Connecticut Republicans file complaint against Blumenthal campaign

Consider this a follow up to yesterday’s latest Blumenthal strategy post. As we told you, the Republicans have filed a complaint filed with the FEC. Not sure this is going anywhere, but it should.

The AP is reporting this morning that Republican Chair Chris Healy has filed a formal complaint with the Federal Elections Commission in light of a memo from the Blumenthal campaign that would seem to indicate it is working with Planned Parenthood to coordinate an attack against Linda McMahon.

In a complaint filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission, Healy cites an e-mail, obtained by Politco, from a Blumenthal staffer to co-workers about how Planned Parenthood had asked the campaign for misogynistic photos of women and World Wrestling Entertainment, where Republican candidate Linda McMahon was CEO until last year.

You can read the e-mail here. The Blumenthal campaign has issued a statement saying it did nothing wrong and that searching for photos for PP was not part of a media campaign. Yada, yada, etc, etc.

Meanwhile Ted Mann has a good, and I think well balanced article on the controversy, noting the WWE’s pretty lurid story lines from the past, but also notes, the WWE has not run with those stories in years.

The skit, said McMahon’s campaign spokesman, is just that: a skit.

“Robert DeNiro has played characters that were abusive to women, but he isn’t considered a misogynist or anti-woman,” said Ed Patru. “Why? Because he did that while playing a character designed to illicit negative emotions among viewers. That is the difference between real life and entertainment.”

Democrats have taken more than $50 million from movie, TV and music executives over the past two election cycles, Patru said, and only now “become righteously indignant about WWE.”

“Much of what comes out of Hollywood in terms of entertainment pits a protagonist against an antagonist, or good against evil, or a hero against a villain,” he said. “And generally the villains behave badly and even despicably. That’s what villains do.”

A WWE spokesman, Robert Zimmerman, noted that all of the company’s programming has been rated TV-PG since June 2008 (its Friday night “Smackdown” program already was).

I’d read the whole thing if I were you. It’s one of the best wrap ups of this whole story line I have seen.

Still, with the exception of George Gombossy’s article’s, I have yet to see the definitive Main stream press report on Blumenthal’s tenure as AG, the law suits left unresolved and the businesses that have been destroyed as a result.