was going to do a damaging piece on the affair. ABC then came to Edwards and gave him an opportunity to do an exclusive interview rather than breaking the story.

Edwards took that opportunity, but felt compelled to lie about a number of things because Elizabeth may not have known the whole truth. So, he either had to go public with a story full of holes or admit to his wife that he was still cheating on her with the woman who’d had his love child.

I just can’t shake the notion that Elizabeth Edwards knew, or knew most of it. These women know. They do not get where they are by being dull-witted and unobservant.

And yes, this feels dirty to write about. It is worth noting that the press continues to dance around this story and if Edwards were a Republican, all these questions and suppositions would be answered by now.

UPDATE:

Stephen Green discusses the screwing news consumers got (go read the whole thing, here’s a snippet):

LA Times blog honcho Tony Pierce (living evidence that The Peter Principle might prove a pinch Panglossian) told his bloggers to ‘keep rockin‘ [sic], but to keep their clams shut about Edwards and Hunter. Pierce’s gag order had the benefit of being loud and clear — but why the utter silence, until just Friday, of the rest of the mainstream media? It’s understandable when Democrats want to sweep the story under the rug — Mickey Kaus valiantly excepted — but isn’t the MSM in the business of providing news in exchange for money? Not at the New York Times, they aren’t. NYT “Public editor” Clark Hoyt freely admits that his paper “never made a serious effort to investigate the story .” Hoyt goes on to say that he doesn’t think that “liberal bias had anything to do with it.” However, in the very same column he admits that the Times freely reported totally unsubstantiated rumors about an affair involving John McCain. If you treat a Republican one way and a Democrat another and it isn’t liberal bias — then what is it? A Sulzberger family suicide pact?
Michael Kinsley has another theory:

…the MSM told a story about Edwards-they told it often and loud-it was probably one of the best-known and totally accepted stories of the 2008 campaign: John loyally standing by his loyal wife as she deals with cancer. If the story isn’t true, they should run a correction. My god, look at the things they run corrections over-the spelling of people’s names, and so on. Yet they’re leaving this huge story uncorrected, and leaving their readers misinformed. No?

Let’s be glad of one thing: The Edwards story isn’t running on page A18 in the tiny little “Corrections” box: “…Edwards may not be entirely nice, after all. The Washington Post regrets the error.”

Posted in Political Animals
Tags: Democrats • Media • MSM