The National Enquirer is reporting that John Edwards is dishing out 15K a month to his lover/former lover (who knows?) Rielle Hunter as “hush money.”
Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. Not in today’s California anyway. There’s a child involved (Frances Quinn Hunter, according to the Enquirer) and a one-time high-priced, high-income trial lawyer like Edwards with high net worth (28,000 square foot home!) would likely end up paying a lot more if he were dealing with the family courts and not “under the table,” as it were. Other states might be equally tough on this form of “dead beat dad.”
Rielle must surely know this. Could this be the explanation for the furtive meeting at the Beverly Hilton? Could it have been a negotiation and not a tryst? I certainly don’t know but it’s a possibility. Maybe the Enquirer will tell us. As Mickey Kaus indicates, the LAT is unlikely to be the source of any information. They don’t deal in the gutter. [Like www.rogerlsimon.com.-ed. Yes, like that.]
MORE: Kaus talks the talk on Edwards and “the undernews” here.
Well, not always… but for the last two LA “big ones” – today’s Chino Hills quake and the much bigger 1994 Northridge quake – I was far from home. I am still on Kauai and was hiking the Kalalau Trail when the shaker hit today. I didn’t know about it until hours later. In ‘94, I was at the Sundance Institute, pretending to teach people how to write screenplays. I learned about that one over breakfast. Neither quake did any damage to my house.
What this all means, I’m not sure. But maybe I could extort some money from the LA City Council by promising to stay out of town. (I won’t tell them I was home for the 1971 Sylmar quake, living in an old house in Echo Park where the internal chimney came down three feet from my head and almost buried me alive.)
And, to make matters worse, the notes were entrusted to me personally and in confidence to wedge between the cracks in the Herodian stones. But I read them in advance! So – whether or not Obama’s people leaked the candidate’s “message to his Maker” left in the Western Wall (see Maariv via Instapundit) – I cannot go on longer with my own intolerable guilt and must come clean now. I broke the sacred trust!
Here are the circumstances:
About twenty years ago I was traveling in Israel to research a novel. My companion for a few days (name withheld to protect the semi-innocent) was a William Morris Agent. That agent, a woman, had to return to the US ahead of me and realized she had forgotten to deposit about a half-dozen messages in the cracks of the Wall. The messages were from secretaries and assistants who work at William Morris. I agreed to take them and the agent left me with those half-dozen folded messages with the admonition not to read them.
Yes, I opened them. And I read them. And, yes, they all said the same thing and, sadly, there is probably not one reader who could not predict it. [Dear Lord, help me find a nice Jewish man.-ed. Right the first time.]
Now, I wonder, what did Obama’s message say? [Dear Lord, help me find a nice Jewish vote.-ed. Right again!]
On a day it has emerged John McCain is actually ahead in one major poll, Robert Novak (to whom we should all lend our emotional support in his battle with cancer) begins his recent column: “In the contest for president, Barack Obama is a magnetic candidate supported by a disciplined, well-organized campaign. John McCain seems wooden, with a campaign that appears to be in shambles. Yet Obama’s lead in the polls over McCain is fragile because he so far has not won the support of a majority of American voters.”
I’m not sure if Novak is just spouting this conventional wisdom to make a point, but I question the assumption. McCain may not be a good speechmaker, but he is far from wooden one-on-one and in town hall meetings. It is Obama who appears uptight in these venues, which are the more telling ones when it comes to revealing personality and behavior. Prepared speeches have their place, but everyone knows they are just that – prepared. Adam Nagourney and others are sucking their thumbs over the strange phenomenon of McCain hanging so close (even being narrowly ahead) in a year that would normally so completely favor the Democrats. They have all kinds of theories, but Occam’s Razor tempts me to the simplest. McCain seems like a regular guy – an attractive trait not very common among politicians.
As Gawker points out, it’s not just the MSM. New Media mainstay Wikipedia is engaging in some “ethnic (make that ‘political’) cleansing” on the John Edwards love-child scandal, an affair whose veracity has become as obvious as OJ’s guilt. (No, I’m not equating Edwards with Simpson.)
This is disgraceful behavior on the part of Wikipedia, which is demonstrating bias that errs on the side of laughable. But we should be grateful. This censorship reminds us never to trust anyone. [Including this blog?-ed. Definitely.] Especially do not trust those whose expertise pretends to be encyclopedic. No one’s is, not even an organization that pretends to use the wisdom of crowds in the manner of Wikipedia. Too often we reference Wikipedia as if it were authoritative. It isn’t. Not even faintly.
It’s a rainy day here in Kauai (I know – tough gazook!) so I have had a chance to cruise around the Net a bit. ABC is reporting an uptick in terror concern: U.S. Headed for ‘Heightened Alert’ Stage. Since all politics is local, I can report that I noticed something odd myself when journeying back and forth on the Bainbridge Island-Seattle ferry last week – a heightened presence of bomb-smelling sniffer dogs. These cute fellows were a heavy presence, nosing out the trunks of the cars lined up for the ferry on both ends. Being an interloper from LA, I can’t be sure if this uptick was significant, but there were more dogs in evidence than I can remember, having traveled the route on over a dozen occasions now.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama seems to adopting a foreign policy best described as “McCain lite.” Technically, Obama doesn’t get intelligence estimates until he is officially nominated but does he know something we don’t know? Or is he just reading the normal tea leaves and sashaying to the center for election purposes? Certainly the latter, but possibly the former. But what does this make Obama the man? Who is he really?
Jon Voight, one of Hollywood’s more outspoken figures on the center-right, is skeptical: “Sen. Barack Obama has grown up with the teaching of very angry, militant white and black people: the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, William Ayers and Rev. Michael Pfleger. We cannot say we are not affected by teachers who are militant and angry. We know too well that we become like them, and Mr. Obama will run this country in their mindset.”
Jon has a point, but actually I think Obama is more confused than that. We have all been subjected to various influences – it becomes a question of how we process them, how we decide to react. Obama appears to be one of those guys who stands back, waiting to see which way the wind is blowing, then he sways one way or the other according to the moment, masking his vacillations with high-flown rhetoric. I wouldn’t call him a socialist, as Voight does elsewhere in his oped, or anything else. He doesn’t have a real opinion. There is, in the words of Gertrude, no there there.
I started this post in a hammock in front of the cottage we are renting on the North Shore of Kauai, just south-east of Tunnels Beach (if you’re a Kauai maven), but the squinting from the sunlight bouncing off the Pacific got too much for me and I had to come inside. This gave me a chance to surf the Internet for the first time in a couple of days to discover the headline Gallup: 9-Point Lead [for Obama] After World Tour.
Oh, well. After a morning of snorkeling with the butterfly fish, it doesn’t bother me so much. Maybe if Obama wins I’ll leave the country–hey, it’s the Hollywood thing in reverse–and live out my Gauguin fantasies. Of course, I’m a happily married man, so I’d be going with my wife (hence no vahines) but the siren song of getting away has me in its grip. Have a good vacation, if you’re having one. I’m going to try to enjoy mine.
BTW, I watched some guys kite-surfing in a heavy wind this afternoon. Amazing.
At least that’s so in the over-heated and oddly self-referential world of Joe Klein, where John McCain is supposedly manipulated by “Jewish neoconservatives.” Poor McCain, after all these years, unable to think for himself.
Speaking of “Jewish” sciences, I wonder what Klein’s unconscious is like. [No, don't go there.-ed. I was only going to call him a liberal reactionary. I heard that already.]
More here.
I wasn’t keen on blogging more on the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter Affair (her real name is Lisa Druck, by the way… then Lisa Hunter… her father-in-law was attorney Alex Hunter of Boulder fame) – gossip isn’t my thing (though I enjoy it like the rest of the world). But since the Los Angeles Times is now forbidding its bloggers from talking, I now thought I’d say a bit more…. especially since the National Enquirer is filing a criminal complaint against the Beverly Hilton and its security force for manhandling the paper’s reporters. If the Enquirer weren’t a hundred percent confident that Edwards was at the hotel with Rielle, I doubt they’d be going to the law.
Is this news? The mainstream media seems to think not. They hide behind professionalism, whatever that means, when the extent of their bias has been documented everywhere. It’s beyond comic. It makes you yearn for the days when reporters were grunts with a high school education. They were more honest.
Edwards was a candidate for vice president of the United States and, until very recently, a candidate for president. He was also being bandied about, quite recently in Newsweek, among other places, as a candidate for vice president once again, a heart beat away, as they say. Normally that would be more than enough. So enough said.
Meanwhile, some more about Rielle Hunter: when she was Lisa Druck she was the heroine of Jay McInerney’s Story of My Life, not, as someone wrote in the comments here, a Bret Easton Ellis novel. After her life as a player, she hooked up with Kip Hunter, said by friends of mine who know him to be a “very nice guy.” Lisa ditched Kip and sought “spiritual enlightenment” — hence the Rielle moniker, whatever that means. In other words, she was just more of the flotsam and jetsam that spills regularly out of Hollywood. It doesn’t say too much for the taste of John Edwards, but then, as we know, he’s building a 28000 square foot house.[Who's going to live there?-ed.]
What of poor Elizabeth Edwards in all this? I remember meeting her at the Personal Democracy Forum a few years back and listening to her speak. She was the highlight of the Forum at that time and, with Elliot Spitzer (ironically!) its keynote speaker. Although I thought her politics naive and conventional in the extreme, I thought Elizabeth was an honest, impassioned woman with an incredible, almost worshipful devotion to her husband. (We knew she had cancer at that point and it made her all the more sympathetic). She was also a huge fan and devotee of blogs and new media, which she surfed, although I doubt she was much of a reader of, say, Powerline. In all, an estimable person. Is she the victim in all this? In the obvious sense, of course. But if she separates himself from her mega-narcisstic husband, perhaps she has done herself a favor.
UPDATE: Some cheap psychoanalysis. I would guess that Edwards, like many cheaters, wanted to be caught. After all, it is hard to conceive he would be that dumb as to conduct a tryst in this modern/post-Bill Clinton era in, of all places, the Beverly Hilton. The Hilton — where such events as the Pre-Oscar luncheon and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent victory celebration are held — would be among the last places you would choose. It’s often a virtual den of paparazzi with staff and others always standing by to tip the gossip press on the latest celeb sighting. There are thousands of places in Southern California more low key for such a meeting. If Edwards is indeed that dumb, we are certainly lucky he never became President. Among those who should be scratching their heads at this moment are his supporters.
(Lighter side here.)
Much as I hate to see it, Obama appears to be getting a bounce from his peregrinations. It’s a PT Barnum, rather than an Abraham Lincoln moment. Up here on Bainbridge Island, far from the madding crowds of the Champs Élysées, you can almost sense it. The era of President Obama is upon us. We have arrived in an Orwellian universe where image is all. In a way, it’s surprising it took us so long to get here. I wish I could be as optimistic as Jennifer Rubin who, in her fine article, thinks that the World Obama Tour holds within it the seeds of his decline. Maybe so, if one were to examine the facts. But facts and reality seem irrelevant. If they were, this would have been over long ago. Hillary Clinton would have been the Democratic candidate. We are watching a Shakespearean epic unfold before our eyes. The King of Callow standing before the masses with his arms outstretched, the adoring media applauding in unison.
