Elizabeth Edwards

When you have cancer and your husband cheats on you with - and possibly knocks up - Rielle Hunter? Yeah, we can see trust being a problem after that.

Elizabeth Edwards, 59, is speaking out for the first time since her husband, John Edwards, a former U.S. Senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, admitted he had an extramarital affair with the filmmaker.

"There's a lot of adjustment to make," she told the Detroit Free Press, adding that she remains in "an ongoing process of finding your feet again."

"Trust [is] probably the most difficult hurdle."

Elizabeth and John Edwards in May 2008.

The story of John Edwards' relationship with Hunter broke in December 2007, but he denied it until he got caught visiting her at a Beverly Hills hotel this July.

Edwards then admitted to the affair in August, but claims it ended in 2006 and he only engaged in relations with Hunter while Elizabeth's cancer was in remission.

Like that makes it okay. He also denies he is the father of Rielle Hunter's daughter, born this Februrary. His former aide Andrew Young has claimed paternity - yet has provided no financial assistance to Hunter, nor has he been heard from since.

It takes a pretty huge jackass to attempt to turn John Edwards into the victim after sleeping with Rielle Hunter and then covering it up.

Not to worry, though: Rush Limbaugh is up to the task.

On the August 12 broadcast of his national radio show, Rush Limbaugh said of former Sen. John Edwards' extramarital affair:

"I've got a theory about the motivations ... We know - we've been told that Elizabeth Edwards is smarter than John Edwards... Ergo, if Elizabeth Edwards is smarter than John Edwards, is it likely that she thinks she knows better than he does what his speeches ought to contain and what kind of things he ought to be doing, strategy wise? Could it have been her decision to keep going with the campaign? In other words, could it be that she doesn't shut up? That's as far as I'm going to go."

But it wasn't as far as he went.

Rush Limbaugh later added, "It just seems to me that John Edwards might be attracted to a woman whose mouth did something other than talk."

In case it wasn't clear what he meant, Limbaugh elaborated in a subsequent segment: "My theory, that I just explained to you about why - you know, what could have John Edwards' motivations been to have the affair with Rielle Hunter, given his wife is smarter than he is and probably nagging him a lot about doing this, and he found somebody that did something with her mouth other than talk."

Wow.

To sum up, the blowhard (who's thrice divorced, BT-dubs) believes that if Elizabeth Edwards channeled her inner Antonella Barba more often, John would never have strayed into the arms of Rielle Hunter. It's an interesting theory.

We could go on for pages about this, but instead, we'll turn it over to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. Follow the jump for his take on Rush ...

Elizabeth Edwards says husband John Edwards "made a terrible mistake" by having an affair with Rielle Hunter, but coping with the revelation was "oddly made somewhat easier" by her battle with an incurable form of cancer.

"None of these (problems) has been easy," she wrote on the political blog Daily Kos. "But we have stood with one another through them all. Although John believes he should stand alone and take the consequences of his action now, when the door closes behind him, he has his family waiting for him."

Elizabeth, 59, says her husband, 55, told her about the affair with Rielle Hunter two years ago – months before her breast cancer returned.

"John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me. And we began a long and painful process in 2006, a process oddly made somewhat easier with my diagnosis in March 2007."

She says she wanted to keep it a "private matter" because it would be even more difficult to deal with on a public stage.

But, Elizabeth Edwards adds, "Because of a recent string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication, because of a picture falsely suggesting that John was spending time with a child it wrongly alleged he had fathered outside our marriage, our private matter could no longer be wholly private."