Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf … or Linda McMahon or Tina Brown?

While appreciating the tendency of the media to compartmentalize scoops, I do not understand why no one except New London Day columnist David Collins has gone anywhere with Linda McMahon’s shamelessly twisted account of her 1976 bankruptcy in Connecticut.

Or was that her 1970 bankruptcy in Maryland? And was it when she was pregnant with her first child or with her second? And was she on food stamps (which a reporter for The Daily Beast didn’t try all that hard to distinguish from S&H Green Stamps) or just defaulting on hundreds of thousands of dollars in obligations to Nutmeg State banks and contractors?

All important stuff to resolve, in this out-of-stater’s opinion. It’s a much more aggressive web of half-truths, possibly out-and-out lies, than the New York Times-manufactured scandal of Richard Blumenthal’s supposed stolen valor. Bankruptcy is an integral component of the $50 Million Dollar Woman’s counterintuitive bridge to populist appeal. In order to distort at this level, Blumenthal would have to have claimed a Purple Heart at the Battle of Khe Sanh.

Unfortunately, Daily Beast writer Lloyd Grove has not followed through on his September 2 promise to get back to your humble blogger “as soon as I recover my equilibrium from that chair you hit me on the head with.” (Get it? Journalism, like pro wrestling, is “soap opera.”)

Yesterday I tried Grove’s boss, Daily Beast editor Tina Brown. No dice there either, unsurprisingly.

But the true story remains a rich and revealing one. There’s a lot more to it than the photo on a McMahon mailer showing her car getting impounded and towed – a piece of art which, The Day’s Collins has revealed, was staged. From front to back, Linda’s effort to turn her bankruptcy story inside-out is just as manipulative as the way her family exploited Bush-era corporate tax laws and an “independent contractor” work force.

Irv Muchnick