Free Republic

You know there are some in the liberal media who have simply lost touch with reality when the headline reads "John Edwards Cheats on Wife With Cancer" and they ask with great detachment whether he'll be able to run for office again soon. These people's morality is so bizarre that they showed more outrage at John McCain featuring a picture of Paris Hilton in a commercial for two eye-blinks than for Edwards catting around on a dying spouse. ...

By now, just about everyone has heard former Sen. John Edwards' non-apology apology for his affair with a former campaign aide. It turns out that despite his repeated, emphatic denials, he's a bigger hypocrite than even we imagined. But in gaining entry to that growing, bipartisan fraternity of immoral politicos, he exhibited especially despicable behavior for which he and his enabling wife, Elizabeth, must be condemned. Simply put, they exploited her breast cancer to cultivate his phony family-values image and cash in on the public's sympathy to advance their political ambitions. Mrs. Edwards' battle against an incurable disease and his...

As most of you know, John Edwards is a lawyer. But that fact alone probably wouldn’t give us subject-matter jurisdiction over the bizarro story involving him and video producer Rielle Hunter (pictured, left). Fortunately, however, Fred Baron (pictured, below right) gives us the in we need. The dealio: In the midst of the weekend’s news that Edwards had had an affair with Hunter, news also broke that someone had paid not only for Hunter to move from Chapel Hill, N.C., to Santa Barbara, Calif., but for the man who claims to be the father of her child, Andrew Young, to...

Former presidential hopeful John Edwards' mistress grew up in Florida with a dad who once found himself in the FBI's sights. Born Lisa Druck in Fort Lauderdale, Rielle Hunter didn't leave much of a footprint there. Or on the Central Florida community of Ocala, where she went to high school. Or Tampa, where she went to college. Correction: A previous version of this story said James Druck died in 1992. Her father, however, did leave a legacy in this state. An ugly one. Quoting an FBI informant shortly after James Druck's death in 1990, Sports Illustrated named him a figure...

Scoble blogged Friday about the four-day presidential announcement trip, after Edwards admitted the romance with Hunter. Wrote Scoble, "I had no idea that when former Senator John Edwards invited me to come along on his plane back in December of 2006 that I would have had a front-row seat to a sex scandal."

By the time the MSM deigned to take notice that former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) had fathered a “love child” with campaign staffer Rielle Hunter – a story broken by the National Enquirer – it had become a staple of Jay Leno’s monologues, the blogosphere was abuzz and Fox News had corroborated the Enquirer’s reporting. These alternative sources of news and information building on the Enquirer’s legwork induced Edwards to admit to the affair in an interview with ABC’s “Nightline.” To make matters worse, the MSM even got scooped about getting scooped about the Edwards story. Well before New York...

Hillary Clinton's supporters gave a fresh glimpse yesterday of their lingering resentment over her defeat by claiming that she would have won the Democratic presidential nomination if John Edwards had confessed his affair earlier. Howard Wolfson, her former communications director, suggested that the lie Mr Edwards told last year over his adulterous relationship with Rielle Hunter had lasting effects because it enabled him to stay in the race at a crucial time. ...

The John Edwards scandal may have just landed flat onto Barack Obama, regardless of whether Edwards is his running mate or just a bad memory. Jake Tapper at ABC notices that Fred Baron, the man who sent money to both Edwards’ mistress and the supposed father of her child, has been raising money for Barack Obama as well. One has to wonder whether his duties at Team Obama are anywhere near as extensive: The Dallas Morning News over the weekend profiled Fred Baron, the chairman of Sen. John Edwards’ campaign finance committees in both his 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns.Baron...

Media Bias: So what if it took a "gutter" tabloid to expose a major Democratic presidential candidate scandal? So, the establishment media's shielding of John Edwards likely determined the party nomination.The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and the other hallowed institutions of the old print media just had their reportorial clocks cleaned by the "sleazy" National Enquirer on the John Edwards extramarital affair story. You can smell the double standard. While the New York Times aggressively pursued questionable allegations of an affair between Sen. John McCain and a lobbyist, it refused to sully its hands with the...

So...I come home from work, expecting to see the latest on the investigation into the Edwards cover-up, tax fraud, election and charitable contributions fraud, etc. and turn on Fox News. There was NOTHING on this story...but an ad during every commercial break for the law firm of Baron & Budd.

(CNN) – If reporters had nabbed former presidential candidate John Edwards lying about his extramarital affair, Hillary Clinton would have captured the Democratic presidential nomination, her former communications director said. "I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," Howard Wolfson told ABCNews.com in an interview released Monday, because internal campaign polling showed "our voters and Edwards voters were the same people. 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 after Edwards first denied rumors of...

John Edwards’ explanation of his affair with videographer Rielle Hunter includes several apparent inconsistencies, which grate against his assertion that he was telling “99 percent” of the truth before coming clean Friday in a confessional interview. Edwards admitted to the affair with Hunter, saying it began in 2006. He denied it for months it following reports by the National Enquirer last October. But discrepancies between his story and the unraveling timeline of events raise more questions about whether Edwards' attempts to come clean are in fact just more lies and half-truths. A former close friend to Edwards’ mistress told FOXNews.com...

The rise and fall of John Edwards Political stardom to public apology By Jim Morrill jmorrill@charlotteobserver.com Posted: Sunday, Aug. 10, 2008 When veteran Democratic strategist Bob Shrum first met John Edwards in 1997, he saw in the accomplished trial lawyer a raw political talent. “I called my partners and said. ‘I think I just met a future president of the United States,'” Shrum recalls. A year later, at 45, Edwards was elected to the U.S. Senate, launching a trajectory that in 2000 put him on the short list of Al Gore's vice presidential candidates. By 2001, he'd begun planning what...

Rielle Hunter, the woman at the heart of the John Edwards scandal, was born in Fort Lauderdale and attended college in Tampa. But it was from the cocaine-fueled New York City social scene of the 1980s that she emerged as the literary model for the ultimate party girl.

Elizabeth Edwards has "bad energy," claimed the woman who had an affair with two-time presidential candidate John Edwards, according to Monday's online edition of Newsweek magazine. Rielle Hunter, the mistress at the center of the political storm around Edwards, held the former North Carolina senator in high regard. However, the party girl-turned-healer-turned-videographer was apparently less generous with her former paramour's wife. "I've only met her once," Hunter told Newsweek reporter Jonathan Darman in late 2006 during a lunch in which she mistakenly cast him as a friend. "She does not give off good energy. She didn't make eye contact with...

The woman John Edwards admitted to having an affair with made disparaging comments about Edwards' wife Elizabeth in an interview two years ago, says the New York Post. Talking to Newsweek reporter Jonathan Darman in late 2006, Rielle Hunter reportedly said, "[Elizabeth] does not give off good energy," and accused: "She didn't make eye contact with me." Hunter, a filmmaker, was documenting Edwards' presidential campaign at the time. She spoke with Newsweek's Darman after getting fired, reportedly telling him of Elizabeth: "Someday, the truth about her is going to come out." When Darman spoke again with Hunter last summer, she...

Through good luck or good sense, Democrats have managed to nominate their only top tier 2008 candidate who won’t bring the specter of a sex scandal (either their own or their spouse’s) into The White House. Over the past eight years, former President Bill Clinton’s personal life has been the subject of several press reports that suggest his post-Lewinsky reformation might have been something less than lasting. And now, everyone knows about the mistress and rumored love child that would have derailed John Edwards’ nomination – or presidency. Certainly, Republicans have suffered their share of scandals over the past couple...

RALEIGH, N.C. - There were few people closer to John Edwards during his presidential campaigns than Fred Baron, a renowned Texas trial lawyer who evolved into one of the Democratic Party’s key fund-raisers. Baron, who made his fortune as a celebrated litigator on asbestos-injury cases before turning his attention to Democratic presidential tickets, was part of Edwards’ inner circle of advisers. But when it came to one key financial decision, Baron said he chose to keep the former senator out of the loop. On Friday, after Edwards confessed to having an affair with Rielle Hunter, a video producer with whom...

The public is unhappy with the Iraq war. The economy is in dire straits. The president, a_two-term_Republican, is setting records for unpopularity. It's very difficult for one party to win three presidential elections in a row. Circumstances seem to be conspiring to make 2008 a Democratic year. So why is Barack Obama running neck and neck with John McCain two weeks before the Democratic Convention? Salon asked two respected journalists and a veteran Republican operative to give us their best guesses. Tom Edsall, a former Washington Post reporter, is political editor of the Huffington Post. He was also a professor...

MyDD's Jerome Armstrong has secured a statement from Rielle Hunter, the woman with whom John Edwards has been accused of having an affair. From MyDD's site: "The innuendoes and lies that have appeared on the internet and in the National Enquirer concerning John Edwards are not true, completely unfounded and ridiculous. My video production company was hired by the Edwards camp on a 6 month contract, which we completed December 31, 2006. When working for the Edwards camp, my conduct as well as the conduct of my entire team was completely professional. This concocted story is just dirty politics and...