Introducing the ‘Senate Candidate Linda McMahon Archive’

Barely ten months after losing by 12 points to Richard Blumenthal in her campaign for the seat of the retiring Chris Dodd, Linda McMahon has officially announced her candidacy for Connecticut’s other U.S. Senate seat, now held by the retiring Joe Lieberman.

In the interim, this blog, formerly called “Wrestling Babylon News,” was rebranded as “Concussion Inc.” Though the archive of old posts got imported to this new site, the old links are dead. Many of those posts included investigative information on the McMahon family business, World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. — information which almost every other new outlet either fudged in coverage or altogether ignored.

Those of you wishing to bone up on these aspects of McMahon’s background as the co-founder and former chief executive officer of WWE can locate this material by browsing this blog’s month-by-month archives or by using the site search engine.

In addition, I’ll be posting flashbacks to the old material in batches. Later today I’ll kick off this feature by republishing, from December 2009, the seven-part series “Linda McMahon’s Husband Vince Fought the Law, and the Law Lost.”

Last year Linda McMahon wrested the Republican Senate nomination from a former congressman, Rob Simmons, and gave Blumenthal a scare before fading due to overexposure, a gaffe about the minimum wage, and an accumulation of questions on the unsavory aspects of how she had made the centimillions bankrolling her “self-financed” $50 million campaign.

For his part, Blumenthal in his first eight months in office has done nothing of substance about two WWE-related issues that people who voted for him might have reasonably expected him to tackle. One is WWE’s abuse of the independent contractor classification for its wrestling performers. The other is sports concussions. The latter is a topic whose crossover between pro wrestling and football becomes stark when you consider that WWE’s medical director, Dr. Joseph Maroon, is also a Pittsburgh Steelers team doctor deeply implicated in the scandal of the National Football League’s history of manipulation of traumatic brain injury research and of false or misleading public statements about the known scientific evidence on chronic traumatic encephelopathy.

As the 2012 election season heats up, a word to staffers and consultants for McMahon’s opposition campaigns: Don’t even think about complaining after the fact that contacts with me were “off the record.”

Irv Muchnick