BY TAYLOR MARSH
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John Edwards lied about his affair.
“The story is false, it’s completely untrue, it’s ridiculous.” – John Edwards
The National Enquirer got the story correct.
Politicians never learn. It’s always the lie that gets you in
the end. The arrogance. But the truth is that people of all stripes never learn
this lesson. Everyone starts out lying about it, pushing off the reckoning until the inevitable happens and it always does.
I made a living almost fifteen years ago on talking about relationships, including
infidelity, while writing about it based on years and years of interviews,
some of which took me to places with a serious creep factor, as I’ve written about before. It’s why when I first read this story so many parts of it rang true, fit, and gave me that sinking feeling.
No one knows what goes on in a marriage unless you’re the one in it. Judgment
is for hypocrits, though Mrs. Edwards’s condition does not make this very easy
to swallow. Newt Gingrich asking his wife for a divorce when she was recovering from cancer didn’t go in the win column for him either.
It’s why when I learned about John McCain’s treatment of his now ex-wife it
didn’t surprise me at all. Neither did the reaction of the Reagans when it finally
floated to the top.
Outside her Bel-Air home, Nancy Reagan stood arm in arm with John McCain
and offered a significant — but less than exuberant — endorsement.But that friendship was strained in the late 1970s by McCain’s decision to
divorce his first wife, Carol, who was particularly close to the Reagans,
and within weeks marry Cindy Hensley, the young heiress to a lucrative Arizona
beer distributorship.The Reagans rushed to help Carol, finding her a new home in Southern California
with the family of Reagan aide Edwin Meese III and a series of political and
White House jobs to ease her through that difficult time.McCain, who is about to become the GOP nominee, has made several statements
about how he divorced Carol and married Hensley that conflict with the public
record. …An examination of court documents tells a different story. McCain did not
sue his wife for divorce until Feb. 19, 1980, and he wrote in his court petition
that he and his wife had “cohabited” until Jan. 7 of that year —
or for the first nine months of his relationship with Hensley.Although McCain suggested in his autobiography that months passed between
his divorce and remarriage, the divorce was granted April 2, 1980, and he
wed Hensley in a private ceremony five weeks later. McCain obtained an Arizona
marriage license on March 6, 1980, while still legally married to his first
wife.
John McCain has fudged the truth about what happened between his first marriage
and his second throughout his political career and even today no one has the
interest to report on it either. The traditional press and new media both seem
to pick and choose who gets the truth squad treatment. Democrats always win
by losing this one. Of course, there’s reporting and then there’s political
manning of the barricades. In the end, there sits the truth, ugly, human and
ultimately predictable and always found out in the end.
This story reveals the human factor in us all, particularly human weakness
of the flesh. It’s just some don’t fall for the drama, dangers and happiness
threatening destructiveness. But the ignorance and abject carelessness of people
on the political scale of Edwards, McCain, and yes, Bill Clinton,
is something I never get used to seeing. It has nothing to do with their stature
and position. It happens to people of all walks of life. But when eyes are trained
on you, it is really mystifying how people get themselves into these messes.
When it comes to affairs of the flesh, stupid reigns. No matter your walk of
life.
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