A couple of weeks ago, I defended Elizabeth Edwards’ right to be as blind as she wants to be. But the more she talks, the less confident I am in that opinion.

Melinda Henneberger has a good recap of Elizabeth’s appearance on Oprah last week, if you’re like me and simply cannot watch Oprah for more than 5 minutes. Some lowlights of the show:

…I just watched a woman claiming to be Elizabeth Edwards tell Oprah and all of us out in TV Land that it’s immaterial to her if her husband made a baby with his mistress, and the whole thing was kind of surreal. “Completely extraneous to my life,” is how she put it.

Still, she slapped the nameless blond around pretty good. (Nameless because the one condition placed on the interview was that Rielle Hunter’s name would not be spoken. The Voldemort clause, I guess. “This person,” is what Elizabeth called her.) And of her husband, John Edwards? “No one’s perfect,” she said. That is one lucky son-of-a-mill-worker.

Henneberger calls Elizabeth a “flawed narrator” and says she’s “not really a member of the reality-based community.” And it’s true, I haven’t seen this much denial since… well, since the mainstream media spent weeks denying any of this was even a story.

Tina Brown’s shoes probably cost more than I make in a month, and now she’s putting them in Elizabeth’s teeth:

Elizabeth Edwards tried to undo the damage she did to herself on the Oprah interview last week by sitting down this morning on the Today show with Matt Lauer. The first segment did the trick — it was all about cancer and the death of her son, and Elizabeth looked solid and sympathetic in her brave blue cardigan; but when she inexorably let Matt bore into John’s marital infidelity, she inexplicably blew it again…

Edwards’ professed desire for candor is such she deserves nothing but candor in return. I am afraid that she is crazy if she thinks, as she says she does, that when the American people saw her with John on the campaign trail they thought they looked such a happy and devoted couple. Most people I know thought that Elizabeth looked like an overbearing chief of staff and were mystified that her interruptions were tolerated by someone as clearly in love with himself as John. There was deep public sympathy over the tragedy of the death of their son Wade and later for her brave, unflinching confrontation with a deadly disease, but also bewilderment that she could use this precious time left with her kids to promote her husband’s ego-fueled, phony-populist lurch for the White House.

Speaking of that ego-fueled, phony-populist lurch for the White House — as if there’s any other kind — some anonymous Edwards staffers are now claiming that they suspected the whole time he was having an affair, and that if it turned out to be true, they were planning to sabotage his campaign. This sounds very unlikely and raises any number of questions, all of which Mickey Kaus tackles admirably. I’d really hate to be a former Edwards supporter these days. Or any days, really.

Kaus also reminds us of the forgotten woman in this whole mess: Cheri Young. Remember her? She’s the wife of Edwards staffer Andrew Young, who claimed paternity of Rielle Hunter’s baby. The woman who welcomed a pregnant Rielle into her home, and then moved her family across the country into a house rented by Edwards moneyman Fred Baron to live with Rielle and the baby, far from the prying eyes of a media that wasn’t really doing that much prying. All of which she did out of some weird sense of loyalty to the Edwards family, apparently.

As Kaus asks Elizabeth:

How do you think [Cheri] feels about this? How do her children feel about it, and what other kids say about it, when they go to school? Do you really not care if she’s going through whatever she’s going through because she’s playing her part in a lie constructed in service to your husband’s, and your, unstoppable ambition? How are you respecting her and her marriage?

The crime is scandalous enough on its own that everybody seems to be forgetting about the coverup. The elaborate, prolonged, hideously expensive coverup, which appears to be ongoing. Well, at least the federal investigators haven’t forgotten.

The toughest part of following this whole mess has been trying to sort through all the layers of lies and half-truths. The technique seems to be: Make everybody so hopelessly confused by your diversions and non-answers that they finally just give up. Now I’m starting to wonder who John learned it from.