I feel sorry for his wife and children but not him in the least

[MrLabGuy]

Here is my question. If this affair was back in 2006 what was he doing at the wee hours of the night in a hotel room with her just last Month? He's a dirt-bag politician and a terrible husband and father considering the condition of his long time wife and political posturing over the years.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Former presidential candidate John Edwards, who won nationwide praise and sympathy as he campaigned side-by-side with his cancer-stricken wife, Elizabeth, admitted in shame Friday he had had an extramarital affair with a woman who produced videos for his campaign.

Acknowledging a sex scandal he had dismissed as "tabloid trash" only last month, Edwards said he had told his wife and family long ago but "I had hoped that it would never become public." He denied fathering a daughter, born to the woman with whom he had the affair, and offered to be tested to prove it. A former Edwards campaign staff member professes to be the father. The former North Carolina senator, who was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, confessed to ABC News that he had lied repeatedly about the affair with 42-year-old Rielle Hunter. Hunter's daughter, Frances Quinn Hunter, was born on Feb. 27 this year, and no father's name is given on the birth certificate filed in California.
After the story broke Friday, Edwards released a statement that said, "In 2006, I made a serious error in judgment and conducted myself in a way that was disloyal to my family and to my core beliefs. I recognized my mistake, and I told my wife that I had a liaison with another woman, and I asked for her forgiveness. Although I was honest in every painful detail with my family, I did not tell the public." "With my family, I took responsibility for my actions in 2006, and today I take full responsibility publicly." Edwards declared his presidential candidacy in December 2006. His wife was at his side that day and campaigned enthusiastically with him and by herself in the months that followed. She announced in March 2007 that her cancer, formerly in remission, had returned and there apparently was no cure. She and her husband said it was important for the campaign to continue. Edwards dropped out midway through this year's primaries after it became apparent he could not keep up with front-runners Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. He recently endorsed Obama and has been mentioned as a possible running mate. He was John Kerry's running mate in 2004 when Kerry lost to President Bush. In his statement, he said, "It is inadequate to say to the people who believed in me that I am sorry, as it is inadequate to say to the people who love me that I am sorry.

"In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic. If you want to beat me up feel free. You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself. I have been stripped bare and will now work with everything I have to help my family and others who need my help." The National Enquirer first reported on the affair in October 2007, in the run-up to the Democratic primaries, and Edwards denied it. "The story is false," he told reporters then. "It's completely untrue, ridiculous." He professed his love for his wife, who had an incurable form of cancer, saying, "I've been in love with the same woman for 30-plus years and as anybody who's been around us knows, she's an extraordinary human being, warm, loving, beautiful, sexy and as good a person as I have ever known. So the story's just false." Last month, the Enquirer carried another story stating that its reporters had accosted Edwards in a Los Angeles hotel where he had met with Hunter after her child's birth. Edwards called it "tabloid trash," but he generally avoided reporters' inquiries, as did his former top aides. In an interview, scheduled to air on ABC News' "Nightline" Friday night, Edwards said the tabloid was correct when it reported on his meeting with Hunter at the Beverly Hills Hilton last month. A number of mainstream news organizations had looked into the adultery allegations but had not published or aired stories. But newspapers in Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C., recounted the Enquirer's allegations in prominent articles on Thursday. The Edwardses have three children—Cate, Jack and Emma Claire. Another son, Wade, died at 16 in a 1996 car accident. David Bonior, Edwards' campaign manager for his 2008 presidential bid, said he was disappointed and angry at Friday's news.

"Thousands of friends of the senator's and his supporters have put their faith and confidence in him, and he's let them down," said Bonior, a former congressman from Michigan. "They've been betrayed by his action." Asked whether the affair would damage Edwards' future aspirations in public service, Bonior replied: "You can't lie in politics and expect to have people's confidence." In 1999, when Edwards was a senator, he said of President Clinton and his affair with Monica Lewinsky: "I think this president has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen." In 2006, Edwards' political action committee paid $100,000 in a four-month span to a newly formed firm run by Hunter, who directed the production of four Web videos showing Edwards in supposedly candid moments as well as in a public speech talking about morality. The payments from Edwards' One America Committee to Midline Groove Productions LLC started on July 5, 2006, five days after Hunter incorporated the firm in Delaware. Midline provided "Website/Internet services," according to reports that Edwards' PAC filed with the Federal Election Commission. Midline's work product consists of four YouTube videos showing Edwards in informal settings as he prepares to make speeches in Storm Lake, Iowa, and Pittsburgh, as he prepares for an appearance on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and travels in Uganda in 2006. Edwards' PAC followed the six-figure payment with two smaller payments totaling $14,461, the last on April 1, 2007. At the time Hunter was compiling the videos in 2006, Edwards was preparing his run for president. Episode One of the four videos shows a conversation between Edwards and an unseen woman as the two chat aboard a plane about an upcoming speech in Storm Lake, Iowa. Cutting between clips of the speech and the conversation with the woman, Edwards touches on his standard political themes, declaring that government must do a better job of addressing the great issues of the day, from poverty and education to jobs and the war in Iraq. "I want to see our party lead on the great moral issues—yes, me a Democrat using that word—the great moral issues that face our country," Edwards tells the crowd. "If we want to live in a moral, honest just America and if we want to live in a moral and just world, we can't wait for somebody else to do it. We have to do it."

[Quicksilver]

With a 50% divorce rate in the USA this is no surprise at all.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...7?tag=untagged

[Krimson X]

Edwards should feel ashamed. However, he wasn't the first 2008 presidential candidate to cheat on his wife... he is just the most recent.

John McCain cheated on his first wife, Carol Shepp, with his current wife, Cindy. This all occurred while Carol was recovering from a horriffic car accident that left her severely disfigured and five inches shorter.

It is also alleged that John McCain cheated on Cindy McCain with Vicki Iseman... a charge he categorically denies.

[NOVAX5]

guys, never say never. we are not angels, remember? and mrlabguy, you still have 50 something years of marriage to prove you are a "good husband" if in fact you are.

[LobsterX]

Originally Posted by NOVAX5

guys, never say never. we are not angels, remember? and mrlabguy, you still have 50 something years of marriage to prove you are a "good husband" if in fact you are.

Just because "everybody else is doing it" doesnt make it right! Just because "we are not angels" doesnt justify cheating on your spouse...

I wonder how we as husbands/boyfriends/men feel if and when we catch our wives/girlfriends, who we love dearly, cheating on us? Let us all be honest and think about that for awhile...

[motordavid]

An interesting op-ed, from that bastion of left wing, wacko journalism,
aka the NewYawkTimes. I think Collins says it pretty well: you screw up,
(literally, in this case), stand up, skip the bs/rationale/salvation crap, and get on with it.
The HairDo was a tad too goody-goody, good looking and self-righteous, imo, as most of
the politicos are. Now shut up and go away and save the mea culpas for your household, imo.
Oh, and save us the "gee, I don't know where the money is coming from"...
BR,Ol'UncMtr

Ken Doll in Lust


By GAIL COLLINS
Published: August 8, 2008

When it comes to politicians and sex, our expectations are not all that great. Human nature being what it is, there will continue to be adultery no matter how many instructive scandals they’re exposed to. But you really would think that by now they’d know how to make a decent public confession.

Yet there was John Edwards, ignoring the many, many previous examples of why it is so important to admit the truth quickly and keep it simple. Unable to deny any longer that he had had an affair with a campaign worker, he insisted on parsing. It was all a mistake. If she was paid off, it wasn’t my money. And, in what may be a new high in the annals of weaseldom: my wife’s cancer was in remission.

As to why he did it, Edwards blamed “an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe that you can do whatever you want.” That we could have figured out on our own.

For a man bent on clearing things up, Edwards seemed strangely incurious during his interview on “Nightline” on ABC. He had no idea why his national finance chairman has been funneling payments to his ex-mistress, and he was apparently never tempted to pick up the phone to ask. His 2 a.m. visit with the woman, Rielle Hunter, at a Beverly Hills hotel last month was a secret mission to keep her from going public about their liaison, the briefness and meaninglessness of which cannot be stressed too often. And he has no idea what baby that was in The National Enquirer picture.

Edwards met Hunter in a bar in New York in 2006, and paid her $114,000 to follow him around, documenting his every move for campaign videos. (In a TV interview back in happier times, Hunter called the experience “life-altering.”) Said videos were posted, then mysteriously disappeared from the Edwards Web site, with officials muttering something about campaign finance rules. They exist today on YouTube, where you can see the candidate sitting on his plane, grinning like a hound dog in heat, while he tells Hunter that he doesn’t want to be “some plastic Ken doll that you put in front of the audience,” and pokes himself in the chest while announcing, “I actually want the country to see who I am — who I truly am.”

When The National Enquirer ran a story that Hunter was pregnant and named Edwards as the father, he denied that there had been any relationship. One of his campaign workers stepped up and took responsibility for the baby. But when the little girl was born, Hunter did not list any father on the birth certificate.

All this is weirdly reminiscent of the saga of Grover Cleveland, my favorite American president when it comes to sex scandals. He had barely been nominated in 1884 when a small, scurrilous newspaper from his hometown of Buffalo accused him of being the father of a love child born to Maria Halpin, a store clerk. She later took to drink, and Cleveland, a bachelor, arranged to have the baby adopted by friends.

“Moral Monster,” said my favorite headline, in The Cincinnati Penny Post. “Grover Cleveland’s True Character Laid Bare. A Boon Companion to Buffalo Harlots. A Drunken, Fighting, Roistering Roué.” The scandal almost cost him the election, and the baby inspired a famous political slogan: Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.

It probably wasn’t Cleveland’s child. The birth certificate lists the baby’s name as Oscar Folsom Cleveland, and Oscar Folsom was Cleveland’s married law partner, who had been killed in an accident before the birth. But Cleveland stolidly refused to defend himself and Folsom’s name was never really connected to the scandal. Then, once he was safely in the White House, the new president married Folsom’s beautiful 21-year-old daughter, Frances.

This is as good as it gets for sex scandal survivors. The marriage was happy and Cleveland wound up serving two terms. The American public has always had an extremely pragmatic attitude toward their elected officials and will overlook almost anything if they believe the sinning pol can deliver on the job.

If Edwards’s political career is toast, it will be because he has always seemed to be less than a sum of his parts: the position papers, the “Two Americas,” the photogenic grin, the supersmart wife. The only piece of the package that consistently disappointed was the man himself. He wasn’t a very good running mate for John Kerry, and as a presidential candidate, he always struck me as being about 2 inches deep.

We take whatever lessons we can get from these sad public messes. We will marvel, yet again, at how much less damage would have been done if the offender had taken the inventive tactic of not lying. But on one front, at least, human behavior really does seem to be evolving. Edwards told his wife that she didn’t need to sit loyally by his side while the TV cameras rolled.

[MrLabGuy]

Originally Posted by NOVAX5

guys, never say never. we are not angels, remember? and mrlabguy, you still have 50 something years of marriage to prove you are a "good husband" if in fact you are.

I've been with my wife for 27 years and we are only 42 so we are well on the way to that 50 year mark. Holding on to a relationship starting at the age 15 these days is pretty rare and took some hard work. Now that we have a child we have all the motivation we need to pull through life as a team.

[Wagner]

Liar, Liar pants on fire...literally.

[soccerjunky]

dirt bag lawyer

i've never so much as looked at another woman

[IMG][/IMG]

[MrLabGuy]

Originally Posted by soccerjunky

dirt bag lawyer

i've never so much as looked at another woman

[IMG][/IMG]

Never hurts to look (when the wife is not watching).