Count on ABC boomerang on Newt’s ex-wife interview

The year-and-a-half-old ABC “scoop”, in which Newt Gingrich’s ex boasts her one interview could end her one time hubby’s political career, is more about the contemporary media than it is about a presidential candidate. The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz said a mouthful when he posited that Marianne Gingrich does not say anything in the new interview that she hasn’t said in the past. The Esquire already ran with the same story in September 2010, if anyone cares.

Notice how quickly the story of another election-year smear has morphed over to WHEN ABC will air it. “Now” has already replaced “when” with segments of the story about to burst on the worldwide web this evening. The story of ABC and other news outlets talking about the ethics of when to unleash the election year recriminations of a not-so-gay divorcee has just got to be the ‘Non-Story of the Century’. Do Ethics and Mainstream Media even belong in the same sentence? So we come down to the story of another embittered ex-wife unloading on her husband via a panting press. That storyline’s as old as Nancy (Methuselah) Pelosi.

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Mainstream media outlets like ABC stopped doing scoops in the prelude to the last presidential election when they passed on vetting the sacrosanct, then Senator Barack Obama who was dumped on a largely unsuspecting world from a backdrop of Hollywood-style Greek columns. Perhaps ABC seeks viewer redemption for ignoring the biggest scoop of the century back in 2008, a Marxist presidential candidate on his way to the White House complete with a promise to Fundamentally Transform America. Just as reporters in costume came out like ghouls Halloween night to paw through the garbage of the rich and famous, ‘journalists’ have long looked to the courts for divorce records for their most titillating ‘scoops’. 2004’s most alledged prominent unsealer of (sealed) divorce records, was no other than Barack Obama, the senator: “When Jack Ryan was running against Dr. Utopia for the US Senate, the Ryans’ (sealed) divorce records were mysteriously unsealed and leaked to the press. Though the divorce itself was amicable--Jeri “Seven of Nine” Ryan had nothing to do with the leak--the records were deeply embarrassing to Jack Ryan. He ended up leaving the race. The Party of Stupid decided to run Alan Keyes in his place. And that’s how Barack Obama became a U.S. Senator.” (HillBuzz - 12/11/11) 
“Ryan is the ex-husband of Jeri Ryan, a woman who played a cyborg of some sort on the Star Trek series that many people apocryphally believe starred Katherine Hepburn as a spaceship captain; Ryan, the actress, currently plays a mortician on some CBS show where Dana Delaney drinks chardonnay while solving crimes as a medical examiner. During their marriage, Jack Ryan used to openly talk about sexual fantasies he had of his wife, Jeri, the most graphic of which is that Jack wanted to fly his wife to Paris and take her to the Cleopatra Club--which was a high-priced sex dungeon where the two of them could have sex in front of other wealthy people while utilizing various swings and other contraptions. The Ryans never did any of this--it was purely Jack’s fantasy, and he wanted to do this with his own wife (while other men and women watched them). When filing for divorce, Jeri’s divorce attorney put references to these fantasies into the filing to embarrass Jack (who wanted to have a political career). The intent on Jeri’s part was to force a quick and lucrative divorce settlement so that the Cleopatra Club fantasies would never get out into the open. “In essence, Jeri Ryan blackmailed Jack Ryan into a much more generous divorce settlement than she would have received if she hadn’t made his unrealized sex fantasies a part of the filing.” The rest of this tawdry tale, you might say, is history with a media-dubbed Messiah, who benefitted from it, now entrenched in the White House. It’s difficult to determine who profits more on bitter divorces, attorneys or the media. Today it’s the 1989 War of the Roses movie coming down from the screen starring Marianne Gingrich. Far more entertainment than news providing, the mainstream is rewriting soap operas for presidential candidate Newt, while still ignoring the Nightmare of the Obamas. The media spins the fairytale of a perfect Obama marriage; that Michelle must be Barack’s only girlfriend. She must be, as there has never been evidence of Barack having any other, not through high school, university or first-job days. But that all is not Blue Heaven with the Obamas is evidenced on the perpetually surly expression Michelle wears on her face. Meanwhile, while the media talking heads pretend to be conflicted about the ethics of dumping the sordid details of a 12-year-old divorce during a presidential election year, Newt can get ready for an unexpected boomerang. Even as they were mulling over their non-existent ethics, ABC and Company have already been upstaged by this one evidenced by the millions who have already gone through messy divorces. It is upstaged in real life scenarios being played out daily with men sipping coffee after squash matches telling their buddies, “You should hear what my ex says about ME!”