Once Ensign admits to the affair, the lurid details lose a bit of their edge. If you’re into lurid details (and sleeping with your employee’s wife is pretty darn lurid). I’m more interested in what prompted this now? Was Larry Flynt on the prowl? The National Enquirer? For a guy who harbored presidential ambitions, this is tough blow to his hopes for 2012. So something had to give. What was it?
Late Update: Politico has more detail, including a reported demand for money from the husband of Ensign’s lover:
Political insiders in the Senate and in Nevada told POLITICO that Ensign began an affair with a staffer several months after he separated from his wife. When Ensign reconciled with his wife, the sources said, he gave the aide a severance package and parted ways.
Sometime later, a Nevada source said, Ensign met with the husband of the woman involved and had what this source described as a positive encounter. Sources said that the man subsequently asked Ensign for a substantial sum of money – at which point Ensign decided to make the affair public.
Turns out that Sen. Ensign (R) is a longtime member of “Promise Keepers.”
Seems like he may have stumbled a bit on promise 3 and promise 4.
Earlier this afternoon, Zack Roth reported on the murder charges against two leaders of ‘Minuteman American Defense’ stemming from an incident over the weekend in which they staged a home invasion in Arizona, killing reputed drug dealer Raul Flores, his nine year old daughter and wounding his wife. Beyond the brutality of the act, it’s difficult to get a handle on just what Shana Forde, Jason Bush and Albert Gaxiola were trying to do. They broke into Flores’s home in Arivaca, Arizona posing as police officers with what police say was the intention of killing him and his family, taking a large sum of money and stealing his drugs which they would then sell on the street for more money. The proceeds, it seems, would go toward funding their on-going anti-immigrant ‘activism’ and, more ambitiously, instigating a race war to overthrow the US government.
Courtesy of TPM Reader AD, a little nugget from 1999 in WaPo (emphasis added)…
Christian politicians and evangelical leaders commonly follow an unspoken rule not to meet behind closed doors with women staff members or travel alone with them. The Rev. Billy Graham, for example, has famously refused to be alone in a room with any woman except his wife since he married her in the 1940s.
Rep. Steve Largent (R-Okla.), a Christian conservative, insists a male staff member is present whenever he meets with a woman, his spokesman said. John Ensign, who is running for senate in Nevada will not be alone in a car with a woman
.
Only five House Republicans voted in favor of Obama’s $106 billion war funding bill, which passed 226-202. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Presumably we can all agree that all the Iranian protestors need to bring victory into their grasp is the good counsel and stiff upper lip of the DC neocons. Jacob Heilbrunn looks at the neocons’ new war with Obama over Iran.
House GOPers flatter themselves: We’re an oppressed minority reduced to using Twitter just like the protesters in Iran!