"I am a product of infidelity. Both of my parents cheated on each other, and as a kid it damaged me."

"I then grew up, fell in love with a married man, and caused even more damage. I believe history often repeats itself if you do not take responsibility and change it. Infidelity is wrong. It hurts people. It hurt me and then I in turn also hurt people. It is a chain of pain."

Says Rielle Hunter, just when no one wants to ever talk about John Edwards again, but the lady has a book to sell. 

About David Petraeus: "The man falls in love with... himself!"

That's what I wrote, when I first saw that the man's love interest was the woman who wrote a fawning biography about him. It reminded me of John Edwards, falling for the woman who was trotting around after him videographing what her trotting around videographing made seem like the amazing wonder of his very being.

A reader emails:

"The man falls in love with... himself!"

And that is at the center of what an affair is about.

Here's Shirley Glass, who before her death a few years ago was considered one of the top experts on infidelity:

There is an attraction in the affair, and I try to understand what it is. Part of it is the romantic projection: I like the way I look when I see myself in the other person’s eyes. There is positive mirroring. An affair holds up a vanity mirror, the kind with all the little bulbs around it; it gives a nice rosy glow to the way you see yourself. By contrast, the marriage offers a make-up mirror; it magnifies all your wrinkles and pores, every little flaw. When someone loves you despite the fact that they can see all your flaws, that is a reality-based love.

In the stories of what happened during the affair, people seem to take on a different persona, and one of the things they liked best about being in that relationship was the person they had become. The man who wasn’t sensitive or expressive is now in a relationship where he is expressing his feelings and is supportive.

Petraeus's woman: his biographer!

What does it say about a man that he falls for the woman who cranks out the PR about what a swell guy he is?

It's so... John Edwards and Rielle Hunter.

The man falls in love with... himself!

"On one tape she saw Johnny walking into a room and his reaction to seeing me."

"She apparently told him that he never once looked at her the way he looked at me. So she took that bit and put it on her computer as a screen saver in order to watch it over and over again."

Johnny = John Edwards. She = Elizabeth Edwards. Me = Rielle Hunter, who once met Elizabeth Edwards, who "did not look me in the eye. In fact, she appeared to be frightened."

"Being a person who's committed to truth and living a life where you're not hiding..."

"... it's almost like a cosmic joke to fall in love with someone who's living a big lie."

And it actually is a cosmic joke when you are the lie.

"The case of USA v. Johnny Reid Edwards contains six counts..."

"... including conspiracy, four counts of illegal campaign contributions and one count of false statements..."

ADDED: Gregory Craig, Edwards's lawyer said: "John Edwards has done wrong in his life — and he knows it better than anyone — but he did not break the law... The Justice Department has wasted millions of dollars and thousands of hours on a matter more appropriately a topic for the Federal Election Commission to consider, not a criminal court."

What? The FEC isn't enforcing law? When John Edwards was a Senator, did he not vote for laws that made campaign finance matters into crimes? Is Craig trying to say that some kinds of crimes aren't really crime crimes?

"Justice Department plans to indict John Edwards."

"The Department of Justice plans to argue that two wealthy supporters donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Edwards campaign — money that went to support Rielle Hunter, a videographer for Edwards' campaign with whom Edwards had an affair.  The government will claim the funds were illegal campaign contributions."

Worst affair ever?

Mickey Kaus has a problem with indicting John Edwards.

He writes:

Apparently the prosecutors’ idea is that if Edwards used money from “Bunny” Mellon and others to keep his mistress stashed away and quiet, this was really a campaign expense and should have been paid for out of campaign funds. But suppose Edwards had paid for it with campaign funds. Don’t you think prosecutors would now be thinking of indicting him for an improper use of campaign funds?  (You can’t pay for most meals using campaign funds. You can’t buy mittens with campaign funds. Are mistresses going to OK?)

"I followed my heart, and I believe it was the right thing to do, which is weird — I get how weird that is..."

"... because I didn’t make a commitment to Elizabeth. I wasn’t the one lying, like, to her, and I was supporting him in his process, and his intentions never wavered. I knew that he wanted — he just had a really unique way of getting there — to live a life of truth."

Rielle Hunter, being weird, on "Oprah."

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

If she would have, like, made a commitment to Elizabeth, then it wouldn't have been weird.

Like, she could have made a commitment to respect Elizabeth's marriage to John? - it would have been, like, a really unique way of getting there? Getting to, you know, that space of living a life of truth?

But it wouldn't have been weird. It would have been just, you know, like a really really real... process.

Oh! It's Everybody Talk Like Rielle Hunter Day!

"I feel comfortable talking now, because Johnny went public and made a statement admitting paternity."

"I didn't feel like I could ever speak until he did that. Because had I spoken, I would have emasculated him. And I could not emasculate him. Also, it is not my desire to teach my daughter that when Mommy's upset with Daddy, you take matters into your own hands and fix Daddy's mistakes. Which I view as one of the biggest problems in all female-and-male relationships."

Rielle Hunter will not emasculate John Edwards. And she will not fix his mistakes. Because daughter Quinn must learn about the problems of the female-and-male relationship. So never never never no no no do not emasculate your little Johnnikins.

Newsweek loves Rielle Hunter.

A ridiculous puff piece by Jonathan Darman. It's called — I am not kidding — "The Quiet Dignity of Rielle Hunter." It ends:

That's not to say we've heard the last of Rielle Hunter. She is too rich and intriguing a character for her story to end here. Eventually, she will talk to someone. When she does the inevitable interview, the questions will be all about the affair: Did John say he loved her? Did she love John? Did she know it was wrong to go after a married man? But I hope someone thinks to ask her about what came after: What was the strength that kept her head down through the years? And why is that strength so elusive to the rest of the world?

Ha ha ha. Well, I've already written about Darman's writing about Hunter — back in August 2008. It ends:

Our adorable reporter tries to do his job as he teeters between falling for her and figuring out what is going on.

Why didn't Rielle Hunter have an abortion?

Because she thought that baby was “some kind of golden child, the reincarnated spirit of a Buddhist monk who was going to help save the world.”

"Mr. Edwards once calmed an anxious Ms. Hunter by promising her that after his wife died, he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band."

Poor Dave Matthews, getting caught up in that ghoulish slapstick.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ralph L said:

He'll need a big helicopter to lift the Dave Matthews Band bus over that rooftop.

(If you don't get that, read this.)

And William said:

I can sympathize with Edwards. My wife is lying in a coma, and the doctors do not expect a full recovery. The whole experience has been very traumatic, but I have learned a valuable lesson. When I get my license back there will be no more DWI on my part. And that's a promise.... But that's not the immediate problem. My wife has all sorts of hot friends visiting her, and you should see the nurse on the night shift. My problem is how do I approach the touchy question of post mortem dating with these attractive women. I don't want to appear insensitive, but life is for the living... I would welcome the advice of any Edwards' voters on this difficult subject.

Who brings their baby along to a court apppearance?

Only Rielle Hunter.

It was not immediately clear why Hunter brought the little girl to court.

Ha ha. It was clear. Just not immediately.

ADDED: Chip Ahoy says "I sense even the kid knows":

Hunter was hired to make videos of Edwards, "but this one is said to have shown him taking positions that weren’t on his official platform."

The Daily News gossip column quipped about the report that there's a John Edwards/Rielle Hunter sex tape.

This sets Popehat off, riffing wildly on sexual wordplay, for example, here:

This brings us, of course, to pirates. How did it come to pass that “to take one’s foot” became an idiom for orgasm? Prior to the Revolution, and therefore prior to the metric system, the French used measurements akin to the imperial system. When corsairs went to divide their spoils after a stint of rapine, each would naturally demand his portion of the whole. The allotted part, by convention, was a foot-high mound of booty. No, really.

Taking his foot of gold was the pirate’s pleasure. Since not everything that happens in Tortuga stays in Tortuga, taking the foot gradually became anyone’s pleasure in anything... And just as a noble, sexy, piraty bit of bawd has by now been stripped bare by its broad overuse in French, so too has the vitality of allusiveness in English suffered under the weight of too popular a press. We’ve seen enough; it’s time to close your eyes and think of English.

Maybe you'd better go over there and see how this all fits together.

"The Excruciating Anguish of Elizabeth"...

... as PR.

I'm betting Mickey Kaus has it right.

Keith Olbermann calls out Rush Limbaugh for saying why he thinks John Edwards cheated on Elizabeth.

Keith Olbermann presents a rather unsavory Rush Limbaugh clip:



I'm not defending Rush for stooping to this level (and I'd guess that he isn't particularly proud of his work in that segment). But Olbermann's comprehension falls short. I agree with him that Rush seems to be saying: 1. Men aren't sexually attracted to women who are smarter than they are, 2. Smart women are always telling men what to do instead of catering to their sexual needs, and 3. Elizabeth Edwards, being a smart woman, may have driven John Edwards into the arms — crudely, into the mouth — of Rielle Hunter.

But Olbermann is wrong to spin this as hypocrisy, a charge he premises on the notion that Rush is a big Puritan who expects others to meet standards of virtue that he ignores. Olbermann cites Rush's 3 failed marriages and problems with drug abuse. I don't think Rush ever promotes himself as particularly virtuous on sexual matters. (See this old post where I call him "a shameless sybarite.") The issue of drugs is irrelevant to Edwards's case, but in the time I've been listening to Rush (since January 2008), he's always been modest and self-aware with respect to his drug problems. But on sexual matters, he tends to be worldly. He frequently says he doesn't want to be married and implies that he's enjoying himself.

What I hear in the clip Olbermann has presented is a man's understanding of another man. Rush means to say something very crude, and he makes comedy out of holding it back and then blurting out just enough that we get the picture: A man needs a woman's mouth for sex. Rush's comic riffs often involve him telling us what other people must be thinking. His best work comes in this form, but this example is not his best work. His best work usually has him voicing imagined thoughts that he does not agree with — the thinking of liberals and leftists. But this one is a case of sympathy. He purports to know why men cheat on their wives, and he may be speaking from experience. So Olbermann's hypocrisy theme is just wrong.

Olbermann is probably assuming that all conservatives are alike, and since some of them profess strong sexual morality, all of them do. That's as wrong as thinking that all liberals are sexual libertines.

It's also absurd that Olbermann taunts Limbaugh for only being on the radio and not on TV. Obviously, Rush's ratings are much higher than Olbermann's, and he's had far, far more influence.

Interestingly, the clip shows why Rush belongs on the radio. And I'm not saying that because he's fat, which he is, and he knows it. He belongs on the radio because to produce his very expressive vocal stylings he throws his whole body into it. He flails his arms and jerks his shoulders like a ham Shakespearean actor. The voice possesses the body. You don't want to see that. You only want to hear the results of it. This is fine, since he's not terribly physically attractive anyway. He's a great voice. That's radio. By contrast, Olbermann belongs on TV. He looks right for that part, and he maintains physical decorum while producing a good, expressive voice.

Olbermann announces at the beginning of the segment that he's going to demonstrate that Limbaugh has turned Edwards into "a victim." He never proves that point. Elizabeth Edwards is a victim — of disease and a cheating husband — and that makes it quite unpleasant to blame her for Edwards's actions (which Rush does). But how does that make Edwards a victim? I think it makes Edwards even more disgusting to have Rush saying, I know why you must have felt like cheating on her.

Now, maybe Rush is a big step ahead of me, and he wasn't just blurting out a theory of why Edwards cheated on Elizabeth. There's not much to the idea that a man wanted more sex than he was getting at home — or a different kind. And the idea that a woman should stop talking so much and give a man oral sex is such low humor that it's hard to see why he didn't discard it. Maybe what Rush was really doing was trying to hurt Edwards with Rush's sympathy. After all, Edwards's supporters hate Rush. To portray him as the sort of guy who thinks like Rush is to hurt him.

Want to keep talking about Edwards?

Hot new stuff here, with appropriate phallic symbolism.

MORE: This is good:



(Here's the photo they talk about.)

"We are generally powerless to interpret reincarnationspeak and yogababble."

You can't just ask Language Log anything. Or is it you just can't ask Language Log anything? Or is it you can't ask Language Log just anything?

Anyway...

A reporter from the New York Daily News called to ask me about some things that former yoga instructor Rielle Hunter had said, about former Democratic politician John Edwards being "an old soul" with a "special energy" who could be a truly "transformational leader" if only he would use his heart more and his head less; and about her purpose on this Earth being "to help raise awareness about all this, to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves." The reporter wanted to know what this meant — what becoming a better reflection of one's true repressed self would amount to, in precise terms. Doesn't it suggest that one's real self is trapped inside, he asked, and one's apparently real self that walks around among us, and eats breakfast, and experiences temptations regarding sexual relations with blonde videographers, is merely a reflection of that inner reality? Is this not, he went on (having apparently majored in philosophy at Columbia), a remarkable inversion of the way language is normally employed by philosophers talking about the self? Has Ms Hunter not got the outside inside and the inside outside?

What becoming a better reflection of one's true repressed self would amount to....

But there really is a linguistics question there! It's about screwing up the meaning by putting the adjectives "true" and "repressed" together. I think Language Log was manifesting some repression about sex and therefore failing to get to its true interest in linguistic. But it was nevertheless very funny, which is always good.