John Edwards, chasing ambulances again

BY BYRON YORK 

http://washingtonexaminer.com/

May 26, 2014

Former U.S. Sen. John Edwards addresses the media alongside his daughter Cate Edwards at the federal courthouse on May 31, 2012 in Greensboro, N.C.

Sara D. Davis/Getty Images

Former Sen. John Edwards came within a few electoral votes of being vice president of the United States. But now, after a loss in the 2004 election, a brief run in 2008 ended by spectacular adultery and love-child scandal, a hung jury in a multiple-felony campaign-finance case, and the death of wife Elizabeth, Edwards has returned to the occupation in which he first made his name: the practice of personal injury law.

Edwards' new firm, Edwards Kirby, based in Raleigh with an office in Washington, is pursuing customers with all the zeal of a late-night, local-cable informercial. Its website -- call 1 (866) 409-2250 -- is dominated by the words: "…AND JUSTICE FOR ALL" and outlines the firm's expertise in personal injury litigation.

"Whether your loss occurred on an operating table, a factory floor, at the workplace or on the highway, our wrongful death lawyers will explore every avenue of recovery," the Edwards Kirby site says. "We have a history of securing record-setting verdicts and settlements in cases involving personal injury, including: Trucking and Auto Accidents; Wrongful Death and Catastrophic Injury; Drowning Accidents; Burn Injuries; Construction and Premise Liability; [and] Defective or Unsafe Products."

Edwards has scored some of his biggest wins in medical malpractice suits; indeed, he was once so successful that he was accused of driving entire fields of medical specialists out of North Carolina and sending insurance rates through the roof. The new Edwards Kirby firm is looking for the same type of business. "Whether your case involves birth injuries caused in the delivery room, botched surgery or a missed diagnosis, the medical malpractice lawyers at Edwards Kirby can advise and represent you," the website says.

The homepage features a sidebar with the headline PROVEN RESULTS. The message is simple and clear: We win big money:

DROWNING/POOL ACCIDENTS

$30.9 MILLION decision for 5-year old girl injured by a pool drain pump.

CATASTROPHIC INJURIES

$23.3 MILLION verdict for child who suffered brain injuries at birth.

TRUCK/AUTO ACCIDENTS

$10.75 MILLION settlement for family of children injured/killed in truck accident.

BURN/ELECTROCUTION INJURIES

$4.1 MILLION verdict for burn injuries received while on the job.

CONSTRUCTION/PREMISE LIABILITY

$8 MILLION settlement for passerby killed during construction accident.

Some readers might think Edwards has been disbarred. He hasn't. He was indicted in June 2011 on six felony counts, accused of using campaign funds to cover up his affair with Rielle Hunter, a woman he hired to make a video for his 2008 presidential run. One reason Edwards did not plead guilty to a reduced charge -- he had the chance -- was that it might have involved disbarment. "Friends said he was loath to lose his law license," the New York Times reported in 2011. "He has expressed interest in practicing public-service law."

Edwards was back in the courtroom recently, suing an emergency-room doctor for "brain damage and physical injuries that a 4-year-old Virginia boy received in December 2009 when he was an infant in the care of Pitt County Memorial Hospital," according to the Raleigh News-Observer. The plaintiffs had already won a $13 million settlement from the hospital involved; the jury deadlocked in the case against the doctor.

"I really loved being back in the courtroom," Edwards told the News-Observer. "It really felt like a gift for me."

It's not known how much Edwards will take home from the $13 million settlement in the brain damage case. But the fortunes of lawyers like him come from taking a big part — sometimes half — of multi-million dollar awards in jury trials. The bigger the award, the bigger Edwards' payday. But Edwards told the News-Observer that his work is consistent with the populist focus on poverty he emphasized in the "two Americas" message of his political campaigns.

"Two Americas — heartbreaking for me and a lot of people — is still alive and well," Edwards told the paper. "It’s not gotten better. There’s a lot that can be done….The courtroom allows [plaintiffs] to level the playing field."

Related:

John Edwards is starting a new Raleigh law firm

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/11/18/3385956/john-edwards-is-starting-a-new.html#storylink=cpy

http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/11/18/3385956/john-edwards-is-starting-a-new.html

Hang on, Tar Heels, it's going to be wild

BY ROB CHRISTENSEN - Staff Writer
The News & Observer
http://www.newsobserver.com/
June 4, 2011

Former U.S. Senator John Edwards and his daughter Cate make their way through the media to a waiting car in front of the Hiram H. Ward Federal Building in Winston-Salem, N.C. where he was arraigned Friday June 3, 2011
(CHUCK LIDDY - cliddy@newsobserver.com)

It was in courtrooms like the federal building in Winston-Salem that a country-boy-on-the-make that everyone called Johnny began carving out his legendary law career.

Who knew back in the 1980s that it would lead to a string of million-dollar verdicts, to the U.S. Senate, to two runs for president, and to the Democratic vice presidential nomination?

Or that in the blink of an eye, it would all come crashing down upon John Edwards, not only dispatching his political career to the dust bin, but leading on Friday to a criminal indictment and his name on an arrest warrant.

So hard has been Edwards' fall that it is hard to find a person who has a kind word to say about him in his home state. Many would just as soon forget Edwards.

But ready or not, North Carolina is about to get a full immersion in the Edwardian scandal - weeks of testimony about an illicit affair, a love child, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of hush money passed in a box of chocolate.

The trial will likely be a media circus unlike the state has ever seen. It will make the criminal proceedings surrounding former House Speaker Jim Black (sentenced to prison) and former Gov. Mike Easley (who accepted a plea bargain) look like traffic court. Think the Rod Blagojevich trial on steroids.

With the Edwards trial this year, and the national Democratic convention next year, political reporters from Japan to Finland will be setting their GPS to Interstate 85 during the next 16 months.

Even though he was the subject of a lengthy grand jury investigation in Raleigh, it seems likely the trial itself will be in Greensboro or Winston-Salem, which is in the U.S. Middle District, where Edwards' Chapel Hill home is and where his campaign headquarters was located.

Edwards faced a difficult decision - whether to accept a plea deal from federal prosecutors on a felony count or to fight the case in court.

To fight the case, Edwards will likely have to spend millions of dollars of his own money, put his family through the bright glare of a highly publicized trial that will splatter the scandal all across the nation's TV screens again. And he risks losing. More than most people, Edwards knows that facing a jury is a game of roulette, and jurors may simply decide to punish a guy who cheated while his wife was battling cancer.

In Edwards' favor, the prosecutors' case is far from a slam dunk. Numerous legal commentators have remarked on how the federal prosecutors seem to be reaching. Campaign law violations usually involve unreported donations to a campaign - not gifts made by supporters to a candidate's girlfriend and former aide.

"A remarkably weak case," was how Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal a watch dog group, described the case.

I have talked to conservatives who are troubled by the indictment as well, comparing the Edwards case to the prosecution of former Bush White House aides Karl Rove and Scooter Libby as an example of overzealous prosecution.

While various groups and individuals expressed reservations about the Edwards prosecution, there were few voices coming to his defense Friday - no statements from North Carolina political figures, or former campaign aides, or former Senate colleagues.

Edwards was always a political loner; he didn't work his way up through politics, but financed his 1998 Senate campaign out of his own pocket. Many Democrats were attracted to his politics, and saw him as a progressive voice for the poor. His most ardent backers even saw him for a while as the second coming of Bobby Kennedy.

But many of those same people became disenchanted with his hubris; and then disillusioned with his recklessness and his treatment of his late wife Elizabeth.

In his autobiographical book, "Four Trials," Edwards talks about how much he relied on Elizabeth as a sounding board for his big cases.

But now that he faces his biggest trial, Edwards seems a man alone.

rob.christensen@newsobserver.com or 919-829-4532

Meet John Edwards

Political Hay

By John Tabin

The American Spectator

http://www.spectator.org/
Published 8/11/2008 12:08:30 AM

In this photo provided by Robert Scoble, former Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards, right, is seen seated next to Rielle Hunter, left, on a plane from New Hampshire to Reno, Nev. Friday, Dec. 29, 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. On Friday, Aug. 8, 2008, Edwards admitted to having and affair with Hunter.(AP Photo/Robert Scoble)

John Edwards hasn't stopped lying.

After many angry denials that he had sex with that woman, Rielle Hunter, Edwards went on Nightline Friday to confess that yes, he did have an affair with Hunter, and yes, he was caught by National Enquirer reporters while visiting Hunter last month at the Beverly Hilton.

But he was quick to add several caveats:

(A) The affair was brief; it started and ended in 2006. This was when his wife's cancer (which is now terminal) was in remission, he makes a point to emphasize.

(B) Rielle Hunter's baby, who was born in February, is not his. Because of the timing, "it's not possible."

(C) The affair happened after he hired Hunter, who had no real filmmaking experience to speak of, to film behind-the-scenes campaign videos for $114,000.

(D) He knows nothing about any hush-money Hunter has received.

(E) He knows nothing about where the National Enquirer got a picture of him holding a baby in what appears to be a Beverly Hilton hotel room.

All of these assertions are suspect. One is demonstrably false.

Start with (A). If the affair had been over so long ago, why was Edwards still visiting Hunter so recently? His answer is that he was meeting with her to convince her not to talk to the press. But why was he worried about the press?

The mainstream press, shamefully, had totally ignored the story, to the point that this is as much a media scandal as a sex scandal. The New York Times was happy to run vague innuendo about John McCain on its front page in February (the week before Hunter's baby was born) but fastidiously avoided looking into the Edwards affair, which was first reported by the Enquirer in October 2007.

A McCain spokesman declined to comment when I asked him on Friday whether there's a partisan double-standard in how the media handles adultery rumors. Readers can draw their own conclusion.

As for the Enquirer, it hadn't run anything on Edwards since December. If the goal was to keep his name out of the tabloid's pages, it was pretty dumb to risk getting caught in the same place with Hunter.

Why didn't he just pick up the phone? And if the affair was over as early as 2006, why was Hunter still on the Edwards campaign payroll through April 2007?

If his claim about the timing of the affair is false, that of course undermines assertion (B), that Hunter's baby can't possibly be his. Edwards said on Nightline that he's willing to take a paternity test. But read between the lines of the exchange:

WOODRUFF: Have you taken a paternity test?

EDWARDS: I have not, I would welcome participating in a paternity test. Be happy to participate in one. I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine because of the timing of events, so I know it's not possible. Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen.

WOODRUFF: Are you going to do that soon?

EDWARDS: I'm only one side -- I'm only one side of the test, but I'm happy to participate in one.

WOODRUFF: Has Miss Hunter said, she does not want to do this DNA test?

EDWARDS: I don't know what she has said.

That "I'm only one side" line sort of came out of nowhere, didn't it?

It should have been no surprise to careful viewers of the Nightline interview that Hunter issued a statement through her lawyer Saturday that "Rielle will not participate in DNA testing or any other invasion of her or her daughter's privacy now or in the future." Edwards seemed to be anticipating just such a response from Hunter. Rather than demanding a paternity test to clear his name, he explicitly tossed the ball into Hunter's court.

Hunter's response -- invoking her and her daughter's privacy -- is a little odd if she expects the test to come up negative. How much of an invasion of privacy is it to prove that someone isn't your child's father -- especially when you've already made public assertions about the child's paternity on the record?

THE ASSERTION THAT IS definitely untrue is (C). Sam Stein of the Huffington Post has plenty of evidence that Edwards and Hunter knew each other for seven months before Hunter was hired by the campaign. Emails from those seven months indicate that the affair was going on.

There's no mystery as to why Edwards would lie about that: It would be one thing if Edwards had an affair with someone who happened to work for him, but anyone who donated to the Edwards campaign has to be appalled to learn that Edwards hired this woman because she was his mistress. This moves the scandal beyond mere sex and into the realm of financial corruption.

Speaking of which, ABC News has confirmed that Rielle Hunter has received $15,000 a month to hide from the press in Santa Barbara, California. Her benefactor is Fred Baron, who was national finance chair to the Edwards campaign. Did Baron really drop all that coin without so much as a "don't worry, I'll take care of this" to Edwards?

(Also hiding in Santa Barbara on Baron's dime: Andrew Young, an Edwards campaign aide who has claimed that he is the real father of Hunter's baby. When Young moved to California, he brought along his wife and children. His wife is either really, really easygoing about infidelity, or she knows that her husband is taking the fall for Edwards.)

That brings us to (E), the photo of Edwards holding a baby. It's probably not from the same night that Enquirer reporters confronted Edwards -- the text accompanying the photos never says that it is, and his shirt doesn't match the dress shirt that both he and the Enquirer say he was wearing that night.

Enquirer editor-in-chief David Perel has told the Washington Post that there was at least one other meeting between Hunter and Edwards at the Hilton. Presumably we'll learn more. It's become clear that the Enquirer has been intentionally holding things back and letting them trickle out slowly, the better to sell papers.

In his Nightline interview, Edwards repeatedly derided the National Enquirer, dismissing it as just another supermarket tabloid printing spurious rumors. Now, it's true that the Enquirer doesn't adhere to standard journalistic practices. The tabloid routinely pays sources for information, which can invite mischief if sources are greedy and dishonest.

But at this point in the story, it's no longer the supermarket tabloid that has the big credibility problem -- it's John Edwards.

John Tabin is a frequent online contributor to The American Spectator and AmSpecBlog.

Keeping It Rielle

By MAUREEN DOWD
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
August 10, 2008

WASHINGTON- John Edwards’s confession was a little bit breathtaking.
Not the sex stuff. That happens here all the time.

And certainly not covering up the sex stuff. That happens here all the time, too. First people uncover; then they cover up. Nobody’s ever had sex with that woman until, suddenly, they have.

The stunning admission Edwards made to ABC’s Bob Woodruff, and in a written statement from Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon, was that he’s a narcissist.

He admitted that wallowing in “self-focus” out on the trail and thinking you’re “special” can result in a solipsism that “leads you to believe you can do whatever you want, you’re invincible and there’ll be no consequences.”

Auto-psychoanalysis by the perp. That’s really rich. When Bill Clinton acknowledged an affair, after equally adamant denials, he simply went into an old-fashioned spiral of penitence, his allegedly long, dark night of his alleged soul.

Even in confessing to preening, Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic? Given his diagnosis, I’m sure his H.M.O. would pay.

The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.

So narcissist walks into a New York bar and meets a legendarily wacky former Gotham party girl — whose ’80s exploits were chronicled in a novel by her former boyfriend Jay McInerney because the behavior of her and her friends “intrigued and appalled me.” When you appall Jay McInerney, you know you’re in trouble.


Webcastr.com Breaks John Edwards/Rielle Hunter Videos on the Web.
(PRNewsFoto/Webcastr.com)
Photo Tools

The president manqué gives Rielle Hunter, formerly Lisa Druck, more than $114,000 to shoot vain little videos for his Web site (even though she’s a neophyte), one of which is scored with the song “True Reflections” about the Narcissus pool, which goes: “When you look into a mirror, do you like what’s looking at you? Now that you’ve seen your true reflections, what on earth are you gonna do?”

He has an affair with Hunter, while he’s honing his speech on the imperative to “live in a moral, honest, just America.” A married former aide says he’s the father when she gets pregnant, even though she’s telling people Edwards is the dad. And one of his campaign donors pays off Hunter to get her resettled with the baby out of North Carolina.

But the Breck Girl wants a gold star for the fact that he sent his marriage into remission when his wife was in remission. That’s special.

In his statement, he bleats: “You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself. I have been stripped bare.” Isn’t stripping bare how he got into this mess?

It isn’t like we didn’t know that the son of a millworker was a little enraptured by himself, radiating self-love from his smile and his man-in-a-hurry airs and the notorious $800 bill for a pair of haircuts and his two-minute YouTube hair primping to the tune of “I Feel Pretty.”

Certain men assume that power confers sexual privilege. And in American politics, there is an eternal disjunction between character and achievement. Sinners do good things, saints do bad things.

Still, it’s bizarre the way these pols spend millions getting their faces plastered everywhere and then think they can do something in secret. “Yeah, I didn’t think anyone would ever know about it, I didn’t,” Edwards said.

In one of the Web films Hunter directed, he actually flirts with the blonde, laughingly telling her that his address on morality is “a great speech” and complaining, “Why don’t you hear me give it live?”

In this image made from video and provided by Chuck Olsen, Reille Hunter films John Edwards after a rally in New Hampshire on Friday, Dec. 29, 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. On Friday, Aug. 8, 2008, Edwards admitted to having and affair with Hunter.
(AP Photo/Chuck Olsen)

For some reason, super-strivers have a need to sell what is secretly weakest about themselves, as if they yearn for unmasking. Edwards’s decency and concern for the weak in society — except for his own wife. Bill Clinton’s intellect and love of community — except for his stupidity and destructiveness about Monica. Bush the Younger’s jocular, I’m-in-charge self-confidence — except for turning over his presidency, as no president ever has, to his Veep. Eliot Spitzer’s crusade for truth, justice and the American way — except at home.

In the Hunter video titled “Plane Truths,” Edwards is relaxing on his plane, telling the out-of-frame director: “I’ve come to the personal conclusion that I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am, but I don’t know what the result of that will be. But for me personally, I’d rather be successful or unsuccessful based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll that you put up in front of audiences.” Ken couldn’t have said it better.

Back in 2002, Edwards sent me a Ken doll dressed in bathing trunks, Rio de Janeiro Ken, with a teasing note, because he didn’t like my reference to him as a Ken doll in a column.

In retrospect, the comparison was not fair — to Ken.

HE WAS ALWAYS A FAKE

By Kirsten Powers
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
Posted: 3:54 am
August 9, 2008

John Edwards "shocked" the political world yesterday by admitting he'd cheated on his wife of 30 years with a campaign aide, Rielle Hunter.

If it looks like a phony, walks like a phony, quacks like a phony, it's a phony.

There's nothing particularly shocking about a politician cheating, and there's even less shock in learning that Edwards has been lying through his teeth about his own affair. In fact, we should assume that his detailed timeline about the affair is likely just another lie.


Edwards: Philanderer shamelessly ran as a family man.

As is usual with people who've been unfaithful, he's already told a string of lies. On July 23, Edwards denied the recent allegations and called the National Enquirer story "tabloid trash."

Last October, he said: "It's completely untrue, ridiculous. 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."

There are many honorable people in politics who aren't cheaters - but the ones who rise to the top have a disproportionate problem with staying true to their spouses: FDR, Bill Clinton, John Kennedy, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson to name a few. Even the "honorable" John McCain cheated on his first wife with his current wife Cindy - earning him the ire of the Reagans, who excommunicated him from their circle of friends.

But something about Edwards always seemed uniquely phony, even by the standards of politics. Actually, nothing about him seemed authentic.

Who was he? Apparently, whatever he thought people wanted him to be. In 2000, he helped found the "New Democrat Coalition" for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) along with Sen. Joe Lieberman and others. Then, for his 2004 presidential run, he staked out the populist "Two Americas" theme. By 2008, he'd completed a total morph into a class warrior who pandered to the farthest reaches of the Democratic Left.

The poor suddenly became a great concern to him after his 2004 loss - yet he saw no disconnect in building a massive mansion as he crusaded for the poverty-stricken. He discovered New Orleans when he wanted to make his 2008 campaign announcement, but was nowhere to be seen back when the tragedy occurred.

In campaign focus groups, people would say something about him was "too perfect," that there must be "something wrong with him." A YouTube clip of him obsessing over his hair captured what so many felt: He was more concerned with appearances than anything else.

Edwards' statement yesterday explained: "In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic." Is he really past the narcissism bug? In an ABC interview airing last night, Edwards took great care to explain that he only cheated on Elizabeth when she was in remission - not when her cancer was full blown.

What a relief.

By the way, Edwards isn't the only one dishonored. The media accepted his denials of any affair - while holding at least one other candidate to a different standard. The New York Times insinuated in a front-page story that McCain had had an affair with a lobbyist - an allegation utterly without evidence. And MSNBC's Keith Ollberman broke into scheduled programming to hawk the story.

But it's Edwards who most deserves our disgust.

Normally, cheating on your spouse is a private matter. Many Americans wind up facing it; many families stay intact and recover. I hope that's so for the Edwards family.

But this is not a private matter: Following his affair, Edwards chose to run for president, using his family as a centerpiece for his campaign. In June of last year, he accepted the Father of the Year Award from Father's Day/Mother's Day Council. Shortly afterward, he renewed his vows with his wife and provided pictures to People magazine.

And in December, Katie Couric asked the candidates about the importance of marital fidelity in assessing a presidential candidate. True to form, Edwards said that it was a "fundamental" way to "judge people and human character" - but shouldn't be a "controlling factor" in choosing a president.

Unfortunately she didn't ask him what it would tell you about a politician if he used his family as a campaign prop and then lied to the public repeatedly about an affair.

Edwards admits affair

Raleigh News & Observer
http://www.newsobserver.com/
From Staff and Wire Reports
August 8, 2008

John Edwards acknowledged Friday that he had an extramarital affair with a campaign filmmaker while running for president, ending months of denials of what he had dismissed as “tabloid trash.”
Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, went on ABC’s “Nightline” to deliver a stunning admission: Yes, he had sex with Rielle Hunter, a 44-year-old videographer hired by his campaign. No, he said, he did not father her child.


ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff (L) interviews former U.S. Democratic Presidential candidate and former Senator John Edwards in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, August 8, 2008. Edwards has admitted to having had an extramarital affair with a woman he met in a New York City bar in 2006, ABC News reported on Friday. REUTERS/ABC News/Handout (UNITED STATES).

“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,” Edwards said in a statement issued after ABC News reported the news Friday afternoon on its Web site.

“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.”

In apologizing, Edwards said: “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 admission likely ends Edwards’ once-meteoric political career — which saw him rise from a prominent Raleigh trial lawyer to the U.S. Senate, two serious presidential campaigns and a place on the 2004 ticket as a vice presidential candidate.

Wade Smith, a former law partner in Raleigh, said the scandal would likely “have a profound impact on his ability to go forward with a public life.”

“I hope that in the long run people will remember the good things he did,” Smith said.

The disclosure is likely to have little effect on the presidential race in North Carolina, where polls suggest that Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama are in a competitive contest. Edwards did not have a large political organization in the state. His popularity had diminished in the Tar Heel state as he moved to his political left to win the Democratic presidential primaries.

But the acknowledgment tarnished Edwards’ image as a clean-cut family man who stood by his wife through the loss of their son in an automobile accident in 1996, and during her continuing battle with breast cancer.

“One of the very strong pieces of John Edwards was his relationship with his wife,” said Wayne Lesperance, a professor at New England College in New Hampshire, where Edwards gave the commencement address last year. “He was seen as the kind of husband that a lot of men would like to be in those situations and that a lot of wives would like to have. He became a model husband in that circumstance.

“This is the kind of thing that is really gut-wrenching.”

‘What kind of mess?’

Supporters reacted with sadness and anger.

Edwards’ former campaign manager, former U.S. Rep. David Bonior of Michigan, said Edwards betrayed thousands of supporters’ faith and confidence.

“What if he had won the nomination? What kind of mess would that have put this party in?” Bonior said in a phone interview.

Edwards denied that he had fathered Hunter’s baby girl, Frances Quinn, who was born Feb. 27 in Santa Barbara. He said the timing of his affair in 2006 made it impossible for him to be the father. He offered to take tests to prove he was not the girl’s father.

The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid, first reported the story last October.

The allegations resurfaced this month when the Enquirer reported that Edwards had visited Hunter in the Beverly Hills Hilton and the tabloid printed a grainy photograph of Edwards holding a baby. Edwards told ABC that he met with Hunter to keep the scandal from becoming public. He questioned the authenticity of the photograph showing him with the baby.

Andrew Young, a married, long-time Edwards aide, has said he fathered the child with Hunter. Young and his wife were living in a Governor’s Club house in Chapel Hill last year. Hunter was living in the same development, according to the Enquirer. Hunter and the Youngs later moved to Santa Barbara.

How Hunter and Young and his wife were paying for their accommodations had been a mystery. Fred Baron, a wealthy Dallas trial lawyer who was Edwards’ finance chairman, shed some light on it Friday.

“I decided independently to help two friends and former colleagues rebuild their lives when harassment by supermarket tabloids made it impossible for them to conduct a normal life,” Baron said in a statement.

“John Edwards was not aware that assistance was provided to anyone involved in this matter. I did it of my own volition and without the knowledge, instruction, or suggestion of John Edwards or anyone else. The assistance was offered and accepted without condition.”

‘Furious’

The affair took place after Elizabeth Edwards was diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of the 2004 election. Edwards said it ended before the couple announced in March 2007 that her cancer had returned.

Edwards told ABC that his wife was angry when he told her in 2006 about the affair: “I think furious would be a good way to describe it.” Friends and supporters were sorting through their feelings on Friday.

Edwards’ next-door neighbor Carol Jenkins, 61, said she didn’t see the need for such fuss. Television crews and reporters swarmed outside of Edwards’ Orange County home Friday afternoon.

“I don’t know that it’s really as newsworthy as everybody’s making it out to be,” she said as a news helicopter buzzed over her home. “I mean, Russia invaded Georgia today.”

David Kirby, a friend and former law partner, said the affair was out of character.

“You can disapprove of conduct, but you don’t abandon a person who is a wonderful and gifted person who has done a lot for others and can still do a lot for others in the future,” said Kirby, who has been a friend of the couple since law school. “I know both of them well enough to know they will somehow move past this.”

Contributing to this story were staff writers Ryan Teague Beckwith and Matt Dees; and Jim Morrill, David Ingram and Lisa Zagaroli of The Charlotte Observer.

ONLY HIS HAIR DRESSER KNOWS FOR SURE!

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
August 6, 2008

The mainstream media's reaction to the National Enquirer's reports on John Edwards' "love child" scandal has been reminiscent of the Soviet press. Edwards' name has simply been completely whitewashed out of the news. Say, why isn't anyone talking about John Edwards for vice president anymore? No, seriously –- hey! Why are we going to a commercial break?

I suspect that if I tried to look up coverage of the Democratic primaries in Nexis news archives, Edwards' name will have disappeared from the debates. By next week, Edwards won't have been John Kerry's running mate in 2004.


Former U.S. Sen. John Edwards from North Carolina gives a news conference held with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, not pictured, announcing the creation of the New Generation Fund, a $100 million addition to the city's affordable housing finance system, on Monday, July 21, 2008 downtown Los Angeles. In the background are photos of the Yankee building before and after being transformed into low income apartments.
(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Do you know what this means? At this precise moment in time, I could call Edwards a name that would send me to rehab, and the media wouldn't be able to report it!

A Washington Post reporter defended the total blackout on the National Enquirer's John Edwards' love child story, telling the Times of London: "Edwards is no longer an elected official and he is not running for office now. Don't expect wall-to-wall coverage." This was the perfect guy to talk to because if there's one thing they're careful about in London, it's tabloid excess.

Isn't there some level of coverage between "wall-to-wall" and "double-secret probation, delta-force level total news blackout" when it comes to a sex scandal involving a current Democratic vice presidential and Cabinet prospect?

Hey, what sort of "elected official" was Ted Haggard again? He was the Christian minister no one outside of his own parish had ever heard of until he was caught in a gay sex scandal last year. Then he suddenly became the Pope of the Protestants. And yet, despite the fact that Haggard was not an "elected official," the Post gave that story wall-to-wall coverage. And what sort of "elected officials" were Mel Gibson, Rush Limbaugh and Bill Bennett?

The MSM justify banner coverage of the smallest malfeasance by any Christian or conservative, with or without independent verification, with the lame excuse of "hypocrisy." Hey, why didn't you say so! If all it takes to get the Edwards story into the establishment press is a little hypocrisy, boy, have I got a story for you!

Based on information currently saturating the Internet: (1) The entire schmaltzy Edwards campaign consisted of this self-professed moralist telling us how much he loved the poor and loved his cancer-stricken wife; (2) the following was Edwards' response to CBS News anchor Katie Couric's question about whether voters should care if a presidential candidate is faithful to his spouse:

"Of course. I mean, for a lot of Americans -- including the family that I grew up with, I mean, it's fundamental to how you judge people and human character -- whether you keep your word, whether you keep what is your ultimate word, which is that you love your spouse, and you'll stay with them. ... I think the most important qualities in a president in today's world are trustworthiness -- sincerity, honesty, strength of leadership. And -- and certainly that goes to a part of that."

There you have it, boys: Go to town, MSM!

Moreover, the National Enquirer reports that Edwards is paying Rielle Hunter -- the former "Lisa Druck" -- $15,000 a month in "hush money." Shouldn't the IRS be investigating whether Edwards is deducting those payments as a "business expense"?

Maybe The Washington Post didn't hear about the Enquirer catching Edwards in a hotel with his mistress and love child since it happened way out in the sleepy little burg of Los Angeles near the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards -- you know, the middle of nowhere. But surely the public can count on the Los Angeles Times to report on a tabloid scandal occurring under its very nose.

Kausfiles produced this e-mail from an L.A. Times editor to its bloggers soon after the Enquirer's stakeout of Edwards visiting the alleged mistress and love child at the Beverly Hilton:


From: "Pierce, Tony"
Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT
Subject: john edwards

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don't hesitate to ask.

Keep rockin,
Tony


Hey, I have a story idea I think the L.A. Times might like: How about something on the glorious workers' revolution that will restore the means of production to the people and create a workers' paradise right here on Earth, free of the shackles of capitalism?

I assume it would be jejune to point out that the MSM would be taking the wall-to-wall approach, rather than the total blackout approach, to the love child story if it were a story about Mitt Romney's love child or, indeed, Larry Craig's love child. They'd bring Ted Koppel out of retirement to cover that. Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Charles Gibson would be anchoring the evening news from Romney's front yard. They might even get Dan Rather to produce some forged documents for the occasion.

But with a Democrat sex scandal, the L.A. Times is in a nail-biting competition with The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC, NBC and CBS for the Pulitzer for "Best Suppressed Story."

A Baby Daddy for Both Americas

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
Thursday, July 31, 2008

The mainstream media really seem to imagine they can prevent Americans from knowing information by refusing to mention it in newspapers or on TV.

For those few Americans without an Internet connection and to whom I have not faxed the National Enquirer stories: Evidence is accumulating that John Edwards is right -- there really are "two Americas." There's one where men cheat on their cancer-stricken wives and one where men do not cheat on their cancer-stricken wives.

To put it another way, it would appear that ambulances aren't the only things John Edwards has been chasing lately.

Last year, the National Enquirer broke the story about New-Age divorcee Rielle Hunter, formerly Lisa Druck, telling friends she was having an affair with Edwards and that she was pregnant with his "love child."

Who knew that "my father was a mill worker" could be such a great pickup line? In his defense, Edwards had to do something to kill time between giving $50,000 speeches on poverty.

I guess the Enquirer is lucky Edwards isn't a trial lawyer! A sleazy carnival sideshow trial lawyer wouldn't even need to start channeling unborn children before a jury -- as Edwards did in the junk-science cases that made him a multimillionaire -- to win a defamation case if these charges are false. The "love child" allegation could be easily disproved by DNA testing.

Which brings up a fascinating legal question: Would it be admissible for Edwards to channel the very love child at issue during such a proceeding? Reminiscent of his performances in medical malpractice cases, he could say: She speaks to you through me and I have to tell you right now -- I didn't plan to talk about this -- right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me, and she's talking to you, she's saying: "John Edwards ain't my daddy!"

When the National Enquirer story first broke last year, the Edwards campaign denied that Edwards was the father, pawning the affair off on an apparently very loyal Edwards campaign official, Andrew Young. Like Edwards, Young was married with children, but also like Edwards, Young is a Democrat, so it was possible.

Except that, not only has Young's wife not left him, but she was perfectly copacetic with her husband's mistress moving into their gated community for the duration of her pregnancy, and even joining her, Andrew and the kids for dinner.

Back on Earth, that doesn't happen. The Edwards campaign better start looking at its backup plan of claiming Nathan Lane is the father.

It also didn't smack of innocence that the Edwards campaign stripped Hunter's videos from the Edwards Web site when the story broke.

Soon after Edwards met Hunter in a bar in New York, the Edwards campaign began paying her more than $100,000 to make "hip" videos of him for the campaign Web site. Unfortunately, Edwards' hair stylists ate up most of the budget.

As Herculean a task as it would be to make John Edwards look hip, the videos can't be worse for the campaign than the Edwards staffer who said of the Catholic church's position on birth control: "What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?" So why did they take down Hunter's videos?

With the MSM still pretending the Internet doesn't exist, last week the Enquirer staked out the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles after receiving a tip that Edwards would be going there to visit Hunter and the love child, who reportedly has her mother's eyes and her father's dramatic flair in front of a jury.

According to the Enquirer, Edwards entered Hunter's hotel room around 9:45 p.m. and left at 2:40 in the morning. Seeing reporters as he left Hunter's room, Edwards sprinted to a hotel bathroom and blockaded himself in until hotel security came to rescue him. Even more suspicious, while Edwards was barricaded in the bathroom, no one reported hearing sounds of a blow dryer.

When asked about the Enquirer story at a press conference a few days later, Edwards looked as flustered as Rep. Robert Wexler did after being asked if he really lives with his mother-in-law in Florida while running for office in that district.

First Edwards pretended to be unfamiliar with the story, a preposterous pose even if the story were false. Then Edwards dropped eye contact and said: "That's tabloid trash. They're full of lies. I'm here to talk about helping people." He couldn't have looked more guilty if he had broken into a cold sweat and lit a cigarette. Britney Spears has responded more credibly to questions about tabloid stories.

Meanwhile, the only way consumers of the old media might ascertain that Edwards is embroiled in some sort of scandal is that, starting last Thursday, his name was summarily dropped from lists of possible vice presidential candidates.

If only Republican Larry Craig had been in the bathroom, the MSM might have covered it.

- Ann Coulter is a bestselling author and syndicated columnist. Her most recent book is Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

Link

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/john_edwards_hush_money_to_mistress/celebrity/65226

The Democratic ticket and the John Edwards affair

By Byron York
The Hill
http://thehill.com/
Posted: 07/23/08 06:54 PM [ET]


John Edwards and Barack Obama (May, 2008): Photo by Beth and Christian Bell (CC)

There’s been a lot of talk lately that former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) will have some sort of role in the Obama administration, if there is one.

A few months ago, Edwards, the Democratic Party’s 2004 vice presidential candidate, seemed to pull himself out of the VP race. But then, a couple of weeks ago, Edwards quietly put himself back in, telling National Public Radio, “I’m prepared to seriously consider anything, anything [Obama] asks me to do for our country.”

“Anything” could, of course, mean running for vice president. But Edwards has done that before, and he didn’t exactly put Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) over the top.

Of course, “anything” could also mean serving as Obama’s attorney general, a position that has been mentioned for the former trial lawyer from North Carolina.

In any event, Edwards has shaped up as someone to watch should Democrats win in November.

But now there’s another reason to watch: an extensive story in the National Enquirer providing new evidence that Edwards, in the midst of his presidential campaign, had an extramarital affair that has, perhaps, resulted in a child.

The story began in 2006, when Edwards commissioned a woman named Rielle Hunter — sometimes described as a documentary filmmaker and sometimes as an aspiring actress — to make a series of brief behind-the-scenes Web videos about his campaign.

Newsweek did a short item on the videos, mentioning that Edwards met the filmmaker “at a New York bar where Edwards was having a business meeting.”

That’s all we heard about it until September 2007, when the Huffington Post published a story headlined “Edwards Mystery: Innocuous Videos Suddenly Shrouded In Secrecy.”

The website’s Sam Stein reported that the videos made by Hunter had suddenly disappeared from Edwards’s campaign website. “No longer am I working on a piece about new media and politics,” Stein wrote. “Now, I just want to know why these webisodes are shrouded in such mystery.”

Then, the Enquirer got into the story, reporting last October that Edwards was “caught in a shocking mistress scandal that could wreck his campaign.”
When Edwards was asked about the allegation, according to the Enquirer, he strongly denied it.

“The story is false. It’s completely untrue, ridiculous,” Edwards said. “Anyone who knows me knows that I have been in love with the same woman for 30-plus years.”

Later, in December 2007, the Enquirer published more details. A pregnant Hunter had moved to North Carolina, living in a house “owned by an Edwards backer” and driving a BMW sport utility vehicle registered to a longtime Edwards aide.

Hunter denied any affair, saying that the longtime, married Edwards aide was actually the father. A lawyer for that aide confirmed to the Enquirer that the aide was indeed the father.

Now the Enquirer has published a new story under the screaming headline "SEN. JOHN EDWARDS CAUGHT WITH MISTRESS AND LOVE CHILD!"

The tabloid reports that Edwards visited Hunter in a Los Angeles hotel Monday night, leaving her at 2:40 Tuesday morning. When the Enquirer’s reporters confronted Edwards, the story goes, he tried to escape.

Critics might question the Enquirer’s involvement in all this. Perhaps, they might charge, money changed hands to make the story happen.

Maybe it did. But one reads an Enquirer story just like one reads a story in The New York Times. You look at the allegation and try to sort out how much evidence the paper is presenting.

For example, after carefully reading the Times’s front-page story alleging that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) had had an affair with a lobbyist, one could only ask, Where’s the evidence?

That’s not the case with the Edwards story; there’s quite a bit of detail.

What will happen now? Well, we probably won’t hear as many mentions of Edwards as a possible key player in an Obama administration.

But so far, Edwards is going on as if nothing happened. The morning after the Enquirer story appeared, he was in Denver, promoting an anti-poverty project.

Asked about the vice presidency, he said, “I’m not seeking the job. But anything Sen. Obama would ask me to do in his campaign or presidency I would consider seriously.”

Will Obama ask? Not likely.

- Byron York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week. E-mail: byork@thehill.com
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John Edwards in a Feydeau Farce at the Beverly Hilton

By Roger L. Simon
http://pajamasmedia.com/
July 22nd, 2008 4:17 pm

Accusations: John Edwards (left) has denied he is the father of Rielle Hunter's child.

I want to start by bragging to you about how discreet Pajamas Media is. Over six months ago, we had wind of the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter love affair and love child and did not run with it. Most of this information was hearsay from people here in Hollywood, people who know Rielle. She was a long time hanger on in Hollywood circles before heading East to do political promo videos… and, yes, I had met her myself on a couple of occasions at parties. She was not particularly notable, of the tedious sort that bore you to death about their yoga instructor.

But now that the cat is out the bag, I will say what I wanted to say then. John Edwards–he of constructing a 28,000 square foot home while preaching about the two Americas and remonstrating about the environment–is one of the most reprehensible schmucks to appear on the American political scene in some time. And that’s saying something. That he played this game while his wife had cancer makes it contemptible beyond words. Now we know why he was always primping in the mirror. It is narcissism unbounded.

But there is a moral to this story - and I think we all know it. I hate the use of caps, but I think in this instance I will use them. DO NOT BELIEVE THE HIGH FLOWN RHETORIC OF POLITICIANS - ESPECIALLY WHEN IT IS HOLIER THAN THOU. THEY ARE LIKELY TO BE MASKING SOMETHING.

Oh, one last thing, for those of you who says it’s The National Enquirer, how do we know it’s true? I suggest you Google the “National Enquirer and OJ Simpson.” They broke most of the important stories on that case. In general, these days they’re vastly more reliable than The New York Times.

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John Edwards: Losing Ugly

By Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
January 25, 2008

Democratic presidential hopeful, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, right, talks to the staff at Atley's BBQ in Orangeburg, S.C., Friday, Jan. 25, 2008, during a campaign stop asking people for their vote on eve of the South Carolina Democratic Presidential Primary.
(AP Photo/Mary Ann Chastain)

WASHINGTON -- There's losing. There's losing honorably. And then there's John Edwards.

Mike Huckabee is not going to be president. The loss in South Carolina, one of the most highly evangelical states in the union, made that plain. With a ceiling of 14 percent among nonevangelical Republicans, Huckabee's base is simply too narrow. But his was not a rise and then a fall. He came from nowhere to establish himself as the voice of an important national constituency. Huckabee will continue to matter, and might even carry enough remaining Southern states to wield considerable influence at a fractured Republican convention.

Fred Thompson will also not be president. His campaign failed, but quite honorably. He never tacked. He never dissimulated. He refused to reinvent himself. He presented himself plainly and honestly. Too plainly. What he lacked was the ferocious near-deranged ambition (aka, fire in the belly) required to navigate the bizarre ordeal that is today's nominating process. Political decency is not a common commodity. Thompson had it. He'd make a fine attorney general, and not just on TV.

Then there is John Edwards. He's not going to be president either. He stays in the race because, with the Democrats' proportional representation system, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton might end up in a very close delegate race -- perhaps allowing an also-ran with, say, 10 percent of the delegates to act as kingmaker at the convention.

It's a prize of sorts, it might even be tradeable for a Cabinet position. But at considerable cost. His campaign has been a spectacle.

Edwards has made much of his renunciation of his Iraq War vote. But he has not stopped there. His entire campaign has been an orgy of regret and renunciation.

-- As senator, he voted in 2001 for a bankruptcy bill that he now denounces.

-- As senator, he voted for storing nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Twice. He is now fiercely opposed.

-- As senator, he voted for the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind education reform. He now campaigns against it, promising to have it "radically overhauled."

-- As senator, he voted for the Patriot Act, calling it "a good bill ... and I am pleased to support it." He now attacks it.

-- As senator, he voted to give China normalized trade relations. Need I say? He now campaigns against liberalized trade with China as a sellout of the middle class to the great multinational agents of greed, etc.

Breathtaking. People can change their minds about something. But everything? The man served one term in the Senate. He left not a single substantial piece of legislation to his name, only an astonishing string of votes on trade, education, civil liberties, energy, bankruptcy and, of course, war that now he not only renounces but inveighs against.

Today he plays the avenging angel, engaged in an "epic struggle" against the great economic malefactors that "have literally," he assures us, "taken over the government." He is angry, embodying the familiar zeal of the convert, ready to immolate anyone who benightedly holds to any revelation other than the zealot's very latest.

Nothing new about a convert. Nothing new about a zealous convert. What is different about Edwards is his endlessly repeated claim that the raging populist of today is what he has always been. That this has been the "cause of my life," the very core of his being, ingrained in him on his father's knee or at the mill or wherever, depending on the anecdote he's telling. You must understand: This is not politics for him. "This fight is deeply personal to me. I've been engaged in it my whole life."

Except for his years as senator, the only public office he's ever held. The audacity of the all-my-life trope is staggering. By his own endlessly self-confessed record, his current pose is a coat of paint newly acquired. His claim that it is an expression of his inner soul is a farce.

A cynical farce that is particularly galling to left-liberals of real authenticity. "The one (presidential candidate) that is the most problematic is Edwards," Sen. Russ Feingold told The Post-Crescent in Appleton, Wis., "who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq War. ... He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record."

It profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the whole world. But for 4 percent of the Nevada caucuses?

letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

Ann Coulter: Is There a Trial Lawyer in the House?

http://www.anncoulter.com/
Thursday, September 20, 2007

The only "crisis" in health care in this country is that doctors are paid too little. (Also, they've come up with nothing to help that poor Dennis Kucinich.)

But the Democratic Party treats doctors like they're Klan members. They wail about how much doctors are paid and celebrate the trial lawyers who do absolutely nothing to make society better, but swoop in and steal from the most valuable members of society.

Maybe doctors could get the Democrats to like them if they started suing their patients.

It's only a matter of time before the best and brightest students forget about medical school and go to law school instead. How long can a society based on suing the productive last?

You can make 30 times as much money as doctors by becoming a trial lawyer suing doctors. You need no skills, no superior board scores, no decade of training and no sleepless residency. But you must have the morals of a drug dealer. (And the bank wire-transfer number to the Democratic National Committee.)

The editors of the New York Times have been engaging in a spirited debate with their readers over whether doctors are wildly overpaid or just hugely overpaid. The results of this debate are available on TimeSelect, for just $49.95.

"Many health care economists," the Times editorialized, say the partisan wrangling over health care masks a bigger problem: "the relatively high salaries paid to American doctors."

Citing the Rand Corp., the Times noted that doctors in the U.S. "earn two to three times as much as they do in other industrialized countries." American doctors earn about $200,000 to $300,000 a year, while European doctors make $60,000 to $120,000. Why, that's barely enough for Muslim doctors in Britain to buy plastic explosives to blow up airplanes!

How much does Pinch Sulzberger make for driving the New York Times stock to an all-time low? Probably a lot more than your podiatrist.

In college, my roommate was in the chemistry lab Friday and Saturday nights while I was dancing on tables at the Chapter House. A few years later, she was working 20-hour days as a resident at Mount Sinai doing liver transplants while I was frequenting popular Upper East Side drinking establishments. She was going to Johns Hopkins for yet more medical training while I was skiing and following the Grateful Dead. Now she vacations in places like Rwanda and Darfur with Doctors Without Borders while I'm going to Paris.

Has anyone else noticed the nonexistence of a charitable organization known as "Lawyers Without Borders"?

She makes $380 for an emergency appendectomy, or one-ten-thousandth of what John Edwards made suing doctors like her, and one-fourth of what John Edwards' hairdresser makes for a single shag cut.

Edwards made $30 million bringing nonsense lawsuits based on junk science against doctors. To defend themselves from parasites like Edwards, doctors now pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical malpractice insurance every year.

But as the Times would note, doctors in Burkina Faso only get $25 and one goat per year.

As long as we're studying the health care systems of various socialist countries, are we allowed to notice that doctors in these other countries aren't constantly being sued by bottom-feeding trial lawyers stealing one-third of the income of people performing useful work like saving lives?

But the Democrats (and Fred Thompson) refuse to enact tort reform legislation to rein in these charlatans. After teachers and welfare recipients, the Democrats' most prized constituency is trial lawyers. The ultimate Democrat constituent would be a public schoolteacher on welfare who needed an abortion and was suing her doctor.

Doctors graduate at the top of their classes at college and then spend nearly a decade in grueling work at medical schools. Most doctors don't make a dime until they're in their early 30s, just in time to start paying off their six-figure student loans by saving people's lives. They have 10 times the IQ of trial lawyers and 1,000 times the character.

Yeah, let's go after those guys. On to nuns next!

But Times' readers responded to the editorial about doctors being overpaid with a slew of indignant letters – not at the Times for making such an idiotic argument, but at doctors who earn an average of $200,000 per year. Letter writers praised the free medical care in places like Spain. ("Nightmare" in the Ann Coulter dictionary is defined as "having a medical emergency in Spain.")

One letter-writer proposed helping doctors by having the government take over another aspect of the economy – the cost of medical education:

"If we are to restructure the system by which we pay doctors to match Europe, which seems prudent as well as inevitable, we must also finance education as Europeans do, by using state dollars to finance the full or majority cost of higher education, including professional school."

And then to reduce the cost of medical school, the government could finance "the full or majority cost" of construction costs of medical schools, and "the full or majority cost" of the trucks that bring the cement to the construction site and the "the full or majority cost" of coffee that the truck drivers drink while hauling the cement and ... it makes my head hurt.

I may have to see a doctor about this. I should probably get on the waiting list now in case Hillary gets elected.

That's how liberals think: To fix an industry bedeviled by government controls, we'll spread the coercion to yet more industries!

The only sane letter on the matter, I'm happy to report, came from the charming town of New Canaan, Conn., which means that I am not the only normal person who still reads the Times. Ray Groves wrote:

"Last week, I had the annual checkup for my 2000 Taurus. I paid $95 per hour for much needed body work. Next month, when I have my own annual physical, I expect and hope to pay a much higher rate to my primary care internist, who has spent a significant portion of his life training to achieve his position of responsibility."

There is nothing more to say.

Ann Coulter is a bestselling author and syndicated columnist. Her most recent book is Godless: The Church of Liberalism.

ANN COULTER: THAT WAS NO LADY — THAT WAS MY HUSBAND

http://www.anncoulter.com/
June 28, 2007


The Edwards campaign is apparently still running low on donations, so this week they went back to their top fundraiser: me.

I doubled the ratings of the lowest-rated cable news show on Tuesday by agreeing to go on for a full hour to promote my new paperback version of "Godless" — a mistake I won't make again. As I was walking to the set, minutes before airtime, it was casually mentioned to me that Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, might call in.

For the first time in recorded history, the show's host did not interrupt a guest, but let Elizabeth Edwards ramble on and on, allowing her to browbeat me for being mean to her husband. (This delicate flower is very sensitive to rough words, having hired the Edwards' campaign staffer who wrote this: "What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit"?)

Say, did any TV host ever surprise Al Franken, Bill Maher or Arianna Huffington with a call by the wife of someone they've made nasty remarks about? How about a call to John Edwards from the wife of a doctor he bankrupted with his junk-science lawsuits?

I think I may have tuned out at some point, so I can only speak to the first 45 minutes of Elizabeth Edwards' harangue, but it mostly consisted of utterly dishonest renditions of things I had said on my "Good Morning America" interview this week and a column I wrote four years ago. (You can't rush Edwards' "rapid response team"!) She claimed I had launched unprovoked attacks on the Edwards' dead son and called for a terrorist attack on her husband.

These are bald-faced lies, and the mainstream media knows they are lies. Yet they were repeated ad nauseam on Wednesday by The Associated Press, the AOL pop-up window, CNN, NBC and — stunningly — the host of the lowest-rated cable show himself, who personally told me he knew the truth.

So for those of you who haven't read any of my five best-selling books: Liberals are driven by Satan and lie constantly.

Here is my full sentence on "Good Morning America," which the media deceptively truncated, referring to a joke I told about Edwards six months ago that made liberals cry: "But about the same time, you know, Bill Maher was not joking and saying he wished Dick Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack — so I've learned my lesson: If I'm going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot."

The usual nut Web sites posted a zillion denunciations of my appearance on "Good Morning America" immediately after I appeared Monday morning. But it didn't occur to any of them to simply lie about what I had said. No, it took them nearly 36 hours to concoct a version of that quote that included the Edwards part, but not the Maher part, or what English language speakers call: "the point."

By tomorrow it will be: "Ann Coulter tried to kill John Edwards on 'Good Morning America'!"

Judging by his fundraising efforts so far, I gather most of you don't know who John Edwards is — unless you're an overpriced hair dresser. He's the trial lawyer who pretended in court to channel the spirit of a handicapped fetus in front of illiterate jurors to scam tens of millions of dollars off of innocent doctors. According to The New York Times, Edwards told one jury: "She speaks to you through me ... And I have to tell you right now — I didn't plan to talk about this — right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She's inside me, and she's talking to you."

Let me also quote from campaign consultant Bob Shrum's book "No Excuses":

"(Kerry) was even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else — that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before — and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn't pick Edwards unless he met with him again."

Apparently every time Edwards began a story about his dead son with "I've never told anyone this before," everyone on the campaign could lip-sync the story with him.

As a commentator, I bring facts like these to the attention of the American people in a lively way. Thus, for example, in a column about the Democratic candidates for president written in 2003, I pointed out that the Democrats refused to discuss the economy or the war, but had recently "discovered a surprise campaign issue: It turns out that several of them have had a death in the family."

(The full column is available at www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/coulter112003.asp, www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=2428&keywords=the+party+of+ideas and www.townhall.com/columnists/AnnCoulter/2003/11/20/the_party_of_ideas.)

Among several examples of Democrats talking about a death in the family on the campaign trail was this one:

John Edwards injects his son's fatal car accident into his campaign by demanding that everyone notice how he refuses to inject his son's fatal car accident into his campaign.

Edwards has talked about his son's death in a 1996 car accident on "Good Morning America," in dozens of profiles and in his new book. ("It was and is the most important fact of my life.") His 1998 Senate campaign ads featured film footage of Edwards at a learning lab he founded in honor of his son, titled "The Wade Edwards Learning Lab." He wears his son's Outward Bound pin on his suit lapel. He was going to wear it on his sleeve, until someone suggested that might be a little too "on the nose."

If you want points for not using your son's death politically, don't you have to take down all those "Ask me about my son's death in a horrific car accident" bumper stickers? Edwards is like a politician who keeps announcing that he will not use his opponent's criminal record for partisan political advantage.

Manifestly, I was not making fun of their son's death; I was making fun of John Edwards' incredibly creepy habit of invoking his son's tragic death to advance his political career — a practice so repellant, it even made John Kerry queasy.

I'm a little tired of losers trying to raise campaign cash or TV ratings off of my coattails, particularly when they use their afflictions or bereavement schedules to try to silence the opposition. From now on, I'm attacking only serious presidential candidates, like Dennis Kucinich.

COPYRIGHT 2007 ANN COULTER

Robert Novak: Edwards' Worn-Out Welcome

Chicago Sun-Times
June 07, 2007

The dynamic performance by John Edwards in Sunday's Democratic presidential debate, assailing his competitors for the nomination, got high marks from political reporters, Republican politicians and left-wing activists. But not from the Democratic establishment. Once their great hope for the future, Edwards now is massively unpopular among party regulars, who neither like nor trust him.

The performances at the Goffstown, N.H., event by the two front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, were error-free if a little leaden. Edwards, the third man in the big presidential field, supplied the fireworks by taking on Clinton and Obama. On the surface, he seems a perfect candidate: eloquent, smart, handsome and shrewd. Is he reminiscent of the two slick Southerners who were the only Democrats elected president in the past 40 years? Yet the prospect of an Edwards-led ticket evokes deep apprehension inside the party that he would be another flawed nominee.

His nomination is not that remote a possibility. For decades, Democratic leaders have exerted little influence on the making of the party's nominee, with decisions ceded to primary voters. Edwards is staking everything on the Iowa caucuses, where he periodically leads in the polls. If he begins the delegate selection process with a victory there, he could be unstoppable (as John Kerry was after he won Iowa).

Even though Edwards may end up being the party's nominee, prominent Democrats are surprisingly candid about him. Mark Siegel, a 35-year party insider, told me: "He came to Washington as a 'New Democrat,' but he's not that kind of Democrat anymore. He's into class warfare."

Edwards has not worn well with party colleagues. Campaign consultant Bob Shrum was enthusiastic about Edwards after working on his 1998 Senate victory in North Carolina and unsuccessfully advised Gore to make him his 2000 running mate. But Shrum chose Kerry over Edwards as his 2004 presidential client. In his newly published memoir, "No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner," Shrum explains: "I was coming to believe he wasn't ready; he was a Clinton who hadn't read the books."

During the 2004 primaries, Democratic activist James Carville was enchanted when Edwards shifted his centrist posture to a populist depiction of "Two Americas." Carville told me -- and then repeated it on CNN -- that Edwards was the best stump speaker he ever had seen. When I asked him this week whether he still thought that was true, Carville replied: "Maybe he's not as good now."

In fact, Edwards's populist rhetoric sounds about the same today as it did three years ago. The big change is his performance away from the podium. Seldom has a presidential candidate undergone a trifecta like Edwards's this year -- reports of the $400 haircut, a $55,000 honorarium from University of California at Davis for a speech on poverty and the $500,000 hedge fund salary -- without his campaign imploding.

Such mishaps appear to be of Edwards's own making rather than accidental, as was suggested by the scene after the New Hampshire debate. Edwards's wife, Elizabeth, entered the spin room Sunday and took issue with passages in Shrum's memoir. She claimed Shrum misquoted her husband as saying of gays during his 1998 campaign, "I'm not comfortable around those people." At that same time, an Edwards aide attacked Shrum's honesty. Answering a book account of a nine-year-old encounter is not a good approach for a presidential candidate.

The ardor for a politically accident-prone Edwards has also cooled in the labor movement, where an endorsement from the Change to Win coalition led by Andrew Stern and James P. Hoffa is now far less likely than it was in December. Hoffa reportedly still regards Edwards as the most pro-labor presidential candidate but doubts whether he can be nominated.

So Edwards must rely on true believers who will brave the bitter Iowa cold in the dark of night to attend caucuses. That's the kind of voter impressed by Edwards lashing out at Obama and especially Clinton on the war. Iowa Democrats in 2004 pulled back from catastrophe at the 11th hour and abandoned Howard Dean when they contemplated the impact of a Dean victory. Party leaders hope Iowans will take a similarly hard look at John Edwards.

Jonah Goldberg: John Edwards' Poor Scam

May 30, 2007

Los Angeles Times

There's a little hustler in every politician. But sometimes there's a little politician in a hustler. Such is the case with John Edwards.

Just last week, we learned that Edwards received $55,000 to give a speech, "Poverty, the Great Moral Issue Facing America," at UC Davis. The poor students who attended were charged $17 a ticket. Earlier this month, it was reported that despite the fact he denounces "predatory lending" and sub-prime mortgages for the poor, Edwards made nearly $500,000 as a consultant to a hedge fund involved in that business.

The former senator defended his gig on the grounds that he took the job to learn how financial markets relate to poverty. This is a bit like saying you frequent brothels so you can learn where babies come from. But here's the hilarious part: Edwards said he didn't know the fund was involved in sub-prime lending. If he was there to learn about poverty and finance, how did he miss this salient fact? He must be a very slow learner. No wonder his former political consultant, Bob Shrum, calls him "a Clinton who hadn't read the books."

Business Week magazine reports that Edwards launched a poverty center that conveniently worked out of the same office as his political action committee. The nonprofit center spent a staggering 70% of the money it raised on a speaking tour for Edwards and on salaries for staffers who in short order just happened to join his presidential campaign. This gives new meaning to the term "poverty pimp."

A few years ago, when it was reported that "virtuecrat" Bill Bennett, the former Education secretary, liked to gamble in Las Vegas, columnist Michael Kinsley spoke for much of establishment liberalism when he declared, "Bennett has been exposed as a humbug artist who ought to be pelted off the public stage." I thought this was unfair, as Bennett never inveighed against gambling, nor did his church consider it a sin. Edwards, who gets choked up and misty-eyed from his own relentlessly recounted stump speech about "two Americas," is more of a humbug artist than Bennett ever was. You would think that when Edwards looks in the mirror in one of his new, 28,000-square-foot house's six bathrooms, inspecting whether it's time for another $400 haircut, he might feel the slightest twinge of conscience about his us-versus-them shtick.

Now, of course, this doesn't mean that he doesn't care about poverty, and there's certainly nothing wrong with making money. Edwards has clearly convinced himself that he's done nothing wrong. He launched his fortune as an ambulance-chasing lawyer, after all, so he's good at convincing people, starting with himself, that he's on the side of the angels. But the story he tells to prove he's not a hypocrite is typically phony. For example, his 2004 presidential campaign highlighted the humble little house he led people to believe he grew up in. But the small home touted in commercials was Edwards' residence until he reached the ripe old age of 1. Then, his father the mill worker was promoted to management and the family moved into a more expensive home that never appeared in his campaign ads.

It's not that Edwards is a liar, it's that he's a toothy door-to-door salesman, seemingly hawking the issues when he's really just hawking himself.

When Edwards was preparing for his first run for president, he struck the pose of a Southern moderate. The National Journal noted that his voting record set him "comfortably apart from Senate liberals." Now that he's out of office -- he likely could not have won reelection -- he's recast himself as the election season's premier anti-warrior. Last week, Edwards gave a major foreign policy speech in which he ridiculed the very idea of a "war on terror" as nothing more than a "bumper sticker." Of course, until recently, he had no problem with the concept. As Sen. John Kerry's running mate, he campaigned on the claim that Iraq was distracting us from the real war on terror. Before that, he recanted his vote in favor of the Iraq war.

In his new book, Shrum says that Edwards voted for the war not because the Bush administration misled him but because his spin doctors did. Edwards, of course, denies this, but even in the recent South Carolina Democratic debate, he confessed that the lesson he learned from his vote was that he needs "to put more faith in my own judgment."

That's a convenient position for a man who seems to really believe only in one thing: himself.

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