Edwards admits National Enquirer was right

On July 24, I wrote about the National Enquirer’s exposure of John Edwards’s affair with Rielle Hunter, and I explained why I felt this was a newsworthy happening, even though the MSM didn’t. In an interview with ABC, Edwards has now admitted the affair, which was going on during his presidential campaign. However, Edwards still denies that Hunter’s child is his.

Update: Here is Edwards’s statement on the matter. He says the affair only went on for a short time in 2006 and that he told his wife about it then, though not the public. But if that’s the case, what was he doing in Hunter’s Los Angeles hotel room in the middle of the night in July 2008 when the Enquirer caught him leaving the room at 2 a.m.? Edwards will be interviewed tonight on Nightline.

From ABC’s account of the interview:

Edwards today admitted the National Enquirer was correct when it reported he had visited Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hilton last month.

“I wanted to keep this mistake I had made two years previously private,” Edwards said.

What’s that? Because he wanted to keep his long-ended affair of 2006 private, he visited his erstwhile mistress at the Hilton in July 2008 and stayed in her room until 2 a.m.? Let’s hope the interviewer on Nightline has a follow-up to that.

UPDATE: I saw the interview on Nightline. Edwards says he met Hunter at the hotel to try to convince her not to go public with their affair, and that there were other people at the “meeting.” But according to the July 21 Enquirer article, Edwards was alone with Hunter in her room from 9:45 p.m. to 2:40 a.m., when he left and was apprehended by the reporters. He says the affair was brief and ended in 2006. He would be crazy, after having been caught, to be continuing further lies. Yet his account of the July 21 “meeting” is a bit hard to believe.

I’ve always disliked Edwards, but he said one thing in this interview I respected him for. The reporter, Bob Woodruff, asked why his wife was not present at the interview, and Edwards said, Elizabeth has done nothing wrong, I have, and there’s no reason for her to be here, and I told her that. And he indicated he disapproved of the way politicians bring their wives with them before the cameras when they have some shameful confession to make. I agree completely.

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August 9

John Hagan writes:

I too watched the Edwards interview on Nightline and was struck by several things he said. His admission that he was a narcissist was compelling. You don’t often see adult men his age come to that kind of understanding. And I found it interesting that he talked about himself as a boy, a boy who would never do to his family the things that as a man he did to them. For all his wealth and success you could see that he understood he had lost something more precious than money or fame; he lost himself.

Still, he’s such an odd individual. He’s always come across as weak and feminine to me. A female friend I know told me she would find it absurd to have an affair with an individual like him. And when I asked her why, this is what she said: “It would be the closest thing to having a lesbian affair, and still be with a man.”

LA replies:

Agreed, but I feel there is more to is oddness than this. There’s the pretty boy aspect, and then there’s the cynical amoral aspect which was evident as soon as he arrived in the Senate, and then there’s the leftist demagogic “Two Americas” aspect. These things don’t fit together at all. I find him to be an unreal figure in several dimensions

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 08, 2008 03:42 PM | Send