Watch Linda McMahon Fidget Under Questions About Her Bankruptcy and WWE ‘Wellness Policy’

The New Haven Register has endorsed Richard Blumenthal over Linda McMahon for the U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut. But the newspaper’s more valuable contribution is a news story by metro editor Ed Stannard, with embedded video excerpts of McMahon’s recent interview by the Register editorial board.

See http://nhregister.com/articles/2010/10/17/news/aa1mcmahon101710.txt.

In the interview, McMahon recycles her bland and unconvincing defense of World Wrestling Entertainment’s suspension of steroid-testing between 1996 and 2006, while the wrestler body count accelerated (it continues to toll today, to the tune of what Blumenthal identified in last Tuesday’s debate as seven additional young wrestler deaths during the campaign itself).

What’s striking is that these questions did not go away but, rather, persisted and accelerated. Contrast Linda’s patient squirming for the Register with her testy insistence on “moving on” from WWE when she was grilled in March by John Dankosky of WNPR. (For background, see “Linda McMahon Audio from Connecticut Public Radio’s ‘Where We Live’,” March 30, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/linda-mcmahon-audio-from-connecticut-public-radios-where-we-live/.)

The Register also takes McMahon to account for the slippery story of her and husband Vince’s 1976 bankruptcy, which Linda has tried to turn into an odd selling point:

… McMahon, 62, described her early years as a college graduate living in Maryland, pregnant with their son, Shane, and resorting to food stamps for a time.

She said reports by a Web columnist that this was the time the McMahons declared bankruptcy were incorrect, that they filed five years later when they lived in West Hartford.

“I talked about how I can relate to so many different folks because my husband and I were married very young … I was right out of high school; he was a junior in college and I went through college and we graduated together. I went through an accelerated schedule,” McMahon said.

“And we found out the day before we graduated from college that I was pregnant with our first child, which is just not quite fortuitous at that particular time…. My husband went to work for a rock quarry and he worked 90 hours a week and I would pack his lunch,” the candidate said. “I was working as a receptionist at a law firm after Shane was born…. one week we used food stamps.”

That happened in 1970-71 when they lived in Gaithersburg, Md. McMahon said they filed for bankruptcy in 1976, before they had bought the company that became WWE from Vince McMahon’s father.

Note that the McMahons married in 1966 and had their first child, son Shane, in 1970. In his disgraceful profile of Linda for The Daily Beast, writer Lloyd Grove said she married young and was “soon” pregnant. The truth is that she attended and graduated from East Carolina University after marrying and before becoming pregnant. (While in college, by the way, she acquired no degree in education – a false line she added to her resume when Governor Jodi Rell nominated her to the Connecticut Board of Education last year.)

For full background on Linda’s “welfare mom” tall tale, see “Muchnick Flashback: ‘Wow, That Lloyd Grove of The Daily Beast Sure Types Fast’,” October 1, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/muchnick-flashback-wow-that-lloyd-grove-of-the-daily-beast-sure-types-fast/.

Irv Muchnick