Veepstakes

On the Palin pick: the short answer is, I like it.

McCain is a terrible candidate. He at least needed a running mate who wouldn't hurt him with conservatives. She doesn't. And she's far easier on the eyes than Joe Lieberman.

Hey, it's only the veep. But as veeps go, I think Sarah Palin is an inspired choice. And Joe Biden...um...isn't. It gives McCain some "new and fresh" zing that he deseperately needs. For the moment, I'm still standing by my prediction that McCain will get slaughtered. He's just a terrible, terrible choice (see link above). But it's getting more interesting.

On another note, if I'm Joe Biden, I think I'm going ahead and punching Barack Obama after this kiss.

Huh. Weird.

O b a m a - B i d e n

O s a m a - Bin Laden

I'm just saying. Visually, you have to admit it's odd.

Do You Have John Edwards In The Can?

Well, I see that John Edwards, finally feeling the weight of public pressure after Rabe Ramblings blew the lid off his illegitimate child scandal yesterday (okay, maybe there were some other people reporting it too), has now admitted an affair with Rielle Hunter, but insists he's not the baby's father.

So let's think this through a little bit.

First, the media. Will they admit now that they were utterly wrong all along to be suppressing this story? It's the headline story at every media outlet right now--even the Los Angeles Times. Will they apologize to the National Enquirer? Why did Edwards find the allegations compelling enough to respond to, while the media didn't even find them compelling enough to report in most cases?

Second, what about baby-faced liar John Edwards? He denied the affair for months and now admits he was lying the whole time. But he claims the child is not his. Is he lying again? The evidence is strong that he is. Edwards claims that the baby could not be his because the math doesn't work out with the baby's birth on February 27, 2008. He says the affair ended before he could have been the father. He also, according to ABC, made a special point of saying that the affair took place before his wife's cancer recurrence.

Elizabeth Edwards' cancer reoccurred in March 2007. Assuming normal gestation, this child would have been conceived in May 2007. If that child belongs to John Edwards, he's the world's biggest cad, and as a politician he knows this. It's over for him. So he claims that the affair ended in 2006. That's convenient if it's true. Yes, it makes him a jerk who cheated on his wife, but at least he's not a complete jerk who cheated on his dying wife.

But does that claim withstand even a moment's scrutiny? If the affair ended in 2006 as he claims, why was John Edwards in his "former" mistress's hotel room at 2am a couple of weeks ago, which he now admits? Why was he photographed in his former mistress's hotel room holding some other guy's baby? Why didn't his wife know about it, as he also admits to ABC? And if it's important to him that we know his wife didn't have terminal cancer when he had the affair, did she have less terminal cancer when he decided to visit his former mistress in California last month?

And perhaps the biggest question: as a trial lawyer worth tens of millions of dollars, is this really the best this clown can come up with?

UPDATE (5:31pm): Edwards has now released a public statement. It's a lot of fun. Here's a sampling:

Although I was honest in every painful detail with my family, I did not tell the public. When a supermarket tabloid told a version of the story, I used the fact that the story contained many falsities to deny it. But being 99% honest is no longer enough.

Get it? John Edwards is 99% honest! Why, that's almost perfectly honest! The only thing he lied about was cheating on his dying wife. He's only a little bit of a liar. 99% honest is a wonderful thing. Is that kind of like how his mistress was only a little pregnant?

In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic.

Gee, you don't say. I think that comes as a stunning surprise to all of us. How much did that haircut cost again?

If you want to beat me up – feel free. You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself.

Oh, I'll bet I can. Self pity is a nice note to strike when you've just been busted cheating on your dying wife and lying about it, though. And his statement still contains no explanation for why he was in Rielle Hunter's hotel room 2:40am only 2 1/2 weeks ago if the affair ended in 2006, and he says he will answer no more questions on the issue.

Well, I beg to differ, because I think the missus is going to have quite a few questions. "No, honest, honey. I broke it off two years ago, just like I told you then."

John Edwards Rielle Hunter illegitimate child media silence baby-faced liar

Radio (And TV And Print) Silence

I saw a hilarious ad on television the other day from Media Matters, the leftwing organization devoted to discovering conservative bias in the media. They were making the claim that....wait for it....the mainstream media was favoring John McCain over Barack Obama. But for the rest of us who are not experiencing feverish delusions, can there still be any doubt about the pronounced leftward bias of the media?

For the vast majority, this issue was settled long ago. But if there are still any holdouts, I offer to you as irrefutable proof, the mainstream media's utterly astounding handling of the story about John Edwards' illegitimate child. That is to say, they haven't handled it. At all. And yet, Edwards has been busted dead to rights.

Of course, the MSM's excuse is that the story was originally broken by the National Enquirer and so, they sniff, it's not worthy of them. The only problem is, whether it was the Enquirer or not, the story is, by all appearances, actually true. Former (and possibly future) vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, who was one of the three major Democratic presidential candidates, whose wife is terminally ill with cancer, has apparently fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman named Rielle Hunter. He even allowed a political crony to take the blame for him last December when the story first started dribbling out. Yet the story is utterly ignored by the mainstream media.

Let's imagine for a moment. Imagine that it's Dick Cheney. Or Mike Huckabee. Or Mitt Romney. Or any of a hundred other Republicans. Does the media hold back on the story? Do we not even see any of the "we're not reporting it as true, we're reporting it as something people are talking about" or the "can you believe this horrible smear campaign?" stories they've become famous for? Not a chance.

So why the total media blackout? The L.A. Times even ordered its reporters not to blog on the subject. Slate magazine is among the few liberal outlets arguing for sanity.

John Edwards Rielle Hunter illegitimate child media silence

Eating The Eggs While Killing The Chicken

I noticed in Slate that Christopher Hitchens has written an appreciation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer (who died over the weekend) who exposed the atrocities of the Soviet gulag in the 20th century. Of course, Solzhenitsyn was a great man and a true hero. But there's an irony in Hitchen's eulogy. He writes:

This is a kind of fortitude for which we do not have any facile name. The simplest way of phrasing it is to say that Solzhenitsyn lived "as if." Barely deigning to notice the sniggering, pick-nose bullies who followed him and harassed him, he carried on "as if" he were a free citizen, "as if" he had the right to study his own country's history, "as if" there were such a thing as human dignity.

The irony is that these "as ifs" were produced by Solzhenitsyn's strong Christian faith. Hitchens' belief system not only has no basis for producing such behavior, but none for even consistently praising it. Hitchens, in his radical atheism, believes that human life is nothing but the product of energy, time, and chance. We are, at bottom, nothing more than atoms banging together. Yet he lauds Solzhenitsyn for living "as if" there were such a thing as human dignity. If Hitchens believes there is such a thing, he didn't get that from his atheism--and is actually being inconsistent with it.

The irony is that, while Hitchens commends Solzhenitsyn's stand against the gulag, it was the gulag that was produced by Hitchens' atheism. Solzhenitsyn's stand on human dignity was produced by the Christianity that Hitchens hates, which views people not only as if they had inherent value, but as actually having it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Christopher Hitchens