Is Linda McMahon Just Like Ronald Reagan — Or Fatty Arbuckle?

Glenn Thrush of Politico.com is the latest to recycle the cliche that Linda McMahon’s background in World Wrestling Entertainment is analogous to Ronald Reagan’s in Hollywood. See “McMahon: WWE just like the Gipper’s ‘acting,'” http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0410/McMahon_WWE_just_like_the_Gippers_acting.html.

On this blog, I have argued that the analogy is flawed — that the McMahon family, unlike Reagan, are bosses, and that their own role is closer to that of Fatty Arbuckle (the silent-film star who was ruined by his involvement in the mysterious death of a starlet). See “Linda McMahon and the Fatty Arbuckle Defense,” March 21, https://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/?s=fatty+arbuckle.

My Arbuckle post was in response to the Hartford Courant columnist I have cheekily dubbed Kevin “Don’t Call Linda McMahon My Mouthpiece” Rennie. But Politico’s Thrush is moving up fast on the outside for the title of McMahon’s No. 1 media lackey. Thrush wrote the piece earlier this month scooping Ted Mann of the New London Day on the story of how McMahon tipped a wrestling doctor that he was under federal investigation for illegally distributing steroids. As I have written previously, I strongly suspect that Politico’s report was a “Friday news dump” planted by the McMahon campaign to soften the impact of Mann’s.

I’ll email these posts to Thrush, and if he has anything to share about my sour assessment of his coverage, I’ll let everyone know.

Irv Muchnick

McMahon: WWE just like the Gipper’s ‘acting’

Linda McMahon and the ‘Fatty Arbuckle Defense’

Kevin “Don’t Call Linda McMahon My Mouthpiece” Rennie has started tweaking his sychopancy for the U.S. Senate candidacy of the co-founder and former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment.

A couple of months ago, Rennie analogized McMahon’s turns running pro wrestling to Ronald Reagan’s goofball role in Bedtime for Bonzo.

In his column in today’s Hartford Courant (“Rising Dissatisfaction Is Wind in McMahon’s Sails,” http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-rennie-mcmahon-blumenthal-po.artmar21,0,4028903.column), Rennie goes a little more passive with the business background of the woman whose company amassed the fortune bankrolling her $50 million campaign while “independent contractor” performers dropped dead by the bushel, and from time to time menaced others.

“Popular culture has always been a bit coarser than political leaders like to acknowledge,” Rennie writes.

Call it the Fatty Arbuckle defense. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was a silent film star whose career was ruined after an actress died at his 1921 Labor Day weekend party, and he was accused of raping and accidentally killing her.

One part of Linda McMahon’s narrative – a kind of companion piece to the tear-jerker about her and husband Vince’s 1970s bankruptcy – is the cocaine-fueled “party atmosphere” of the 1980s. Such excesses are all in the past, you see. That past presumably includes the 1983 death, with a more-than-Arbucklian fact base, of WWE Hall of Famer Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka’s girlfriend. See “Muchnick Flashback: ‘Superstar Snuka and the Death of a Groupie,’” https://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/muchnick-flashback-%E2%80%98superstar-snuka-and-the-death-of-a-groupie%E2%80%99/.

As for the “all in the past” part, see my book CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death. Chris and Nancy Benoit were the ninth and tenth of 21 pro wrestling personalities who died before age 50 in the year 2007 alone. (Their seven-year-old son Daniel doesn’t count.)

See you all at Border’s in Stamford on Thursday night and at Border’s in Farmington on Saturday afternoon.

Irv Muchnick

Dear Glenn Thrush of Politico.com: Did Linda McMahon Campaign Plant Your Story on Her Steroid-Doc Memo?

As the following email text to Glenn Thrush of Politico.com — sent earlier today — was being posted, he had not replied to me.

Mr. Thrush:

Below are links to posts on my blog – one today, the other a couple of weeks ago:

https://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/is-linda-mcmahon-just-like-ronald-reagan-or-fatty-arbuckle/

https://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/did-linda-mcmahon-obstruct-justice-2nd-in-a-series-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%98the-day%E2%80%99-after/

My unflattering opinion of the depth of your coverage of the Linda McMahon campaign is just that: an opinion.

What is a question of fact is whether you were – as I have written I suspect  – a conduit of a McMahon-planted “Friday evening bad-news dump” of the exclusive that Ted Mann of The Day in New London was preparing for publication on Sunday, April 11. The piece revealed an unredacted 1989 internal office memo by McMahon in which she told another wrestling executive to tip off their Pennsylvania ring doctor, and wrestlers’ illegal steroid connection, that he was under federal criminal investigation.

Let me just say that news organizations compete with each other, and if you did the complex investigative work to dig this document out of court archives, then confronted Linda McMahon (and forced her hand to publish and explain the previously redacted portion of it), I tip my hat to you. However, I see no such strain of shoe-leather investigation in your other work for Politico. Hence my question.

I’ll publish my message and any reply by you later today – conveniently, on Friday evening in case the upshot is in any way embarrassing to you. My contact info is below. Thanks for your time.

Irv Muchnick