Just what is Politico getting at with this 2,300 word piece on the incredibly close relationship between John Edwards and aide Andrew Young? Hmm? With all this talk of Young's "intensely emotional" "passion" for the dirtbag former candidate?

Here is what they are getting at: Andrew Young was gay for John Edwards. Oh, god, he was so, so gay for John Edwards. Wow! Like, from the first paragraph onward:

When John Edwards returned to North Carolina in the course of his long quest for the presidency, Andrew Young always met him at the airport in Edwards's big black Chevy Tahoe. Young drove, and Edwards rode shotgun, silently raising his left hand whenever he wanted a Diet Coke, which Young would wordlessly supply.

Just a bro, out on a road trip, wordlessly providing another bro with some Diet Cokes. In paragraph two, Young is folding Edwards' dry cleaning.

What was Young's job description again?

Young sometimes described himself as Edwards's "special assistant" and dreamed of serving in an Edwards White House. Other aides, with a combination of disgust - and, perhaps, a bit of envy - referred to him as Edwards's "personal servant," or worse, Edwards's "butt boy."

Yes, well, we're beyond insinuation now, aren't we.

Here are some more sentences:

  • Starting soon after Edwards was elected to the Senate in 1998, staffers began describing Young as intensely 'jealous' of others who were close to the senator.
  • "It's not enough to say that he idolized the guy - there's something deeper and weirder than that."

Oh, and Elizabeth Edwards, what say you?

"In months of talking with [John Edwards], I have come to understand his liaison with this woman, if I have, not as a substitute for me. It was more like his relationship with a former staff member," she wrote. She described an "obsessed" and "overbearing" young volunteer who "volunteered for everything, making himself indispensable," taking care of cars and dry cleaning - an unmistakable portrait, people close to her say, of Young.

This is not even halfway through this article, yet. As it goes on, we learn that Edwards did not reciprocate the passion, so much, but he was happy to "talk about sports" with Young, and even happier to allow Young to claim paternity of Rielle Hunter's child, forcing Hunter to move in with Young's family(!) and then they all had to move the West Coast for a while and then they went back to Chapel Hill. And John stopped taking Young's calls, and then Elizabeth started leaving nasty blog comments about him and leaving messages on Young's wife's voicemail demanding that Young reassert his paternity.

Oh, and then there is this:

And Young, with all the fury of a spurned lover, may be holding out yet another threat to his old idol, if it comes to that: an explicit videotape, two people who have seen it said, of Edwards and Hunter together.

Hah. Yes. Ok. Wheee! What a fucked-up bunch of people.

Someone give Ben Smith and Politico five thousand Pulitzers for this important investigative report into John Edwards' Waylon Smithers.

[Photo: AP]