Last year's John Edwards adultery/paternity/cover-up/payoff scandal was a sad, tawdry business. But it isn't behind us yet. We're now waiting to see if Edwards illegally used campaign money to keep Rielle Hunter quiet. If the FEC determines he did, Edwards is in big trouble and the American public is in for a few more headlines, as in "Former Democrat Star Spends His First Day in Federal Pen."But even if Edwards skates away from a criminal conviction, there's still a few headlines coming our way. And those will be courtesy of Elizabeth Edwards herself, spilling secrets and sharing her pain in juicy, tell-all interviews with the press. The first big one will air tomorrow on Oprah.
But why would Mrs. Edwards, so reclusive and stoic since the scandal finally surfaced in the MSM, choose now to end her silence?
Oh. She has a book coming out.
Both as a "wronged woman" and a person battling cancer, Americans are right to be sympathetic to Elizabeth Edwards. But it doesn't mean some skepticism isn't in order as well.
Jenice Armstrong, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, says, "Keeping quiet gained her automatic sympathy. You "tsk, tsk" and imagine her the wronged victim in this sordid affair. But by dredging all this up again, it's a reminder that she, too, victimized the American public by playing along with her husband's deceptions."
Michael Goodwin, the New York Daily News columnist wrote a quick piece for Fox News, "After all, Elizabeth Edwards helped to perpetrate a fraud on voters, namely, that her husband was fit to be president."
Emily Miller, writing in Inside Politics Daily, "There are victims in this mess, and they are the Edwards' three children. And this book just worsens the life-long public humiliation of their parents' marriage and their father's philandering.
As Elizabeth Edwards has said, her cancer is incurable, so I especially feel sad for the younger two children at home. I'm not a mother, but I cannot imagine why she would rather spend her remaining time on a book tour rather than at home with her children.
At the end of a life, does it really matter who was at fault over an extramarital affair? And is the public airing of that answer worth taking her limited time away from what does matter, the people who love you?"
And even Maureen Dowd?
...“He should not have run,” Elizabeth Edwards writes in her new book, “Resilience.”
John told her a little about Rielle a few days after he announced in 2006, and she told him to drop out to “protect our family from this woman, from his act,” she writes.
She said she cried, screamed and threw up when she found out. But she ended up going along, helping sell the voters on her husband’s character as a truth teller and charm as a loving husband and father. She had put so many quarters in the shiny slot machine of their mutual ambition. It was hard to walk away.
Just as it’s hard to walk away from her desire to prosecute her husband and his former girlfriend now in public, while still taking the marriage “month by month.”
John Edwards’s political career is over, and he’s being investigated by the feds about whether he used campaign funds to underwrite his affair. Nobody — except Rielle — has any interest in hearing from him again. Americans would have been relieved if the last we heard of him was that cringe-inducing “Nightline” interview last year, when he made the argument that he was a helpless narcissist and that he hit on Rielle when Elizabeth’s cancer was in remission.
But now Saint Elizabeth has dragged him back into the public square for a flogging on “Oprah” and in Time and at bookstores near you. The book is billed as helping people “facing life’s adversities” and offering an “inspirational meditation on the gifts we can find among life’s biggest challenges.”
But it’s just a gratuitous peek into their lives, and one that exposes her kids, by peddling more dregs about their personal family life in a book, and exposes the ex-girlfriend who’s now trying to raise the baby girl, a dead ringer for John Edwards, in South Orange, N.J...
But leaving aside the timing and the motives for Mrs. Edwards' latest revelations, the thing that most bothered me in reading the previews of her Oprah appearance was her answer to a question about being scared of dying. Mrs. Edwards replied, "It's not as frightening. If there's an ever after - please, please, please - I would be leaving part of my family, but I can do and join another party, and wait for that day when we're all together again. In some ways it's something you yearn for."
"If there's an ever after - please, please, please."
Hardly a statement of confidence, despite the Bible's clear and frequent teaching that those who trust Christ as their Savior possess eternal life as a guarantee, one won not by their own merit but by the sacrifice Jesus made on their behalf.
But then, Elizabeth Edwards doesn't believe that.
Adele Stan recorded the following notes about Elizabeth Edwards' religious ideas in July of 2007. She did so in a post for The American Prospect, "an authoritative magazine of liberal ideas, committed to a just society, an enriched democracy, and effective liberal politics."
Stan wrote:
Asked by Beth Corbin of Americans United for Separation of Church and State to explain how her faith beliefs inform her politics, Elizabeth Edwards gave an extraordinarily radical answer: She doesn't believe in salvation, at least not in the standard Christian understanding of it, and she said as much:
"I have, I think, somewhat of an odd version of God. I do not have an intervening God. I don't think I can pray to him -- or her -- to cure me of cancer."
After the words "or her," Mrs. Edwards gave a little laugh, indicating she knew she had waded into water perhaps a bit deeper than the audience had anticipated. Then she continued:
"I appreciate other people's prayers for that [a cure for her cancer], but I believe that we are given a set of guidelines, and that we are obligated to live our lives with a view to those guidelines. And I don't that believe we should live our lives that way for some promise of eternal life, but because that's what's right. We should do those things because that's what's right."
Those of us who understand what genuine prayer is (and to Whom it is directed) would do well to intercede for Mrs. Edwards. And not only for her deliverance from cancer but, much more important, for her deliverance from a foolish, self-centered religion which rejects the salvation offered by a transcendent but oh, so personal God.
