Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - Posts
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Thursday, May 14, 2009
Old Chinese Proverb: Man who gets overexcited in support of a candidate is likely to get excitably disappointed when candidate fails to live up to overexcited expectations. Andrew Sullivan moves on to the inevitable next stage in the cycle of his hyperbolic judgment. Instapundit rubs it in. ... P.S.: It's actually a powerful post, if characteristically overexcited. Why is Sullivan so annoyed? Haven't gay rights been making huge, startlingly rapid gains recently? Maybe Obama's just sitting back and letting it happen, worried that if he forces the issue the result will be a backlash. And it turns out Sullivan also has an acute personal motive for wanting to hurry things up:
Here we are, with marriage rights spreading through the country and world and a president who cannot bring himself even to acknowledge these breakthroughs in civil rights, and having no plan in any distant future to do anything about it at a federal level. Here I am, facing a looming deadline to be forced to leave my American husband for good, and relocate abroad because the HIV travel and immigration ban remains in force and I have slowly run out of options ... [E.A.]
Aha. ... Still, you'd think Obama could at least get away with protecting gay servicemembers with skills--like facility in Arabic--the country badly needs. ... 12:12 A.M.
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Doomsday Reconsidered: Some entries from that Edwards timeline:
September 2007 – Anonymous tip comes into National Enquirer hot line saying Edwards was having an affair with Hunter. ...
Late November 2007 – National Enquirer discovers Rielle is living in Chapel Hill and having dinner with Andrew Young and his wife. Sources were saying Rielle was six months pregnant. ...
December 20, 2007 – National Enquirer editor-in-chief David Perel says source for Hunter-Edwards love child story was not a rival political campaign. Calls sources “extraordinarily good” and “beyond reproach.”
Hmm. Who were the Enquirer's sources? Was Perel's source perhaps "not a rival political campaign" because it was ... the Edwards campaign? Maybe the much-disputed "Doomsday" plan not only existed, but was actually put into effect. ... 12:11 A.M.
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All they had to do was say it was a Star Trek joke. Instead they panicked. ... 12:10 A.M.
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When Hype Congeals: Los Angeles brands Mayor Villaraigosa a "failure." ... 12:09 A.M.
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XX Factor breaks out of the Slate blog ghetto! ... 12:08 A.M.
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Wednesday, May 13, 2009
This impressive timeline of the Edwards/Rielle Hunter scandal** alludes to an obvious John Edwards lie I'd forgotten about (it's hard to remember them all). In his alleged "confession" on Nightline, Edwards was asked by Bob Woodruff about a photo that seemed to show him holding a baby in the Beverly Hilton, when he was visiting Hunter [emphasis added]:
WOODRUFF: And that picture is absolutely you and you are holding that baby.
EDWARDS: The picture in the tabloid. I have no idea what that picture is.
WOODRUFF: But you've seen it right?
EDWARDS: I did see it and I cannot make any sense out of that. When I went to this meeting you've already asked me about, uh, I was not wearing a t-shirt, I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I don't know who that picture -- I don't know if that picture is me, it could well be, it looks like me. I don't know who that baby is, I have no idea what that picture is.
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WOODRUFF: But are you saying you don't remember holding that child of Miss Hunter?
EDWARDS: I'm saying you asked me about this photograph, I don't know anything about that photograph, I don't know who that baby is. I don't know if the picture has been altered, manufactured, if it's a picture of me taken some other time, holding another baby -- I have no idea. I was not at this meeting holding a child for my photograph to be taken I can tell you that.
WOODRUFF: You did say you did meet her at a hotel in California.
EDWARDS: She was there, Mr. McGovern was present, and that's where the meeting took place.
WOODRUFF: But you don't remember a baby being there?
EDWARDS: No.
Does anyone believe this? Even if the baby is (as he claimed***) not his, how could he not remember the baby being there? If the pictures were from another visit, then he still knows perfectly well "what that picture is." ... Even his wife seems to have given up on this line of defense, resorting to the contradictory, but equally implausible 'politicians-hold-babies-all-the-time' response.
P.S.: Is it true that the Center for American Progress' Jennifer Palmieri, last seen emasculating poor Matthew Yglesias, really "helped [Edwards] prepare" for the dissembling Nightline interview, as reported by Walter Shapiro? There's a line she can put on her resume! ...
P.P.S.: Even the liberal New Republic is getting into the business of spotting St. Elizabeth's dissembling. Like Lee Stranahan yesterday, TNR's Jason Zengerle notes that on "Larry King" Mrs. Edwards said she "dismissed" tabloid reports of the Hunter affair on 'they-write-about-airplanes-on-the-moon' grounds, even though by her own account her husband had confessed to at least a one-night stand a year earlier. ...
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**--My main problem with this timeline is that, by focusing on Rielle Hunter and Edwards, it creates the appearance that Hunter was Edwards' only extramarital affair, something that's very much unclear at this point. If that's not true--if Edwards had been screwing around for years, for example--it would cast the subsequent agonizing and dissembling in a very different light, no?
***--In his televised "confession," remember, John Edwards claimed not only that the baby wasn't his but that it couldn't possibly be his, a certainty Elizabeth now seems to have abandoned (she says she doesn know--"I don't have any information" -but that it might be "discovered" that the child is his.) ... 5:09 P.M.
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