It’s been an annoyingly silly campaign season, dominated by the media’s inexplicable interest in haircuts, cleavage, and madrassas, but the interest in John Edwards’ adultery “scandal” — which appears to have been made up out of whole cloth — is clearly a new low.
Mickey Kaus, the in-house blogger for the Washington Post-owned Slate, began pushing this nonsense late last week, based on a report in a supermarket tabloid. You know the story was cheap when Mickey proclaimed, “This isn’t the first time kausfiles hasn’t met Drudge’s journalistic standards!”
Edwards denied the rumor, saying, “The story is false.” Kaus said this denial was far too vague. Edwards later added that the rumors are “completely untrue” and “ridiculous,” before concluding the story was “made up.” Mickey was troubled by this, too.
[“Made up”] by the Enquirer? Or by one of the people the Enquirer cites? Either way, it’s a direct attack on the integrity of someone (not necessarily a smart move for a politician in Edwards’ position)….
It’s as if Mickey is doing a bad imitation of someone trying to make a fool out of himself.
On the one hand we have a scurrilous story about a presidential candidate and a former staffer. The candidate denies the story, the staffer denies the story, and there’s no evidence to suggest either is lying. On the other hand we have a supermarket tabloid and a strange blogger who’s convinced the baseless story has credibility.
Why would the Washington Post want to finance this?
Matt Yglesias tried to set Mickey straight.
Basically what we have here is that if we assume the anonymous hearsay is true and the on-the-record first-hand denial is false, then Edwards is either mishandling the story by denying it too vaguely (“the story is false”) or else is mishandling it by denying it too directly (“made up”) but what if the story’s not true? No doubt by now we’ve had all the legitimate news organizations in the country looking into it and it seems that . . . nobody can come up with any evidence. As we saw with Scott Beauchamp, and the fake John Kerry intern affair story, if you just operate from within an assumption of guilt it’s very hard for someone to prove his innocence but that’s why we . . . don’t operate with an assumption of guilt!
Kaus responded that that National Enquirer may have “not-at-all-conclusive emails” between Edwards and the woman. This, apparently, is a rationalization for continued interest in a story that apparently has no foundation in reality. Oh my.
Better yet, Ezra reminds us, “[T]his isn’t the first time Mickey Kaus has fastened on an unproven, and likely untrue, story about a Democrat’s infidelity and hyped it to high heaven. Anyone remember Alexandra Polier, John Kerry’s supposed illicit lover? Kaus had a helluva time with that one.”
As a rule, bloggers who get picked up by major news outlets tend to be top-rate pros — Yglesias, Greenwald, Drum, Wolcott, etc. With that in mind, how Mickey Kaus keeps his pro-profile gig remains a mystery.