I Guess I Gotta

From ABC News:

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 loved only his wife, Elizabeth.

"Two years ago I made a very serious mistake," Edwards said, blaming the prominence of being a vice presidential candidate. "All of which fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe that you can do whatever you want," he said.

And his statement (if you want to read it).

The child, a baby girl named Frances, was born February 27 of this year (and in the spirit of full though unecessary disclosure, my brother's birthday is February 28. He was born early in the Kennedy administration and has no connection to John Edwards, Reille Hunter or her child).

Counting the months, that means conception occurred in early June, 2007. John Edwards, by the way, was in town a month or so later. Something, out of context and coincidental, stands out in from that. In discussing poverty, Senator Edwards quoted Martin Luther King:

A time comes when silence is betrayal.

Lotsa folks feel betrayed.Johnny Mac is one:

Man, he is so toast.

A little pissed too, it seems. Later he writes:

I bought into his populist message. He seemed like the real deal to me. Again, not casting aspersions on adulterers. Some of our best presidents have been adulterers. And some of our worst, including the worst ever, apparently, have not been.

But just don't start wetting your dipstick at the beginning of the process, risking EVERYTHING (like the future of the country if we don't take the White House back).
Idiot.

Agreed. Granted he never seemed to crawl out of third place in the primaries, but imagine if he did. Imagine if Obama flared out early and the race was between Senator Clinton and Senator Edwards - and Edwards won.

All else being the same, we'd now be looking at 4 more hears of Republican misrule. 4 more years of non-existent oversight on White House illegalities, 4 more years of conservative judicial activism, 4 more years of upwardly mobile republican wealth redistribution and so on. Just because John Edwards couldn't keep it in his pants.

As McIntire said, idiot.

Via Crooks and Liars, some other reactions.Atrios:

The public: Edwards was a fucking idiot for running for president, and betrayed a lot of his supporters by doing so.

Fire Dog Lake:

But Edwards did play the family card quite heavily during his campaign, and if he'd gotten the nomination, the Democrats would be sunk right now and we'd be looking at four years of John McCain. So on that count, I'm profoundly grateful that he didn't get it. He was risking a lot for all of us by doing this stuff and running at the same time. It was incredibly stupid.

What more can you say?

Go Obama.

Earlier this evening at the dailykos, Elizabeth Edwards published a statement of her own:

Our family has been through a lot. Some caused by nature, some caused by human weakness, and some – most recently – caused by the desire for sensationalism and profit without any regard for the human consequences. None of these has been easy. But we have stood with one another through them all. Although John believes he should stand alone and take the consequences of his action now, when the door closes behind him, he has his family waiting for him.

John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me. And we began a long and painful process in 2006, a process oddly made somewhat easier with my diagnosis in March of 2007. This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well. Because of a recent string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication, because of a picture falsely suggesting that John was spending time with a child it wrongly alleged he had fathered outside our marriage, our private matter could no longer be wholly private.

The pain of the long journey since 2006 was about to be renewed.

John has spoken in a long on-camera interview I hope you watch. Admitting one’s mistakes is a hard thing for anyone to do, and I am proud of the courage John showed by his honesty in the face of shame. The toll on our family of news helicopters over our house and reporters in our driveway is yet unknown. But now the truth is out, and the repair work that began in 2006 will continue. I ask that the public, who expressed concern about the harm John’s conduct has done to us, think also about the real harm that the present voyeurism does and give me and my family the privacy we need at this time.

Privacy for the Edwards family seems in order.

We'll be happy to discuss John McCain's first wife (how that marriage ended and how quickly he remarried), the (separate) illegitimate children of J.C. Watts and Dan Burton, Rush Limbaugh's multiple marriages and addictions and so on if the topic of "Democrat values" rears its ugly head any time soon.