To Find Out About John Edwards' Affair You'll Have to Look to the Foreign Press

UPDATE: EDWARDS ADMITS AFFAIR

The mainstream U.S. media is for some reason putting their fingers in their ears and going "LA-LA-LA-LA" whenever the issue of John Edwards mistress and love child comes up. They're refusing to report any of the details, probably because they want to protect Edwards and Obama, and because the story was broken by The National Enquirer. The London Times is willing to write about it even if the U.S. press isn't:

Sleaze scuppers Democrat golden boy
Gotcha: Senator John Edwards, whose wife has cancer, has been caught in a sex scandal that ends his vice-presidential hopes

SCRATCH John Edwards off the list of potential vice-presidential candidates. The former White House contender, who had been hoping to get the nod from Barack Obama, is in the midst of a full-blown sex scandal.

Every supermarket shopper knows that the preternaturally youthful former senator for North Carolina may have fathered a love child with a film-maker while Elizabeth, his saintly wife, is dying of cancer. There are sensational new details on the National Enquirer website, although most of the media have done their best to ignore them.

The tabloid magazine cornered Edwards, 55, leaving a Los Angeles hotel where Rielle Hunter, his alleged mistress, and her baby were staying, at 2.40am last Tuesday. He ran down a hallway and dived into the men’s bathroom. A hotel security guard confirmed the encounter. “His face just went totally white,” the guard said.

The story has been bubbling away for months, but so far there has been not a word about it in the mainstream newspapers, even though Edwards was John Kerry’s running mate in 2004 and has been tipped for a prominent job in an Obama administration – if not vice-president, then attorney-general or antipoverty tsar.

Edwards volunteered recently: “I’m prepared to consider seriously anything, anything [Obama] asks me to do for our country.”

He can stop waiting by the telephone. News of the “gotcha” rapidly circulated on the internet via the Drudge Report and has been buzzing on the blogs. The Enquirer’s story appears to be well sourced.

According to the magazine, Edwards arrived at the Beverly Hilton on Monday at 9.45pm after attending a meeting on homelessness in Los Angeles and was dropped off at a side entrance. Two rooms were allegedly booked for Hunter in a friend’s name.

Edwards emerged hours later and was confronted by journalists from the Enquirer. His usual spokesmen and defenders have scurried for cover behind a wall of “no comment”, while the details of the story have gone unchallenged.

While it might be easy for the media to try and discount the story based on the National Enquirer connection, Fox News verified significant parts of the story with a hotel security guard, and so far Edwards hasn't challenged any of the facts. He's tried to dismiss it as "tabloid trash", but even the tabloids get it right once in awhile.

I hope the Democrats rally around him and give him a prominent speech at the convention. The GOP would have a field day with that, and maybe the U.S. press would finally take an interest in the story.

Personally, I think he's toast and if he's at the convention at all he'll be parking cars. Look for an announcement that suggests his wife's health problems will keep him from attending.