Hypo-Critical

So, the John Edwards Love Child story is back, after the National Enquirer wrote a new piece (and follow-up) about Edwards meeting with his alleged mistress, Rielle Hunter, in a hotel in LA. Edwards still denies he fathered Hunter's child; his long-time associate and friend Andrew Young still claims he (Young) is the father. Anonymous sources claim otherwise.

I've got no bloody idea; I hope that it isn't true and fear that it is.

My only interest in the story at the moment is the increasing complaint that the mainstream media isn't running with it. Over at Slate, Mickey Kaus apoplectically details everyone who isn't talking about it, while Jack Shafer asserts that the reason "the press" (excepting Slate, evidently) is "ignoring the Edwards 'love child' story" is because "a double standard is at work." Drawing a comparison between the press coverage of the Larry Craig restroom arrest and the Edwards story, Shafer says that hypocrisy was the difference—then proceeds to get the nature of said hypocrisy precisely wrong.

At one point, he notes, "Edwards, too, may be a sex hypocrite," as if the phrase "sex hypocrite" isn't nothing but hyperbole with no real meaning at all. Later, he asks, "Is he, like Craig, a public hypocrite?"—a phrase with potentially two meanings. Craig was a public hypocrite in the sense that he publicly represented himself as a straight husband who was both conservative and anti-gay, but he was also a public hypocrite in the sense that, in his official capacity as an elected Republican politician representing voters in the public (i.e. government) sphere, he endorsed anti-gay policy and advocated anti-gay legislation.

Edwards potentially shares in common with Craig only the first meaning of the term "public hypocrite," in that his alleged private failings as an adulterer may be publicly exposed—but it's really the second meaning that matters. Did he attempt to legislate against the very thing about himself he was hiding? No.

Shafer's conflation of the two meanings in an attempt to draw an equivalence is entirely disingenuous, even despite his casually ginormous caveat that the two situations "aren't completely analogous." Perhaps "the press" realizes that as well as anyone else with two brain cells knocking together would—and that's why they're ignoring the story.