Burying the lead
To be honest, I didn’t think I’d be bringing up Senator Ensign again.
CNN has their political ticker, a website off their main page that does brief political news stories. I find it a very useful website for scanning what the major political stories of the day are.
Tonight, one of the stories is: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/07/08/report-senator-tried-to-stop-colleagues-affair/ which is about the efforts of Senator Coburn to get Ensign to break off his affair. It is a news article about a more complete story located in the Las Vegas Sun, at http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/jul/08/spouse-ensign-affair-says-senator-should-resign/
Now, in the article, it says that the husband of the woman having an affair with Ensign reached out to a conservative Christian senator, Coburn, for assistance in ending the affair. That’s all well and good, a story about a good man trying to help another man behave well. Right?
I want to call attention to one line in the middle of the Sun article:
“The group, including Coburn, a well-known conservative, confronted Ensign and suggested that the Hamptons needed to be given financial assistance — in the millions of dollars — to pay off their $1 million-plus mortgage and move them to a new life away from Ensign.”
I guess I could be misreading this, it doesn’t explicitly say it, but is that saying what I think it is saying? That a group of people including Senator Coburn, in their attempt to get Ensign to break off the affair, suggested that he pay off his mistress to just go away? Isn’t that just called “hush money” most of the time?
I think CNN really buried the lead on this one.
You call it “hush money”, I call it “extortion”. Alas, since it’s a CNN report, the Republican must be the bad guy, and the mistress is supposed to be an “innocent victim”, so we dare not accuse her husband of using the influence of Coburn in an extortion attempt on Ensign: it would lose her sympathy points, and possibly make people think more favorably of Senator Ensign….
As I said earlier, media bias seems more important than good reporting anymore.
Fair enough, but even if its an extortion attempt, they still buried the lead. The important part of that story is the million dollar suggestion, not that Coburn had a conversation.
Tom Coburn involved in extortion?? I’ll believe it when I see it. He’s hated in DC because he actually works for his constituents. I’m proud to vote for the man every chance I get.
Of course it’s possible, but it would be extremely out of character. The story today is that the parents paid her off. I think this was just a smear attempt by an overzealous reporter.
And by working for us, I don’t mean securing as much pork as possible. I mean he works to try to keep my daughter from having an insurmountable tax rate to pay back out of control debt.