Connecticut Newspaper Editorial: Source of Linda McMahon Profits Is Less Important Than Opponents’ Hypocrisy

Please do not construe this as an endorsement of her opponent Richard Blumenthal’s candidacy, but I’m seriously worried that an editorial writer for the Waterbury Republican-American is going to pull a mental muscle.

An intellectual lackey for Linda McMahon in the Connecticut Senate contest might have been content to concede that her World Wrestling Entertainment is capitalism’s face of corporate sleaze, and Blumenthal has his own problems, and leave it at that. But not the Republican-American! In “The Democrats’ glass house,” http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2010/07/05/opinion/493197.txt#, the newspaper editorializes that it’s all her opponents’ fault. For, it seems, where WWE falls short of the mark in the family-values department, the company “only holds a mirror up to the putrid, destructive, defective culture of sex and violence created and exalted by the Democrats.”

Well. What’s a person to do in America these days if she wants to make hundreds of millions of dollars, and use $50 million of it to buy a Senate seat?

Absent the heated partisanship, I actually have sympathy for the point of view that the McMahon family’s success story is a sick twist on Horatio Alger. But I don’t buy the heated partisanship. The Republican-American seems to be saying: Don’t do as Linda does, don’t do as Dick says — just vote Republican.

Irv Muchnick