Sunday, August 10, 2008

No Kidding, John. Take The Damned Test

HUNTER AND EDWARDS ALOFT
John Edwards' half-assed effort to come clean about his affair with Reille Hunter left a slew of questions unanswered.

Chief among them are:

*
If he wasn't the father of Hunter's child and broke off the affair two years ago, why was he lurking in a stairwell of her current digs, the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, in the middle of the night? It's time for John Boy to take a DNA test even if Hunter says no.

* What was Hunter paid when, from where and by whom? The suspicion grows that money contributed by Mr. Squeaky Clean's presidential campaign found its way to her, which is probably a violation of federal election law and clearly not what contributors thought their ducats were being used for.

Let's also revisit the "issue" of whether its anyone's business if a politician who claims the moral high ground is screwing someone on the side.

Whether I cheat on my wife is of no consequence outside of my family. A politician, especially someone who aspires to the highest office in the land, not only sacrifices a substantial degree of privacy, but if his statements and deeds clash as have Edwards' -- and as also was true of Eliot Spitzer, Newt Gingrich and that Clinton fella, to name just a few people who not only diddled others but diddled their constitutents -- then what they do in private is very much a public matter.

If John -- and yes, Elizabeth Edwards, as well -- had not been so consumed with politics and power, then they might have understood the implications of sacrificing their privacy, especially when the man who would be king made a willful decision to add adulterer to his career resume.

All that so noted, Edwards needs to deal with the mess he has caused so we can get back full time to stuff that really matters.

Photograph by Robert Scoble via The Associated Press

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