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illary’s communications director, Harold Wolfson, has an interesting theory:

Sen. Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee if John Edwards had been caught in his lie about an extramarital affair and forced out of the race last year, insists a top Clinton campaign aide, making a charge that could exacerbate previously existing tensions between the camps of Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.

“I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee,” former Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson told ABCNews.com.

“Our voters and Edwards’ voters were the same people,” Wolfson said the Clinton polls showed. “They were older, pro-union. Not all, but maybe two-thirds of them would have been for us and we would have barely beaten Obama.”

Two months before Iowa, Edwards lied his brains out denying the affair, and the Dem-happy media let the story end with that denial, choosing not to follow the National Enquirer’s story, believing that a trail lawyer turned Dem politician was the more believable source.

I don’t think Wolfson’s right. If Edwards had fessed up, I think it would have tilted the voting public towards the “new” politician, and at that point, Obama’s new facade was unblemished. But if Wolfson is right – and we’ll never know, so let’s play with it – the media would be at much at fault as Edwards, since they shirked their First Amendment responsibility to dig.

We’ve been telling you all along the MSM want Obama elected.

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Hey Greenies, Stop The War On The Poor!

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t was a small demonstration by DC standards – a dozen speakers and a few dozen marchers perhaps – but the demonstrators represented the working poor and minority communities dear to the Dems’ political patter, and they were mad about Dem stalling on energy solutions.

Leaders from the civil rights, African American, evangelical, agriculture and consumer advocacy communities have launched a national campaign to publicly unmask more than 100 politicians and 50 environmental extremist groups that are waging an immoral “war on the poor” by pushing policies that limit America’s ability to produce more America energy and drive energy prices skyward. …

“Environmental extremists, and the politicians who do their bidding, are strangling consumers, minorities and the working poor by restricting our ability to produce enough American energy and forcing energy prices to go through the roof,” said Niger Innis, National Spokesman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a key organizer of the Capitol Hill protest and co-chairman of the national “Stop The War On The Poor” campaign.

Will the politicians listen? Let’s see … environmental groups represent an affluent constituency and therefore have a lot of money to throw around. The poor, well, let’s all feel sorry for the poor, but really, they can’t contribute much to campaigns, can they, Nancy? Continue Reading »

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It is no coincidence that the perpetually slimy John Edwards chose today, the opening day of the Olympics when most people won’t be engaging in the news, to admit – at least partially – that everything the MSM hasn’t been saying about him is true:

John Edwards repeatedly lied during his Presidential campaign about an extramarital affair with a novice filmmaker, the former Senator admitted to ABC News today.

In an interview for broadcast tonight on Nightline, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 44-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her.

Edwards also denied he was the father of Hunter’s baby girl, Frances Quinn, although the one-time Democratic Presidential candidate said he has not taken a paternity test.

Edwards said he knew he was not the father based on timing of the baby’s birth on February 27, 2008. He said his affair ended too soon for him to have been the father.

(More here)

Of course! It was the conveniently handy campaign aide, banging the same broad has his boss, that fathered the child of Rielle Hunter, who Edwards broke up with way back when, even though the National Enquirer busted him coming out of Hunter’s room in the wee, wee hours of the morning last month.

And we should trust him to be telling us the truth because he’s a politician and a class action lawyer. As a testament to his truth-telling, here’s what he said about the affair last year:

“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.”

It’s a very fine day when the political ambitions of such a transparently worthless jerk are dashed by his own actions. Next step: I think a criminal investigation is in order, since Edwards apparently used campaign contributions as hush money for Hunter:

According to friends of Hunter, Edwards met her at a New York city bar in 2006. His political action committee later paid her $114,000 to produce campaign website documentaries despite her lack of experience.

The SacBee reports that the net output for that $114,000 was “just four Web videos, one a mere 2 1/ 2 minutes long.” That’s not an unheard of amount of money to pay for the services – if you were paying someone who had a good portfolio of similar work. It’s pretty obvious Edwards was paying for something different.

And one more criminal investigation is in order: journalistic misconduct by the New York Times, the Washington Post, AP, the networks and just about every other major news outlet for refusing to cover this credible story. They refused to cover it when the Enquirer broke the story, and also when Fox News verified it by talking to a security guard who escorted Edwards from the LA Hilton after he was confronted by the Enquirer – a level of reporting that apparently is beyond the capabilities of the major news rags and nets.

ABC was among those who were running from the story, until McClatchy’s story opened the door for them – though not for any of the others, who remained mum. Now ABC has the dubious distinction of “breaking” the story while it’s actually now just the slightly less egregious of the whole egregious bunch.

Of course with ABC in, the others are in, too. Embarrassing late (although they of course admit no embarrassment) NYT has a pretty thorough blog post up; and WaPo’s got a story on its afternoon Web page with this remarkable paragraph:

Most major news organizations, including The Washington Post, did not report the allegations against Edwards because of a lack of corroboration. But a debate has swirled on Internet sites and on Fox News over whether media outlets were protecting the former senator, either out of bias toward a Democrat or sympathy for his wife.

How can they say “a lack of corroboration” when they admit that Fox News had a story that corroborated it? I can’t think of anything that screams “liberal bias” more than this sort of knee-jerk rejection of all things Fox. And when has sympathy for a wife ever stopped the hounds of the media when they’re in pursuit of the story?  Cross out that ridiculous excuse, and you’re left with “bias towards a Democrat.”

Exactly right.

Photo: Coed Magazine

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cClatchy News Service is going where most others fear to tread: Actually writing a story about a leading VEEP prospect who has cuckolded his cancer-suffering wife, fathering a love child with his hot mistress. The MCClatchy story, emanating from the home-town paper of Mr. Happy Zipper, aka John Edwards, shows how easy it is to cover the story:

RALEIGH, N.C. — Former Sen. John Edwards has a deadline to save his spot on the national stage.

With two weeks to go before their national convention, a number of Democrats are saying that Edwards needs to publicly address National Enquirer stories that have alleged he had an affair with a campaign worker and fathered her baby.

If Edwards fails to clear up the story in short order, he risks party officials deciding not to have him speak or, if they do, creating a distraction from a week focused on Barack Obama accepting the nomination.

See? McClatchy didn’t have to buy in to the Enquirer story; it only had to state the obvious: Edwards has a problem that may well doom his VEEP hopes. This is not tough stuff.

But it’s apparently too tough for the NY Times, which has run nothing on the story, presumably using the Enquirer’s credibility as its excuse. Yet in another scandalous story twelve years ago, it proclaimed, The Enquirer: Required Reading in Simpson Case. Nothing has happened since then that would make the tabloid’s reputation any worse, so the NYT is using a moving, selective criteria to protect one of the Dems’ golden boys. (Is it OK to use “boys” if the guy’s white?)

At the Washington Post, which sees itself as the torch-bearer for the coverage of national politics, it’s the same thing: Not one single story. Ditto ABC, NBC, and PBS. (CBS ran a brief blog entry – nothing on camera – that said “I can’t really tell if [the photos] are genuine.”)

How can these “news outlets” justify their silence when even the left-leaning LA Times, which earlier mandated that its staff under no circumstances would cover the story (even though Edwards was busted by the Enquirer in LA), now covers it marginally well, with two recent stories on the scandal.

Dem strategist Gary Pearce (no relation) who ran Edwards’ 1998 senatorial campaign, has an interesting comment on the mess:

“The big media has tried to be responsible and handle this with kid gloves, but it’s clearly getting ready to bust out. If it’s not true, he’s got to stand up and say, ‘This is not true. That is not my child and I’m going to take legal action against the people who are spreading these lies.’ It’s not enough to say, ‘That’s tabloid trash.’ “

The LA Times’ coverage, and now McClatchy’s, certainly indicates that the story is “about to burst out.” But I wonder if Pearce would use the term “kid gloves” if the Enquirer had busted Mitt Romney coming out of a pretty blond’s hotel room at 2:30 in the morning. He’d be howling like a banshee.

As for the quote Pearce suggests, it is not enough. Edwards’ word is not enough. He needs DNA proof that he’s not the love child’s father if he wants to project a shred of believability. And yes, I know I’m talking about the Dems here; I still think it’s true.

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MSM Still Blowing Off Edwards Love Child Story

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just ran a Nexis search of newspapers and newswires over the last week for “John AND Edwards AND Enquirer” and it’s obvious that the MSM are not the least bit interested in reporting on John Edwards’ affair while his wife fights cancer.

Here’s the Nexis tally for Edwards: Six stories total, appearing in the Miami Herald, SF Wrongicle, Boston Herald, The Columbian in Wash. state, the Kansas City Star and the Philly Daily News. No major papers at all, no newswires. This after the story has now been verified by Fox News.

Meanwhile, the foreign press is doing the job journalists are supposed to do. Here’s the stodgy London Sunday Times:

Sleaze scuppers Democrat golden boy

Gotcha: Senator John Edwards, whose wife has cancer, has been caught in a sex scandal that ends his vice-presidential hopes

SCRATCH John Edwards off the list of potential vice-presidential candidates. The former White House contender, who had been hoping to get the nod from Barack Obama, is in the midst of a full-blown sex scandal.

Every supermarket shopper knows that the preternaturally youthful former senator for North Carolina may have fathered a love child with a film-maker while Elizabeth, his saintly wife, is dying of cancer. There are sensational new details on the National Enquirer website, although most of the media have done their best to ignore them.

The tabloid magazine cornered Edwards, 55, leaving a Los Angeles hotel where Rielle Hunter, his alleged mistress, and her baby were staying, at 2.40am last Tuesday. He ran down a hallway and dived into the men’s bathroom. A hotel security guard confirmed the encounter. “His face just went totally white,” the guard said.

The story has been bubbling away for months, but so far there has been not a word about it in the mainstream newspapers, even though Edwards was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004 and has been tipped for a prominent job in an Obama administration – if not vice-president, then attorney-general or antipoverty tsar. (Read more here)

See, it’s not that hard to report this story … if you’re not an American newspaper in the pocket of the DNC.
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t Slate, Micky Kaus digs up the latest dirty business at what once was the West Coast’s greatest newspaper:

LAT Gags Blogs: In a move that has apparently stirred up some internal discontent, the Los Angeles Times has banned its bloggers , including political bloggers, from mentioning the Edwards/Rielle Hunter story. Even bloggers who want to mention the story in order to make a skeptical we-don’t-trust-the-Enquirer point are forbidden from doing so. Kausfiles has obtained a copy of the email Times bloggers received from editor Tony Pierce.

To see the full text of Pierce’s incredible email, click over to Kaus’ post here. Here’s the money line:

Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations.

What a shoddy excuse that is! In the time since the story broke, the LA Times easily could have dispatched some of its crackerjack investigative reporters – the gang that did such a great job on the Gropinator story might be available – to either verify or disprove the Enquirer’s story. But apparently they didn’t bother. Do you think that would have been the case if it had been Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee or any other former GOP contender who was found by the Enquirer to be shacking up with the mother of his secret love child … while his wife was at home, struggling against cancer?

Didn’t think so.

Now the LAT also is going to have to ignore Fox News as well in order to keep its ban in place:

Guard Confirms Late-Night Hotel Encounter Between Ex-Sen. John Edwards, Tabloid Reporters

A Beverly Hills hotel security guard told FOXNews.com he intervened this week between a man he identified as former Sen. John Edwards and tabloid reporters who chased down the former presidential hopeful after what they’re calling a rendezvous with his mistress and love child.

The Beverly Hilton Hotel guard said he encountered a shaken and ashen-faced Edwards — whom he did not immediately recognize — in a hotel men’s room early Tuesday morning in a literal tug-of-war with reporters on the other side of the door.

As I’ve said since this story broke, it will not be hard to confirm. Now it is with two sources – the guard and the National Enquirer. Next two questions: Will the LAT keep its ban in place? And if so, on what pretext – that Fox News isn’t reliable?

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ohn Edwards, who previously denounced tabloid news reports that he had a mistress and a “love child,” saying, “The story is false. It’s completely untrue, ridiculous,” was just caught by the National Enquirer at 2:40 in the morning trying to sneak out of an LA hotel where the completely untrue mother of his completely untrue love child was staying. In LA. So, is the story in the LA times?

Nope. Nor is it in the NY Times. The Washington Post, which has covered more than its fair of politicians with their pants down, does have coverage … a couple words … buried half-way down a column:

Uh, OH: Has John Edwards been caught with his, er, guard down? National Enquirer Still Chasing John Edwards–Affair Story; Claim to Have Caught Him in Hotel Tryst (Daily Intel, July 22) The link to that tabloid that none of us ever reads at the checkout counter has some pretty specific details. (But no pics?)

Note that no specific details are provided, and the “but no pics?” jibe is there for no reason but to attack the source, which is not surprising. (If there are pictures, we won’t see them ’til the next print edition of the Enquirer hits the stands.) (The link provided is to a New York article about the National Enquirer article; WaPo doesn’t want to get its links dirty linking to a tabloid.) Still, among its heavily tarnished ilk, the Enquirer has established itself as reasonably professional, particularly when it strays into “real news.”

And this is real news. It’s not just that Edwards is a major politician, not just some Hollywood glitter-boy. It’s that he’s been caught in a lie, a lie told straight-faced to major media outlets. So if a former presidential candidate and current VP possibility is caught in a lie while being caught in a love affair, why isn’t the big media covering it? Not even the broadcast media, including Fox, are covering it. NBC talked to Edwards after the story broke, but the blog entry on its site says only this:

John Edwards said he expects his anti-poverty initiative to play a prominent role at the convention. “I’m very hopeful and have good reason to believe that this issue will be heard loudly and clearly” at the convention, Edwards said.

Is the story not running because of the source? Are MSM steering clear of the story because it ran in a tab? Sure, the tabs are sleazy and are looked down on by the “serious” journalists who pored over a certain men’s room in Minnesota to make sure they were reporting the Larry Craig story completely. But the Enquirer has been on this story for months, and it’s clear from the coverage they ran that multiple Enquirer sources have confirmed everything – more source confirmation than there ever was on the NYT’s story on John McCain’s so-called affair, which was picked up by lots of news outlets.

Jack Shafer at Slate raises the same question I’m raising and compares the dearth of Edwards coverage to the flood of coverage that followed Larry Craig’s arrest for solicitation.

But if Edwards had an affair and lied about it, shouldn’t he suffer scrutiny akin to that of Craig? At least three-dozen daily newspapers in the United States published the Craig news the day after the Roll Call scoop, according to Nexis, but this morning not a single U.S. daily mentioned the Enquirer piece.

(I just re-confirmed this. A Nexis search for John Edwards and National Enquirer yields no hits.)

Yes, Craig had been been arrested so there was police documentation, but that didn’t stop the press from other affair stories, including the NYT McCain piece and the LA Times’ notorious pre-special election hit piece on Arnold Schwarzenegger accusing him of harassment of female staffers.

One or two whispering sources and a little reportorial tenaciousness are all that’s required for a major media to run a “legitimate” hit piece on a major candidate or politician. Yet we have here the Enquirer with reporters throughout the LA Hilton spotting Edwards as he ran about like a scared kitten, trying to avoid the media until hotel security escorted him out of the men’s room where he was hiding and away from the reporters.

That’s all very easy to verify. One reporter in five minutes at the hotel could fill a notebook from sources who were on duty and saw the same stuff the Enquirer reported. So it’s obvious that the media are using the source as an excuse to turn ignore the story because it’s about a liberal democrat who is still, by all reports, under consideration to be Obama’s vice presidential pick being caught as a hypocritical liar who’s having an affair while his wife fights to survive breast cancer.

If I had a magic machine that would turn the “D” after Edwards’ name to an “R,” you would be seeing a media frenzy today, not the forced ignoring of a legitimate news story that’s embarrassing to the Dems.

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