Questioning Elizabeth Edwards’ ‘Excruciating Anguish’

I have to admit being gullible enough to have accepted John Edwards story as I watched the first telling. That didn’t last long. But what about Elizabeth?

Mickey Kaus notes that both the People Magazine cover story and the National Enquirer agree that she is the victim. Not Kaus:

Elizabeth Edwards, rather than being its victim, is in on it up to her eyeballs! Why do I think this is a real possibility? First, Elizabeth was in on the first coverup, allowing her husband to go out and deny the initial Enquirer reports of his affair. (He admits to Woodruff that she knew these denials were false,) Second, she might see her legacy as bound up with her husband’s–and also want her children to have a father with a political future.** Third, Elizabeth Edwards is famously smart, and a lawyer. Does still she really think the Enquirer is just making up the part about how Edwards’ affair with Hunter restarted around the time Hunter got pregnant? She can’t possibly be as dumb as People thinks its readers are.

Meanwhile, Ted Frank looks into the real estate genius of paternity-claimer Andrew Young:

Andrew Young, who publicly claims to be the father of Rielle Hunter’s baby (though he hasn’t been heard from since John Edwards’s confession of an affair), was moved to Santa Barbara by the generosity of John Edwards’s campaign chairman, trial lawyer Fred Baron. He was paid $3,500/month to work for the Edwards campaign. Yet the Raleigh News & Observer reports that Andrew Young and his wife sold their Chapel Hill house to Carolyn Grissom for a jaw-dropping $1.2 million on February 14, 2007, and moved into the Chapel Hill Governors Club country-club gated community, where they rented a few doors down from Hunter. (Rentals there are available for as low as $1700/month, and home prices range from $289,000 to $2.3 million, so nothing necessarily unusual about that.)

What’s more unusual is that North Carolina real-estate records on the web show that Andrew and Cheri Young purchased the 5000-square-foot house for $300,000 on September 28, 2005. (The home was built in 1989, so they weren’t buying a vacant lot and building.) So either Andrew Young is a secret real-estate genius on a level not seen since Hillary Clinton’s commodities trading, and was able to flip a house for a 300% and $900,000 return in under eighteen months, or something else is going on. [READ ON]