Joy Behar's TMI moment with Andrew Young

The talk show host asks the tough questions about Rielle Hunter

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

Senior Writer

Published February 4, 2010 9:05PM (EST)

If there's one good thing to come out of the bottomlessly tawdry ongoing revelations about John Edwards, it's the way they’ve put our jaded, seen-it-all psyches right back in touch with their capacity to be genuinely skeeved out.

The man who there but for the grace of God might have been our Democratic presidential contender made a sex tape with his mistress Rielle Hunter? He allegedly was mixed up in domestic altercations?  It's enough to make one beg for fresh revelations from Charlie Sheen and Tila Tequila.

So perhaps we'd selectively ignored this choice revelation from his former aide Andrew Young's turncoat blabfest "The Politician":  "Whenever Rielle called me, she tried to talk explicitly about her relationship with the senator ... When the details about specific sexual acts, love bites, or the condition of her vagina got too graphic, I cut her off, but my attempts to set limits on Rielle were only partly effective."

Clapping our hands over our ears and singing "La la la! I can't hear you!" proved to no avail last night, when Young was a guest on Joy Behar's HLN talk show. After tossing him a few softballs about the sex tape – and in the process proving that the former senatorial aide is unclear on the difference between "corroborating" and "collaborating" evidence – she went for the gold. Rielle Hunter's "relationship with you is kind of weird, I think … She confided in you about so many details, even about the condition of her vagina," she said. "That is so strange. What was up with that? And what was the condition of her vagina?"

In response, Young demurely snickered and said, "I would always say, 'TMI! TMI! Too much information!'" Well, you're obviously the soul of gentlemanly southern discretion, sir. That must be why you mentioned her vagina in your book in the first place. By morning, "Rielle Hunter's vagina" was a bona fide search term. Its conditon may remain shrouded in mystery, but in a story that's nothing but TMI, that moment on Behar's show may just be the TMIest yet. Until, no doubt, tomorrow.

edwards-exposed-in-the-politician-by-andrew-young.html


By Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a senior writer for Salon and author of "A Series of Catastrophes & Miracles."

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Broadsheet John Edwards Rielle Hunter