• Ashlee Simpson-Wentz has been fired from Melrose Place along with co-star Colin Egglesfield, with whom she was rumored to be flirting on-set.

• Producer Todd Slavkin is trying to make it sound like it was always the plan to have Ashlee exit after filming episode 12 in January, saying, "we felt that once the murder mystery was resolved, the tone of the show was going to shift into a much more fun, romantic, sexy upbeat kind of show, and [her] character would move on." [Perez Hilton]
• Jessica Simpson and Gerard Butler: not on. A source close to Jess says: "There is nothing romantic there at all." [Us]
• Lil Wayne pled guilty to attempted weapon possession in New York today. Police say they pulled his tour bus over because they smelled pot and found a loaded gun in a Louis Vuitton bag. He is expected to be sentenced to one year behind bars. [TMZ]
• During a radio interview today, Chris Brown said he's learning a lot in his court-ordered domestic violence course and hopes fans can forgive him. "At the end of the day, I'm human," he said. "Of course you're gonna have your thoughts and opinions. I'm not gonna say they're wrong. But at the end of the day, it's not right to judge someone. People make mistakes all the time." [Radar Online]
• Teyana Taylor says her support of Chris Brown has never wavered. "A lot of people were jumping on different bandwagons and I really felt like that was wack," she said. "Before the incident between him and Rihanna, Chris had always been my brother... I've known him for four years and I was one of the only people that stood by his side when the situation happened... When he gets back to where he used to be, a lot of people are going to come running back and smiling in his face." [Vibe]
• You can listen to the moment that caused a judge to declare a mistrial in the John Travolta extortion case at the link. At a Progressive Liberal Party convention, Bahamian lawmaker Picewell Forbes screamed, "Pleasant Bridgewater is a free woman!" The judge declared a mistrial because he believes someone on the jury may have been "communicating" with Forbes. [TMZ]
• Picewell Forbes has been summoned to appear before the judge because he wants Forbes to explain himself in person. [TMZ]
• John Travolta's lawyer says "He was upset [about the mistrial] as he wanted closure. The family wants to privately begin the long and difficult healing process – as well as to properly honor Jett's memory – without the cloud of this litigation over their heads. But he said he is committed to cooperating with authorities so justice can be served." [People]
• Elizabeth Taylor was one of the first people to see the Michael Jackson concert documentary This Is It. She held a screening at her house over the weekend and, according to a source, said, "The film was pure genius and the most magnificent film," and gave it a standing ovation. [Entertainment Tonight]
• When asked if he and wife Khloe Kardashian are planning on having kids, Lamar Odom said, "Maybe one day, hopefully... That's what kings and queens are put on the earth for, to have offspring." [Us]
• Kris Jenner says the Kardashians "have a hunch" about who stole $100,000 of jewelry from Kourtney Kardashian's house. They think it was a group of "jealous" people close enough to the family to know when E!'s cameras weren't rolling and to sort out "what was real jewelry and what was costume jewelry." [Us]
• Dennis Quaid narrowly avoided a DUI when he got in his car outside a L.A. restaurant and moved it about a foot when a cop told him to get out of the car and go back inside and call a cab. A paparazzi yelled, "You don't want a DUI. You don't want to end up like Mel Gibson" and everyone laughed. [TMZ]
• Madonna will visit Malawi on Sunday to lay the foundation stone for a girls' school she's building for $15 million. [Reuters]
• So You Think You Can Dance host Cat Deely says last season when Katie Holmes was on the show Tom Cruise was, "an absolute sweetheart. He was taking videos of his little girl and wife. Just like any guy, he was incredibly proud of his spouse." [E!]
• Lady Gaga says her tour with Kanye West was cancelled because, "It just wasn't the right timing... I don't want to embellish on it too much, because I want to respect Kanye's privacy. But we just had our own reasons. We're real friends, real friends can make decisions like that, and we wanted to keep the momentum going in terms of pop music staying innovative with hip-hop and R&B, and we really wanted to do it, and it just wasn't the right time. But who's to say what will happen in the future?" [People]
• Now that the Fame Kills tour has been cancelled, Lady Gaga will do her own tour called The Monster Ball beginning on November 27. "I wanted to really put together a show that would be the most beautiful, expensive-looking, delicious show, but that my fans wouldn't have to pay a ton of money to come see," she says. [Rolling Stone]
• The Spice Girls may be reuniting for a new reality competition show in which they will search for the women to play themselves in a Spice Girls musical. [The Sun]
• Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky are developing a comedy for Showtime based on the memoir Why the Long Face? about author Craig Chester coming to terms with his homosexuality as a child in a conservative Christian family. [Entertainment Weekly]
• Nicholas Rodriguez, a SATC newcomer who will play a "crucial" role in the wedding scene of the upcoming film, says that after the shoot Liza Minnelli said, "'I would like to have everyone's attention,' and they pulled out a stool for her at the piano and gave her a mic and she sang a favorite of her mother, Judy Garland. She said, 'Thank you for letting me play with you guys. It was so heartfelt and genuine. I got choked up and several people were sobbing like a baby, but I'm not going to name names because he might be really embarrassed." Was it Chris Noth? [People]
• Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid is planning to sell condoms featuring a portrait of David Beckham sleeping. [Guardian]
• The National Enquirer claims that John Edwards is paying for Rielle Hunter and their "love child" Frances to live in a million-dollar home near his family's mansion. Supposedly Elizabeth Edwards is fine with this. [National Enquirer]
• Robin Thicke and wife Paula Patton are expecting their first child. [Us]
• Robin Wright Penn says of the media coverage of her split from Sean Penn, "Yes, it's divorce; it's a given that it will be public. But … it's so disrespectful. 'You're an actress, you owe us this?' 'Fuck you,' is what I say." [People]
• Musicians who were outraged when they found out that their songs were cranked up to help break prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, including Pearl Jam, R.E.M., and Trent Reznor, have joined the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo. [AP]
• If Michael Lohan Tweets, don't worry: it' isn't really him. "I don't have a Twitter account, so whoever is sending these messages around is a fake and it's not me," says Lohan. [Radar Online]
• Olivia Newton-John says she feels bad for Britney Spears because compared to Brit, she didn't receive as much press coverage when she rose to fame in the late '70s. She says, "The poor girl. She has lived in a time where the paparazzi reign and we didn't have that problem at all. We'd have occasional intrusion, you know I had a few incidents, but it was nothing like it is now." [Daily Express]
• Ang Lee says he made Taking Woodstock because, "After making several tragic movies in a row, I was looking to do a comedy, and one without cynicism. It might seem a strange idea to make a comedy about Woodstock, but it was kind of bizarre and seemed like comedy material to me." [The Telegraph]
• "I won a 'Best Body Award' from Fitness Magazine and I was too embarrassed to accept it. I actually don't have a good body, but if everybody thinks so, I guess it means I'm a good actress. I have acted the part of the girl who has a very good body. If you know how to dress, there's some tricks you can pull." — Salma Hayek [Parade]
• Brace Paine says he new Gossip had hit the big time, "When we got asked to do The Simpson's theme song." [AP]
• Simon Van Kempen of RHONY says of Bethenny Frankel's impending motherhood, "Nothing prepares you for parenthood [more than] parenthood. That baby will change Bethenny for the better. It will smooth over the few rough edges she still has." [People]
• RHONY's Kelly Killoren Bensimon says she posed for Playboy because, "It's the ultimate compliment and every woman's dream. You get to be a sex symbol and work with top people in the business. It's such an honor." [Star]
• Carrie Fisher says the tackiest piece of Star Wars memorabilia she ever saw was, "The sex doll. No question. But there was one other item: There's that doll of me in the metal bikini, and George Lucas had a special one made for me where the top came off and I had tits." [NPR]

Back in 2008, John Edwards was riding high, having successfully rerouted the national conversation to include a substantial discussion of poverty and holding his own as a contender for the presidency. Less than eighteen months later, Edwards has faded from the limelight in the wake of an extra-marital affair that resulted in a child.

The LA Times' article explores the Edwards' uneasy existence in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Elizabeth Edwards is coping by throwing herself into a furniture business and a quieter life, and John Edwards is struggling with picking up the pieces of his derailed life and career. The voices of the townspeople loom large in this analysis and the general consensus appears to be anger and betrayal.

Interestingly, a lot of the rage seems to stem from politics, and not Edward's moral failings:

The feelings of betrayal are particularly strong here in Chapel Hill, the famously liberal college town where the family moved after Edwards left the Senate in 2005. In some quarters, John and Elizabeth are both being blamed for pressing ahead with his presidential run despite their shared knowledge of the affair: If Edwards had secured the Democratic nomination, such critics say, the revelation might have meant Republican victory.

The article ends with a Freudian slip of sorts, a clear illustration of John Edwards' tarnished reputation:

The dean, who received a divinity degree in 1971, said Edwards' personal tragedy reminded him of a certain passage from the Book of Psalms. He pulled down a Bible from his office shelf, opened it to the 22nd Psalm and pointed out the line: "I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people."

No, no, Boger said. On second thought, that was not the one he was thinking of.

The Dividing Line On John Edwards [LA Times]

Earlier: John Edwards Always Knew He Would Disappoint Women

On Saturday, Neil A. Lewis of the Times wrote that Edwards was considering announcing paternity, that Elizabeth Edwards had yet to come around to the idea, and that — as the National Enquirer reported last month — Hunter was planning to move to North Carolina so that her baby could be near the father. Showbiz411's Roger Friedman, though, says the story is vaporware. He says Hunter is in New Jersey with no plans to move, and that a source told him, "All that story is is regurgitation of old misinformation combined with false light and repackaged with bits of Andrew Young's book, probably leaked by his agent to heighten interest."

That book, by the former Edwards aide who once said he was the father of Hunter's baby, is the subject of a lengthy post by Glynnis MacNicol of Mediaite. MacNicol writes that the book proposal — which has yet to be picked up by publisher — seems like the main source for Lewis's Times story. But as we know from James Frey, just because something's in a book proposal doesn't make it true. Young's words haven't been fact checked by publishers yet, and he may be especially untrustworthy given that he once lied about being the father of the child. MacNicol characterizes the Times story as a quick-and-dirty attempt to get out in front of usually quicker-and-dirtier media outlets: "The New York Times is not going to be scooped by the National Enquirer anymore!"

But is there really even a scoop here? The Dave Matthews stuff is salacious, as is the assertion that Hunter gave her child the middle name Quinn to allude to the fact that she was the fifth of Edwards's children (and not, apparently, because she really liked the sister on Daria). But since Edwards is already totally discredited, the story doesn't really have anywhere to go from here. Lewis wrote in the Times,

Any acknowledgment of paternity would have ramifications for Mr. Edwards, who could suffer a further blow to his credibility but could also be praised for belatedly accepting responsibility. It could also shift Ms. Hunter's image from that of a predatory celebrity stalker (Mrs. Edwards told Oprah Winfrey that Ms. Hunter met her husband after waiting for him to come out of a New York hotel and telling him, "You're so hot.") to that of a mother concerned about her child's rights.

But any praise for Edwards's "belated" acknowledgment of his daughter is going to ring pretty false and hollow, given the lengths he went to in order to avoid acknowledging her. And Rielle Hunter will probably be forgotten in a few years' time, returning only to plague the nightmares of Caitlin Flanagan. At some point, John Edwards may make a public statement about Rielle Hunter and her baby (although she might be a teenager by then), and at least there will be some information to discuss. Until that happens, any face-off between the Times and the Enquirer just seems like a test of who can beat a dead horse the hardest.

For Edwards, Drama Builds Toward A Denouement [NYT]
The New York Times Edwards Story: Scandalous! Newsworthy! Vetted? [Mediaite]
John Edwards' Confession: Not So Fast [Showbiz411]

Of course, Hitchens can't resist injecting himself into the review in various obnoxious ways, from the name-droppy ("Perhaps here is the moment for me to say that I used to see a good deal of them both in Washington, beginning with my writing a profile of him in 2002, and that we have been on friendly social terms in each other's houses. I think I may refer to her as "Elizabeth" rather than "Mrs. Edwards" from now on.") to the intellectually snobby (mocking the book's publishers for inserting an explanation of who Edmund Wilson is, as though we didn't all know). He also indulges in some annoying gender stereotyping when he discusses Edwards's mourning for her son, killed in a car crash at the age of 16. He writes,

As to the other great supposed cure for isolation, the consolation of religion, Elizabeth is at the same time vulnerable and skeptical. In describing the dreams and superstitions and fantasies that assailed her when she lost her boy, she confirms something that I have long thought to be true about the apparent conundrum of female religiosity: Why is it women who keep up the congregations in male-dominated places of worship? That's easy: women do all the childbearing, and they will try anything-anything-to ward off the illness or death of an infant. They will also grieve over and commemorate such a catastrophe long after the menfolk have "moved on."

Does Hitchens really need to make Elizabeth Edwards stand in for all women in opposition to "menfolk," especially when her particular story is so tragic and captivating? To his credit, though, Hitchens's review paints Edwards as a tough-minded woman with a complex view of both grief and human nature. He writes that she "unflinchingly records her mother's conviction that the gallant captain had been unfaithful to her while she was 'buried in babies'" and that she "remarks tenderly" that her father's flirtation with a nurse in his assisted-living center is an expression of his will to live. Hitchens also says,

In the unequal battle between life and death (as she understood in her father's case), Eros has its part in warding off Thanatos, and if this really was-as I believe-her husband's first lapse, it might have been partly because of the death-haunted context in which, for all his money and charm, he found himself.

My first reaction to this was outrage: so John Edwards cheated on his wife because he was afraid of death? What about her? But I don't actually think Hitchens means to excuse Edwards's behavior here. Rather, I think he's putting it in a larger context that Elizabeth Edwards herself establishes — that men are more than the sum of their sins, and that fear of the abyss can manifest itself as prurience just as easily as "religiosity."

That it did so in John Edwards is inexcusable, but Resilience focuses more on Elizabeth Edwards's grief over the deaths of her father and son than on anything her husband did. Hitchens writes of her approach to grieving, the antithesis of "any too-Oprah-like search for comfort or 'closure.'" And he mentions, perhaps surprisingly, "how much the Internet came to her aid, first when her son was killed and second when she discovered that a term had been set on her own life." He adds,

The importance of this medium in bringing about a great unspoken social reform-the abolition of loneliness-has not to my knowledge been better evoked.

Of course, the Internet may add to Elizabeth Edwards's loneliness as well, especially today, when several sites are reporting the results of a paternity test showing John Edwards to be the father of Rielle Hunter's child. Elizabeth Edwards's fame is a mixed blessing — Hitchens calls her "quite a darling of the Democratic rank and file," and perhaps she has benefited from the public outpouring of support during her battle with cancer. But it's hard to imagine — despite widespread sympathy for her — that having to negotiate her husband's infidelity in the public eye has made her life any easier. In her circumstances, a decision to retreat into private life would be more than understandable. But just as the Internet made her less lonely, perhaps her book will do what David Foster Wallace said all good writing should — help people "become less alone inside."

The Pain Of Elizabeth Edwards [The Atlantic]
Report: DNA Test Proves Edwards Fathered Videographer's Daughter [FOX News]
John Edwards Secret DNA Test Proves He's The Daddy [National Enquirer]

Earlier: Sex & The Single Homewrecker: Caitlin Flanagan Slams Rielle Hunter, Helen Gurley Brown

In an essay of epic and varied nastiness in the new Atlantic, Flanagan argues that Brown was no champion of working-class women — she was a champion for home-wreckers. Flanagan quotes Jennifer Scanlon, author of Brown bio Bad Girls Go Everywhere, saying,

As Scanlon aptly notes, Brown "appointed not predatory or non-committal men but married women as the sorry counterpoint to her sexy girls." For the reader with moral qualms? "I'm afraid I have a cavalier attitude about wives," Brown announced from the outset of her public life. To Scanlon-whose besotted encomium may constitute Brown's final caress in this vale of tears-the attitude amounts to "she who keeps the man happy keeps the man," a point of view the biographer hails, several times, as being fundamentally "libertarian." By this, she means that when two women bid for a man, no advantage shall be given to the one who might have children with him, or an economic dependency built upon their marriage. There is only the marketplace of feminine wiles, in which a concubine's feigned interest in a man's workday trumps a wife's quiet plea for help around the house, in which young is better than old and new is more exciting than familiar.

Here Flanagan takes the worst kind of antifeminist rhetoric — the kind that speaks of women in terms of quasi-monetary sexual "value" — and makes it run both ways. Now women are "bidding" on men, using their riches — the "concubine" (!?) her youth and "wiles," the wife her children and "economic dependency." Both men and women are reduced here — men, for a change, are commodities, but women are merely sexual pocketbooks competing in an auction. And wiles win out, but not for long.

Flanagan jumps from Brown to John Edwards's paramour Rielle Hunter, a loose woman perhaps influenced by Brown's celebration of single sluttiness (because, of course, adultery was invented in 1962). Flanagan has some incandescently insulting things to say about Hunter, including this:

Hers is not an intelligence or an ambition difficult to plumb, and her dream is almost certainly to have Elizabeth shuffle off the mortal coil so that she can instate herself in the North Carolina pleasure dome and become the fun, hip, "Being Is Free," bleached-blond, super open-minded, videographing, Power of Now stepmom, a prospect so hideous that it makes Elizabeth Edwards's last-chance book tour look like what it is: a desperate attempt to protect her sweet, sad children from the influence of this erstwhile cokehead and present-day weasel after she has died.

Flanagan (who, as the tabloids say, does not treat Rielle Hunter) knows exactly what Hunter wants, down to the intellectually lightweight cultural references. And she knows she's not going to get it:

Deep within Rielle-this little minx of pleasure and profit-guess what there is? A heart that aches like a woman's but breaks just like a little girl's. [...] I don't imagine that Rielle's decision to have her baby (whoever the father) came from a strongly pro-life position, or from a plan to jack some cash out of the ambulance chaser. It came, surely, from the powerful emotions that accompany all pregnancies, but especially those that occur in women who probably thought they would never get to have a baby, and who find out, at the 11th hour, that the dream might come true after all, and they might have a home and a child, and (please, God) a husband and father to go with that child.

So, to recap, Helen Gurley Brown made it sound like it was okay to steal someone else's man, but it really isn't, not only because marital commitment should override "wiles," but also because a married man will never leave his wife for you. The wages of sin are ... still being single, a prospect Flanagan seems to abhor. She writes of "the desperate, Blanche DuBois tinsel of [Brown's] new creation-the single girl" and "the possible pitfalls and sorrows of life as a sexually liberated, 'all the time in the world' unmarried woman" in such a way as to leave no doubt that she views Hunter as the ultimate loser in the affair — and to imply that unmarried women in general are really kind of sad.

But it's men who fare the worst in Flanagan's moral reckoning. Amy Benfer of Broadsheet offers a smart roundup of Flanagan's many insults (Brown was "pee-on-the-side-of-the-road white trash;" the "ladies of the steno pool" include "Bertha in Accounting, with the hair on her chin;" anyone who hasn't had a kid is "just guessing about love, gesturing toward it, assuming it's the right name for a feeling you've had"), but she doesn't mention Flanagan's implicit denial of male autonomy. Flanagan makes much of Rielle Hunter's pickup line to John Edwards: "you are so hot." She writes,

"You are so hot," Rielle Hunter said to John Edwards 10 years after he and his wife buried their first boy, and after they had started a new family, and after they had given their all to a presidential campaign-with the personal losses and long separations that come with it-and after Elizabeth had been diagnosed with cancer and undergone a disfiguring surgery and chemotherapy and lost her hair and been handed a recalculated set of odds about her life expectancy with two very small children who needed their mother. "You are so hot," Rielle Hunter said, because she turned out to be another woman with a cavalier attitude toward wives.

Interestingly, these words were also the subject of an article in last month's Cosmo, about how to keep your man from cheating. Both Brown's former magazine and her modern-day critic act like Hunter made Edwards sleep with her using these simple words. But Rielle Hunter didn't break John Edwards's vows. She didn't cheat on his wife in her hour of need. He did.

Ultimately, Flanagan and Brown make the same mistake: assuming that women can control men. Sex and the Single Girl wasn't all that far off of the seduction manuals George Sodini read, in that both taught readers that fulfilling relationships with the opposite sex could be had through manipulation. Flanagan might not agree with the "fulfilling" part, but like Brown, she seems to see an adulterous affair not as a choice made by both a man and a woman, but as a competition between wife and "concubine." The man is just the prize.

Of course, they're both wrong. Rielle Hunter may not be a good role model, but ultimately the blame for Elizabeth Edwards's pain rests with her husband. Because women — single or married — can't actually control men. Luckily, it's not our responsibility — it's theirs.

Sex And The Married Man [The Atlantic]

Relate: Who You Calling White Trash? [Broadsheet]

• Rielle Hunter's friends don't recall the videographer's affair with John Edwards ending in December 2006. One says, "I'm not sure what men tell their wives about their mistresses represents the most accurate portrayal." [Huffington Post]

• Newly minted Democrat Arlen Specter forgot that he isn't a Republican any more and told a reporter that he was backing Norm Coleman's bid to prevent a filibuster-proof majority all the way to the Supreme Court. [NY Times]
• Then he took it back. [Talking Points Memo]
• Then the Democrats stripped him of all his seniority because, for whatever reason, they don't trust him, his motivations or his willingness to vote their way! [Washington Post]
• Someone else the Administration doesn't trust: Mayor of Kabul Afghan President Hamid Karzai. With that pro-rape law and drug-dealing relatives, that's no big surprise. [Washington Post]
• The United Kingdom doesn't trust right-wing nutbag Michael Savage not to incite ethnic, religious and other violence so it won't let him visit; he's now suing British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to prove he's not a psycho. [Reuters]
• In other psycho news, Michele Bachmann charged Barack Obama with enslaving the nation's youth. [ThinkProgress]
• Mitt Romney, who recently cracked a sexist joke about how Time's list of influential people was really only a beauty contest, was actually one of People's "Most Beautiful People" once upon a time. [Huffington Post]
• Some Mormon had Barack Obama's mother posthumously baptized against the will of her family in the middle of the campaign. [AmericaBlog]
• The Mormons are investigating, which means they're hoping the issue will die down aso they can go back to funding efforts to keep same sex couples from getting married. [Politico]
• Some Bush lawyers might get disbarred for twisting the law in an attempt to make torture legal, but they probably won't get prosecuted. [NY Times]
• The Obama Administration won't announce its replacement for Justice Souter this week. [Huffington Post]
• Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has agreed to be the GOP's token, rather than its real leader, and will give up the sole actual power the RNC Chair actually has (meaning: the purse strings). [Washington Times]
• Uh-oh: Joe Biden just found out why it's a crappy idea to appoint a caretaker Senator so that your son can run for your seat in two years: Beau Biden, despite his tour in Iraq, is trailing Republican Congressman Mike Castle in the polls by 21 points. [Politico]

I don't want to say, "I told you so," but I did suggest, the day the affair broke, that John hadn't told Elizabeth the whole truth. She backs up my assertions.

The next morning he told me why, or told me a version of why. He had made a terrible decision and had been with the woman. After I cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up.

And the next day John and I spoke. He wasn't coy, but it turned out he wasn't forthright either. A single night and since then remorse, was what he said. There were other opportunities, he admitted, but on only one night had he violated his vows to me.

That, she learned later, was untrue.

Like most wives - or husbands - in my position, I wanted to believe his involvement with this woman had been as little as possible. A single night, another opportunity, but that was it and he had wanted away from her.... It turned out that a single time was not all it was. More than a year later, I learned that he had allowed [the woman] into our lives and had not, even when he knew better, made her leave us alone.

I'm saddened to think what she means by saying that John let Rielle "into our lives," because it doesn't sound like she's just talking about the affair.

If you'll recall, Elizabeth took a lot of heat for "allowing" John to continue campaigning — heat that I thought was ugly and unwarranted, in part because I figured he probably hadn't ever really told her the full truth of the situation. Elizabeth finally responds to those criticisms, too.

So much has happened that it is sometimes hard for me to gather my feelings from that moment. I felt that the ground underneath me had been pulled away. I wanted him to drop out of the race, protect our family from this woman, from his act. It would only raise questions, he said, he had just gotten in the race; the most pointed questions would come if he dropped out days after he had gotten in the race. And I knew that was right, but I was afraid of her. And now he knows I was right to be afraid, that once he had made this dreadful mistake, he should not have run. But just then he was doing, I believe, what I was trying to do: hold on to our lives despite this awful error in judgment.

In other words, he told her about the affair two days after his formal announcement — not before, and then pressured her to continue despite her misgivings while she was vulnerable.

The worst you can say about Elizabeth is that she's no fan of Rielle Hunter and is rather unimpressed by her husband's choice of mistresses.

It didn't occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work, he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line "You are so hot" and an idea that she should travel with him and make videos. And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then 28 years would have responded to a come-on line like that, I would have said no.

Lest you think that Elizabeth is being less than charitable, that's about how Rielle Hunter described their meeting to Newsweek just before John told Elizabeth about the affair.

Elizabeth goes on to suggest that Hunter is a moocher and a hanger-on.

In months of talking with him, I have come to understand his liaison with this woman, if I have, not as a substitute for me. Those with any fame or notoriety or power attract people for good reasons and bad. Some want to contribute and some want to take something away for themselves. They flatter and entreat, and it is engaging, even addictive. They look at our lives, which from the outside in particular are pictures of joy and plenty, and they want it for themselves.

Which, as the cuckolded wife in this scenario, is an understandable way to feel about the woman who, by all accounts, pursued and had an affair with her husband. But Hunter's own friends — and even the New York Post — described her in a similar manner in early 2008.

The New Age hippie, who friends say "mooches off other people and sleeps on their couches because she doesn't believe in money," tells anyone who will listen about her fling with the good-looking guy. She recently walked up to a Page Six pal she'd just met and said, "Oh, I'm so stressed out. I've been having an affair with [a candidate]."

And with the reports that Edwards' finance chairman, Fred Baron, bankrolled her move to the West Coast and her lifestyle there until his death, that might not be terribly far from the truth.

As much as I enjoy a good salacious political scandal, I do have to ask: can we go back to talking about health care reform really soon? Because, honestly, the latter is more important.

Elizabeth Edwards: How I Survived John's Affair [Time]

Related: John Edwards, Untucked [Newsweek]
Just Asking [Page Six]
Dallas Lawyer Fred Baron Paid For Edwards' Mistress To Relocate [Dallas Morning News]

Earlier: Elizabeth Edwards' Resilience And Rielle Hunter's Revenge
John Edwards Always Knew He Would Disappoint Women
Hey Ladies, Lay Off Elizabeth Edwards (And That Means You, Bonnie Fuller)
Elizabeth Edwards: "I Think We Have The Capacity With Great Leadership To Change Things"
Elizabeth Edwards Talks About Issues Unrelated To Infidelity

The Broadway Books catalog says Edwards has written “an unsentimental and ultimately inspirational meditation on the gifts we can find among life’s biggest challenges.”

The usually private Elizabeth Edwards, I am told, is definitely including her take on the relationship in her new book. Her publicist says she will be addressing John’s “affair and how she experienced it.”

But, as one insider exclaimed yesterday: “What is Elizabeth thinking?” Certainly the minute she does any publicity for “Resilience,” the first questions will be about Rielle Hunter and her baby daughter. And don’t think for a minute that Hunter is going to allow herself to be portrayed as a groupie, sycophant or gold digger. Far from it. I’m told that if “Resilience” minimizes her at all, Hunter will not shy away from showing her own “resilience.” She’s said to be a smart, educated, articulate woman—not at all how she’s been portrayed so far in the supermarket tabloids.

Indeed, how Elizabeth “experienced” may be just as the public did: Edwards suddenly exited the race for the Democratic presidential nomination on January 30, 2008. In early August, after much pressure and a sting by the National Enquirer, he admitted the affair. What he didn’t say: the end of his campaign came exactly one month before Hunter gave birth to baby Frances Quinn.

There's another story about John Edwards in yesterday's Daily News, about how he's been calling former staffers and asking for forgiveness for his tawdry business with Rielle Hunter. When we asked Philip Nobel about his research assistant fucking ways, he asked to be "to be treated as an individual case." And here's the thing with both Edwards and Nobel and many other cheating spouses: they've taken for granted the rights and feelings of another individual, with their public philandering... their wives. Their actions did not take place in a vacuum. And even if I could muster some sympathy for a man trapped in a bad marriage or a marriage that made him unhappy, I can never ever feel bad for someone who has forced another person, willing or not, to deal with it in public. And as the following five stereotypes of cuckolded wives show, the fucked-over wifey will be judged by that public, no matter what she does.

1. The Ball Buster: Of course Bill cheated on Hillary, many said, she was a feminazi who never let the poor man have his way. And anyway, like Elizabeth Edwards, Hillary "allowed" the affair to continue and participated in a cover-up because all she wanted was power in the first place.

2. The Doormat:: Silda Spitzer got a lot of this, especially from other women, who were disgusted that she stood behind Eliot at the press conference after he was caught frequenting prostitutes. They called her "nauseating . . . phony and awful."

3. The Nag: Nobel said that his piece in Elle was about "the burden of being a lightning rod for the fears of women and the resentments of burdened men." The implication there is that all married men, even the ones who are happily married, are burdened by the responsibility placed on them by their nagging harpy wives. Who wouldn't want to ditch all that and run off with a twenty-something! Which brings us to…

4. The Crone: Nobel's preference for firm young flesh is shared by another political philandering John: McCain. McCain left first wife Carol for current wife Cindy, because, as Carol said, "John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does." Even Carol herself has bought into this piece of media claptrap!

5. The Martyr: Those who don't see Silda Spitzer as a doormat probably see her as a martyr — someone's who's keeping the family's life as private as possible so that her three teenage daughters can have some semblance of normalcy in their lives. While this stereotype isn't necessarily negative, I'm sure Spitzer — and the rest of these wives — would much rather not walk down the street and have everyone feeling sorry for them. As Erica Jong said in an impassioned defense of Hillary in the Washington Post earlier this year, "She cannot have enjoyed her husband's playing around. She certainly never condoned it. But he was clever enough for her, he supported her dreams, and they both loved their smart and beautiful daughter. Besides, what does anyone know about anyone else's marriage?"

In Which People Are Atrocious To Elizabeth Edwards And Not Nearly Atrocious Enough To Her Idiot Husband [Radar]
Edwards' Wife Criticized For Silence On Affair [AP via WRAL]
Hillary Vs.The Patriarchy [Washington Post]
John Edwards Calling Former Staffers Asking For Forgiveness [NYDN]

Earlier: Elle Writer "Didn't Plan To Be The Poster Boy For Male Recklessness"
Women On Silda Wall: "I'd Have Paraded In Front Of A Microphone With A Knife"
Oh, About That First Wife

DAVID: Good morning!

MEGAN: Morning! Welcome to my daily routine of crap!

DAVID: Good morning, baby! You know, I'm actually sort of impressed with this Maureen Dowd column. Not that it's actually good or anything, just that for once she managed not to fall back her one Freshman Lit class trick, over-alliteration. It's like that was the one day in English 102 that she bothered to show up for.

MEGAN: Hmm, I found it marginally less annoying than usual, except that she makes fun of Hawaiian culture, uses annoying similes and puts words into people's mouths and outrageous and unlikely thoughts into people's heads:

You can almost hear her mind whirring: She’s amazed at how easy it was to snatch Denver away from the Obama saps. Like taking candy from a baby, except Beanpole Guy doesn’t eat candy. In just a couple of weeks, Bill and Hill were able to drag No Drama Obama into a swamp of Clinton drama.

You're right, it's not alliteration, it's internal rhyme and it's not even original! Guess she missed those days of English composition. I have to say, one thing I really hate about this job is the need to read Maureen Dowd. I miss my many years of ignoring her existence, let alone her writing.

DAVID: It's kind of sad, really. She's been dining out on the Clintons for nearly two decades now. Sometimes I feel like she's getting in all her hits now before her meal ticket walks out the door. She's going to wring every last drop from those two that she can. And sometimes I feel like the Times knows it, which is why they still have her behind kind of a half-hearted subscription wall.

MEGAN: I think they quit that, since no one would pay to read her. Man, those were good days, too. When I could claim I wasn't reading her because my boss wouldn't pay for the subscription.

DAVID: You still have to register your email and get a log-in ID to read her column. I know that because the log-in from BugMeNot that I've been using for three years just stopped working, so I had to re-register just now. Now, here's the kind of headline you don't see too much anymore:

Al Qaeda positioned for attacks against West, U.S. analyst says

There. You've covered your ass. Now let's go clear some brush.

MEGAN: Oooh, I feel so 2001, except that no one reported it then and no one in the Administration listened to it!

DAVID: Yee haw! Maybe for old times sake we should saw on the Gary Condit thing for an inordinate amount of time. Oh, no, wait, the WaPo beat us to it.

MEGAN: Anyway, speaking of mistresses, we should probably touch on the Rielle Hunter former friend interview.

DAVID: Her name is "Pigeon"? That's really unfortunate.

MEGAN: Well, and so is the fact that she refrained from being like "Girl, stop boning the married guy and buying his shit and find yourself someone nice that cares about you for real" and Rielle friend-dumped her anyway.

DAVID: This bit is particularly unnerving to me somehow:

I — she's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful person in a very ugly position, and I really feel for her. I think that — I really have never known someone so insistent upon integrity and honesty and openness. It's one of the most beautiful things about her. There are many beautiful things about her.

Nah, I take it back. Actually that part is kind of beautiful.You can really taste the crazy.

MEGAN: Yeah, there are many parts that are probably beautiful about Rielle, her willingness to ignore that Edwards was married and tell all her friends about it and bash his wife to reporters are probably not among them. That said, I'm not sure Rush Limbaugh gets it (heh) either.

It just seems to me that Edwards might be attracted to a woman whose mouth did something other than talk.

God, don't you love the old "My wife doesn't suck my cock anymore" excuse for infidelity?

DAVID: Well, these people are hardcore New Agers, and something I've found about those people is that they'll do just heinous stuff to other people and then find some way to justify it with a bunch of airy fairy crap about "positivity" and "actualization of my potential". Oh, we really are going to talk about Hellmouth Limbaugh?

MEGAN: Well, we have to bring it up. He basically said guys get tired of fucking mouthy women who, by the way, don't give blow jobs. You know who I don't ever give blow jobs to? Rush Limbaugh. Also, guys that are pigs about it. And guys who beg for it like small children, just because it's unattractive. And anyone who is less than fastidious about cleanliness.

DAVID: Can I get a "Hell, yeah" on that last one? I know there are a lot of people out there who are against circumcision, but in terms of what you're are or aren't going to go down on, ultimately, I think I'm in the pro-circumcision camp. See? I'm willing to totally range into Deep Overshare territory to not have to think too hard about Rush Limbaugh.

MEGAN: Or his penis. Or the women he might have to pay to suck his penis, just so's he knows it's still there, since he can't really reach it around his stomach to jerk off anymore, which is why he bloviates the way he does. His show is the closest thing to self-fellating he's able to achieve.

DAVID: This is the thing that kind of keeps me up at night. We may get a Democratic Congress and president in 2009, but you know, I live in Georgia (and things have been much better since the cease-fire, thanks fer askin'!) and I see all those angry, red-faced white guys in their Escalades and Dodge Rams who listen to him. They're not going anywhere. It makes me think about Oklahoma City and that guy who charged into that Unitarian church and started shooting.

MEGAN: See, the only time I really see those people is in bars back home. They seem less angry then. Sometimes they hit on me.

DAVID: Hellmouth Limbaugh has been stoking those people's ids for, well, about as long as Maureen Dowd has been working toward the same ends from the Upper West Side. His listeners are genuinely scary true believers. At least around here they are.

MEGAN: When I used to leave my house during the day and go to a real job, I used to hear cab drivers listening to Limbaugh during the day. Amusingly, 99% of his cabbie listeners in my anecdotal survey were immigrants. I never did figure out if they were listening because they believed, or to better know the enemy. Or because it was a Republican town and they worked for tips.

DAVID: My guess would be the latter, but I guess you never really know. I can't really think about Limbaugh without thinking about pilonidal cysts.

MEGAN: I had a friend with those. Don't Google, people, whatever you do.

DAVID:

A pilonidal cyst is a cyst at the bottom of the tailbone (coccyx) that can become infected and filled with pus. Once infected, the technical term is pilonidal abscess. Pilonidal abscesses look like a large pimple at the bottom of the tailbone, just above the crack of the buttocks. It is more common in men than in women. It usually happens in young people up into the fourth decade of life.

Hey, there's a reason to be happy about turning 40!

Oh, heh, I just saw your Do Not Google advice. Enjoy your breakfast, Jezebelles!

Fully accepting Edwards' version of the time line of events, Bonnie places the blame for his candidacy on Elizabeth:

The bigger question is "why did Elizabeth Edwards drink her husband's Kool-Aid? How could she have possibly believed that her husbands affair would remain a private matter when he was running for President of the United States? Hello, the National Enquirer had already broken the story last fall. Why in fact, did she knowingly encourage her spouse to even enter the campaign when she had been fully informed about the affair for over a year? And she helped support and propagate John Edwards' image as a devoted husband and family man.

Actually, let's dispense with the problem with Bonnie's facts first. John and Elizabeth say that she was told "sometime" in 2006; Edwards threw his hat in the ring on December 28, 2006 (the same week Rielle Hunter was quoted talking about her documentaries in Newsweek). Elizabeth was, however, no where to be seen in any of the photographs or press reports. The first documented incidence I can find of them together was on January 14, 2007 when Edwards gave a speech for MLK Day, followed by a campaign event on January 20, 2007 — more than a month after the official announcement (and long after the decision had been made). Frankly, at the point at which John Edwards was contracting with Rielle Hunter to make documentaries of him in Summer 2006 — mistress or not — the decision for him to run for President had obviously long been made. So, she'd hardly been "fully informed about the affair for over a year" when she encouraged him to run — assuming, in fact, that' she's "fully" informed now.

That aside, there are plenty of reasons Elizabeth might well have assumed John's indiscretion might never come out. Anyone in Washington can tell you that plenty of men cheat on their wives in this town and no one ever says a word. If John told her, as it seems he is telling us, that he had a "brief" indiscretion with a staffer, that's a lot different than a long-term torrid affair and far less likely to become public. Elizabeth, by all accounts, has sacrificed a lot for John's political career and is as committed to his political goals (poverty eradication, universal health care, etc.) as he is. So maybe once she got over her grief and anger, once she made the decision to stay with him, maybe she convinced herself that no one else would ever have to know about her humiliation. Goodness knows that's not the first time that such a thing has come to pass. And looking at the race, and her husband and her political ideals, maybe it wasn't such a stretch to believe that a one-night stand wouldn't make the papers. Most politicians' don't.

The second point to consider is whether his indiscretions make him a bad father (in Fuller-speak, "family man"). Not that I wouldn't rage to the high heavens if I discovered my father had been unfaithful to my mother, but that would have almost no bearing on whether he was a good father to me or not. That's not to say whether John Edwards is or not — he might well not be and, if Rielle's child is his, I would guess that the general consensus would be he's not — but what he did or did not do with his penis on the side aren't the determining factor in that by a long shot.

Fuller's main point is this:

Well, she may not want to admit it but Elizabeth is as guilty as her husband at this point, in inviting the public into her family's personal life.

What evidence Fuller has for that is unclear. Because she stood by his side? Because she did what you do when your spouse is running for office? Standing next to him at a rally, or giving a speech, or sitting for an interview is tantamount to letting the press into your bedroom or the inner workings of your marriage? While I have no doubt that Fuller, the former editor of Star Magazine and US Weekly, repeated that to herself in the mirror every morning before heading to the office to scroll through paparazzi photographs to use in her next poorly-sourced, sometimes mean-spirited celebrity-gossip-filled issue, that doesn't make it, you know, actually true. I don't want Bonnie Fuller's minions in my closet at night any more than I want George Bush's.

Basically, Elizabeth Edwards forgave her husband and, by her own admission, wanted to be spared public humiliation so she didn't run through the streets telling everyone her husband had an affair. She began to try to make her own peace with it in her own way, and at the same time recognized that, in terms of policy issues, she still thought her husband was the best candidate for President and supported him. How terrible of her. While I disagree with her assertion that her husband's actions in the affair — especially given the timing, the money he paid Rielle to work for him, the kid, the shady antics involved in paying both her and Andrew Young to leave North Carolina and the possibility that he has continued to lie about it — should not be subject to public scrutiny, I don't think she bears any responsibility for his actions or her desire and willingness to continue to support him. He is the villain here, at least in terms of his marriage and the affair and its effect on his political career — not her. And slapping blame on her for convincing herself that her private humiliation might remain private is just ugly and unwarranted.

Today [Daily Kos]
Elizabeth Edwards Drank Her Husband's Kool-Aid And Became His "Ambition Enabler" [HuffPo]
Politics 2008: John Edwards, Untucked [Newsweek]

MEGAN: Morning! Shall we get right down to analyzing the whole Edwards debacle?

SPENCER: I just wanted to say I went an entire weekend without fathering any illegitimate children OR vindicating Mickey Kaus.

MEGAN: Hey, and I haven't gotten knocked up either, so, congrats to both of us!

SPENCER: But this changes nothing. Mickey Kaus, now and forever, snacks on goat penis.

MEGAN: Well, I mean, he said it was really tasty.

SPENCER: So, you said in your post Friday that Edwards can't be Attorney General, which disappoints me tremendously. Do you think Elizabeth can launch her own political career? She's in remission, right?

MEGAN: Actually, I don't think she's in remission. She's incurable, so it's still going, sadly. I would've rather have seen Elizabeth's stellar political career. Rewind? I mean, the biggest problem is that paternity isn't going to be resolved. Rielle's not going to allow a DNA test, so everyone will continue to suspect it's his kid as I already do.

SPENCER: You saw her dKos diary, yeah? She wrote this like a pro:

John has spoken in a long on-camera interview I hope you watch. Admitting one’s mistakes is a hard thing for anyone to do, and I am proud of the courage John showed by his honesty in the face of shame.

I started singing the Ramones' "Swallow My Pride" to myself when I read this. and also "Swallow Goat Cock" By Kaus and the Goatees.

MEGAN: Which, I'm sorry, totally negates the whole "I asked her not to come on camera" bullshit Edwards pulled on Friday to appeal to us ladies.

SPENCER: He did what now?

MEGAN: On Friday, in his interview, Edwards told Woodruff that he not only didn't ask Elizabeth to appear with him but asked her not to, in effect saying he didn't want to be Spitzer, McGreevey or Craig, getting lambasted for having his wife by his side while admitting to this shit. BUT he had her talk to Bob Schieffer on the phone (sobbing, according to Schieffer) to confirm the 2006 version of events and then she did the thing on Kos.

So, I'm sorry, we don't have the visual, but I don't think he's a better guy. Also, as I said in my piece on Friday, I think he's lying on the timing and nothing I've read since does anything to disabuse me of that notion.

SPENCER: Well shit. But here's something else: in liberal circles in 2007, the drunken chatter was that Edwards didn't want to run for president, but Elizabeth, facing the clarifying prospect of her own mortality, wanted him to. Sounded plausible at the time! He had no chance of getting the nomination as soon as Obama jumped in, and possibly none before. But but but but BUT how could Elizabeth have known he slept with Rielle Hunter and then said "Fuck it, Johnny. You should still be president!"

MEGAN: I'm guessing that was just a story he put out there to look like less of a shitty husband for continuing to run while his wife had cancer. I'm sure she was supportive, but there was no firm indication that she'd live until the 2009 Inauguration when she was first diagnosed.

So, maybe seeing him as President was her semi-dying wish, maybe she'd internalized his desires to that degree that she thought it was, but it sounds to me like a pretty campaign fairy tale intended to make us believe in the John-and-Liz as a team thing. Anyway, back to why I'm sticking by my suspicions that he's still lying: Sam Stein thinks he is, too, and he's got even more evidence about when John and Rielle met, and when she got hired. And the Updated Newsweek story about how Rielle was indeed still going around claiming to be having an affair with someone the reporter knew (which, he didn't know Andrew Young) in January, which is the blind item Page Six had in January 06 as well.

SPENCER: Here's where I get exhausted with the story. OK OK he fucked her, might have fathered an illegitimate child, career's come to an end, it's DONE right? Does it matter if he's lying to the public if he's not going to be a public official anymore? At what point do we say enough, he's out of politics. I say right now!

MEGAN: Oh, you know me, I'm the type of person who hates to let that shit go. But on to new topics, then! Like the leaked Clintonian emails. Damn, I hate when shit makes Mark Penn look less incredibly wrong. Can't we just stick to mocking the chapter of his book about appealing to American snipers?

SPENCER: Let's chew on this a moment:

Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

MEGAN: George Bush in 08?

SPENCER: ... and so begins the header on a million GOP/McCain fundraising emails.

MEGAN: I mean, really, at this point, Penn ought to be getting fucking royalties from McCain's campaign.

SPENCER: so, congratulations, black people! Remember how you thought whites don't see you as American? Mark Penn just confirmed it. You are officially off the hook for the Iraq war.

MEGAN: Wait, according to Virginia Congressman Jim Moran it was all the Jews' fault anyway.

SPENCER: I'm curious to see in Josh's story what the Clinton machine's reaction to that memo was — whether that launched the Wright-based whisper campaign or whether the Clintonites rejected it. Yeah yeah that shit. But really — if that memo was ignored/repudiated, it's one thing. If it was ACTED UPON that is quite another.

MEGAN: Do you think that whether the Clintonistas put the Obama in Somali gear photo out there will be in there?

SPENCER: Mike "who's your celebrity crush" Allen says the Penn memo was 3/30/08 so I think that post-date Somalibama but NOT some of the Wright stuff.

MEGAN: I think this much was acted upon:

Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back

Which, really, means Penn should pay royalties to Karl Rove.

SPENCER: Except Rove wins elections
MEGAN: What his lackeys will do with John McCain is another question.

SPENCER: ... ok back to Edwards for one second: can he really not be attorney general? He had such balls! He was going to be the leftwing John Ashcroft, fucking with the right just to fuck with them! The mailed fist in Obama's politics-of-hope-and-reconciliation velvet glove? Really? I have to give up the dream? The dream of indictments for torture and rendition and US attorney firings and warrantless surveillance? What if he just says the kid is mine? The Democrats are going to have 57 fucking Senate seats!

MEGAN: I really don't think he can be. Can you imagine those confirmation hearings? Especially if it turns out he was still lying? If he used donor money to pay his mistress (let alone hush up his mistress)? Did you check the Baron angle — that's Edwards' finance chair who paid both Rielle and Andrew Young and his wife and kids to get the fuck out of North Carolina but says he didn't get the money from Edwards or the campaign? Oh, right, and this:

The associate, who asked not to be identified, said Mr. Young has privately made conflicting statements about the extent of his relationship with Ms. Hunter and whether he is the child’s father.

Like, all of that, up for review, in the confirmation hearing for the guy who's supposed to play gotcha with the Bushies? I think you need to get yourself a new legal pitbull, as do I.

SPENCER: BUT GODDAMN IT i need to see someone go to jail on this shit. I guess if you're Obama you want to be light years away from Edwards' cocktrouble, but if he doesn't appoint a real left-wing SOB for AG I will be sorely disappointed. Now I feel fucked by John Edwards. Hopefully I remain unpregnant.

MEGAN: Well, how much would you sorta like to see, um, Bill Clinton in that role. If the Dems get 60 in the Senate.

SPENCER: Well, not if he acquiesced to that Penn memo!

MEGAN: Can you imagine Bill Clinton with subpoena power? His bar membership's been reinstated.

SPENCER: and that's a confirmation hearing you relish?

MEGAN: Hey, I said if they get to 60.

SPENCER: actually on second thought, it would be awesome to see Clinton-as-pugilist putting it back on, say, Inhofe or Sessions.

MEGAN: I'm just enjoying the thought of Bill Clinton with the power to investigate the dirty laundry of those that investigated his blowjobs, because you know there is worse than a couple of intern beejes going on in Washington.

SPENCER: But speaking of going back: the right-wing veterans organization Vets For Freedom are sending right-wing Iraq vets to embed in Iraq. and you know what? I have absolutely no problem with this.

MEGAN: Really? That the Weekly Standard and the National Review are putting a bunch of right-wing non-jouno partisan hacks on the masthead for the purpose of war promotion and we're footing the bill? Please explain.

SPENCER: That "we're footing the bill" bullshit applies to ALL EMBEDS.

MEGAN: Yes, which I'm fine with when their stated purpose is not to promote the war and elect John McCain.

SPENCER: Like, you paid for my trip to Baghdad & Mosul last year, and I reported from a liberal perspective. That's structurally indistinguishable from what the VFF ppl are doing.

MEGAN: Except you're an actual reporter.

SPENCER: It's not something the Pentagon is in the business of stopping. You'd rather not live in a world where the Pentagon starts deciding who is and who isn't a reporter.

MEGAN: No, you're right, I just wonder why the WS and the NR can't find actual reporters to go. Is there a word for that?

SPENCER: A bunch of antiwar bloggers have embedded as well. The embed program is open, and in terms of the "harm" they do, only the 27 Percenters who still back Bush would read this shit anyway.

MEGAN: Chiiiickenhawk or something?

SPENCER: No, I doubt that, I just think the Standard & NRO know a gimmick when they see one, and think that it'll be harder for leftwing antiwarriors to attack pieces written by vets. and to that, I must quote Beyonce: "they must not know 'bout me, they must not know 'bout me." but, look, you know, the game is the game, and let's see how they play it.

MEGAN: I am happy to attack pieces written by vets. Heck, I've gotten into no less than two ugly political arguments with veteran friends of mine and finally threw up my hands and said, "If you want to buy what they're selling, rationality and actual facts aren't going to convince you, so don't ever ask me questions again."

SPENCER: Also, speaking of BALLING, everybody note that my roommate and homie Matt Yglesias launched his new ThinkProgress blog today!

MEGAN: Congrats to him! Should we talk about that little war thing that started this weekend? I hear, by the way, that anything good about Russian cuisine comes from Georgia.

SPENCER: I dunno. I make a kickass borscht.

MEGAN: Georgian wine is definitely better, not that it's not virtually impossible to come by here.

SPENCER: So yeah while I was driving for an internet-free weekend in State College, PA Russia attacked Georgia or something? I should know about this shit so enlighten me.

MEGAN: Well, so, Georgia went into the disputed territory of South Ossetia where the citizens apparently want to go back to being Russian, so the Russians moved in. And because they're the Russian military, they routed the Georgians. Now they're bombing the capital of Tbilisi and sending ground forces to Gori, which is in Georgia proper, about which one diplomat said, "They seem to have gone beyond the logical stopping point."

SPENCER: Also LOL my friend Benny's band is on the cover of the new Kerrang!

MEGAN: Man, your friends are sort of kicking ass today. They're like the Russians of pop culture.

SPENCER: Yeah so that sucks and we should set to work on the diplomatic course of getting the UN Security Council to turn back the invasion and restore the status quo ante.

MEGAN: Yeah, that's sort of what the Georgians think only you know who sits on the Security Council?

SPENCER: Yeah yeah.

MEGAN: That's why the UN has been so effective in Chechnya. And you know we aren't going to do it because Bush is hard at work at the Summer Olympics and he's seen into Putin's soul.

SPENCER: You know what sets a really bad precedent? Invading other countries while circumventing the UN Security Council. I mean call me crazy!
MEGAN: Well, right, and that. The Security Council basically functions as a rubber stamp for the foreign policies of its members.

SPENCER: Next he'll look into Rielle Hunter's vagina.

Edwards reportedly hired Hunter in 2006 to produce a series of films about his candidacy before he was actually a candidate — after meeting her in a bar. She didn't exactly have a lot of video production experience. By last September, the videos were scrubbed from the website, and more salacious rumors about him began making the rounds. In December, the National Enquirer came out with its first story that Rielle Hunter was pregnant and that she and Young were claiming to have had the affair. But in January, Page Six published a blind item that, in retrospect, indicates that she was claiming to still be having an affair with Edwards. Rielle's daughter was born February 27, 2008, placing the child's conception around April 2007.

The videos Hunter made for Edwards (and about which she was quoted) were released around New Year's 2006. Is it possible that the affair ended in 2006 while she was still giving press quotes? And that he'd, as he says now, already told Elizabeth? No one noticed the videos were scrubbed until last summer 2007, which is about the time Hunter would've been discovering she was pregnant (and telling people, and showing).

Elizabeth Edwards, by the way, announced that her cancer had come out of remission in March 2007 — about a month before Rielle would've gotten pregnant, supposedly by Andrew Young.

Frankly, I think Edwards is still lying. No one wants to believe he was having sex with a woman he'd hired to work for his campaign, or that he was doing so after his wife announced that she had cancer, so few people are going to question the timing. The story that he cracked Elizabeth's ribs "hugging" her (with the innuendo being while they were having sex) last winter and that's how they discovered the cancer seems a little more... unseemly now, doesn't it? Were they having make-up sex? Or was he still sleeping with his (soon-to-be immunocomprised) wife while having condomless sex with his mistress who he didn't even love?

John Edwards' political appeal relied on a couple of things: his ability to get $400 haircuts while relatively convincingly playing the son-of-a-mill-worker concerned with economic inequality in America; and his ability to be a very attractive politician with a lovely but considered by some to be less-attractive wife with whom he seemed to have a healthy and affectionate relationship. What does he have now? A hippie pregnant mistress from whom, if she openly claims it's his child, he'll demand a paternity test? A mistress that he was (knowingly or not) "sharing" with his staffers while his wife was developing cancer? There's no way to come out ahead of this story, and prevaricating on the timing doesn't help.

There's no way an Obama Administration can nominate him as AG, let alone appoint him to anything that requires Congressional approval. This is the end of the line for John Edwards and his political career, and it should be. Keeping your dick in your pants doesn't require training, just a brain.

Edwards Admits Sexual Affair; Lied as Presidential Candidate [ABC News]
Did John Edwards Sleep With This Lady? [Wonkette]
Enquirer Reports: Rielle with Someone’s Child [Updated] [Wonkette]
Edwards Mystery: Innocuous Videos Suddenly Shrouded In Secrecy [HuffPo]
Scrubbed: Edwards Filmmaker's Deleted Website Raises Questions [HuffPo]
Just Asking [Page Six]
Birth Certificate Of Child Linked To Edwards Lists No Father [McClatchy]
Politics 2008: John Edwards, Untucked [Newsweek]
Elizabeth Edwards's Cancer Returns – but Campaign Goes on [People]
Can We Talk Politics, Please? [NY Times]