A bad day for monogamy in America….Rielle, Tiger

Wow, what a bad day for monogamy in America. First I read that Tiger Woods supposedly admitted to cheating with 120 women…but it’s the 121st he doesn’t admit to, a daughter of a neighbor, that pushes his wife over the edge to meet with divorce lawyers.

And then there was Rielle Hunter talking to Oprah for a whole hour. I had to eat a lot of chocolate chips to sit through that interview. Living in Chapel Hill, John Edwards’ meltdown when he cheated on his cancer-stricken wife and had a baby with his mistress while running for President is practically a cottage industry (a source of local gossip with national implications, at least)–but now it’s weird to see the mainstream media leaping all over this story now, long after it has ceased to be relevant to the national campaign, when the major news outlets were conspicuously quiet, not knowing how to pick up on a story that had only been reported in the National Enquirer.

(Anyone else noticed how Tiger and Edwards and other wonderful dudes like Jesse James have really raised the bar on cheating? Now the idea of a woman leaving her husband because he just cheated with one person seems almost quaint.)

I had been an Edwards supporter and I had met John, Elizabeth, Andrew and Cheri Young on several occasions (Andrew assured us we were “like family,” which meant we were prospective fundraisers), and I had even met Rielle Hunter once in June 2006 just as she was about to come on board as the campaign’s “documentary videographer.” Last time I blogged about this I was really angry that the whole Edwards campaign had swindled me by collecting my donations and those of my family members under false pretenses, going forward with the campaign in the midst of the affair that could have blown up the whole 2008 election for the Democrats. Why don’t the media talk about that national campaign angle more? How could even the most Koolaid-imbibing loyalists move forward in that circumstance? Oprah didn’t really ask Rielle Hunter or Andrew Young about that on a probing level. My visceral reaction to Rielle is still that I am really bummed to think that every time I meet a female campaign worker I now feel a split-second impulse that I have to analyze whether she is a secret mistress. That really stinks.

But after seeing Rielle on Oprah today, a new thought emerges that applies to both Hunter and Edwards: Some lies are bigger than words.

Rielle can talk all she wants about “alignment” and “living her truth” and having other people project their judgments on her. Her actions were lies. His actions were thoroughly, inherently lies. The Edwards marriage storyline was a lie that was paraded int front of the whole country. John was renewing his vows with Elizabeth when Rielle was pregnant. Rielle was the “documentarian” who was going to show us the “real” John Edwards while carrying on a secret affair and making a sex tape with him. Even Rielle had to wonder what were we thinking? in hindsight, examining their reckless and inevitably destructive behavior. Rielle may be articulate and may have even spun a fantasy world in her head where her actions make sense to her. In the end, I believe that the truth is it doesn’t matter what they were thinking, it doesn’t matter what they said then, or are saying now. Their actions speak for themselves.