Prior to giving a speech yesterday to the Chamber of Commerce in Fernley, Nevada, Ensign explained to a reporter how his affair with the wife of his friend/longtime staff member, who also happened to work for him, was so very different from Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.

I haven't done anything legally wrong...President Clinton stood right before the American people and he lied to the American people...You remember that famous day he lied to the American people, plus the fact I thought he committed perjury. That's why I voted for the articles of impeachment.

Now, technically Ensign has a point, but just because his affair broke no laws — that we're aware of at this point anyway — doesn't mean that his isn't the more repugnant of the two situations. After all, Bill Clinton wasn't living in a temple owned by a mafia-inspired Jesus cult when he was getting sucked off by Lewinski, was he? But then again, in Ensign's mind, him sticking his pee-pee inside of his staffer's vagina was entirely the will of Jesus Christ, and if Jesus wants you to fuck somebody, well, you kinda just have to.

Hiking the Appalachian Trial This evocative phrase can mean anything done instead one's official duties. It also implies that you are skipping work to cry for days with your soul mate, in Argentina.

That Whole Sparking Thing What a wonderful euphemism for sleeping with that special someone who is, as far as your romantic partner knows, "just a friend"! That moment when you give up all pretense of innocent platonic friendship and just go for it is indeed a special time in the dissolution of every man's marriage.

Crossed Lines This is a splendid example of the art of digging yourself a deeper hole. Feel free to use it if you are trying to make your background sound sexy and exciting without having to admit to anything specific, or if you just want to be vague, once again, to your partner about your romantic history!

Only Dead Fish Go With the Flow This, apparently, is Christian dogwhistling, yes, but it is also a really great way to paint your complete abdication of your responsibilities as the proactive decision of a maverick. Only a dead fish would keep governing Alaska after two years on the job! A vibrant leader of tomorrow would buck the system and randomly quit for no good reason in the middle of her term! (Also: live fish swim both up and downstream, all the time, we are pretty sure.)

A Pattern of Generosity The John Ensign sex scandal has, thus far, not presented as many idiomatic gifts as the scandals of Palin and Sanford. But there are nuggets of gold. This phrase, our humble suggestion for a new euphemism, comes from Ensign's lawyer's statement on the payments made by Ensign to the husband of the woman he slept with for a year. In the letter, the lawyer claims the payments were made by Ensign's parents, out of the kindness of their own hearts, and not by Ensign himself, out of his campaign or Senate funds, acting on orders from Tom Coburn. So go ahead and say you bought those drugs or paid that woman to keep quiet as part of your long "pattern of generosity" next time you're caught possibly misusing funds!

Honorable mention: "The biggest self of self is self."
"I know that I know that I know"
"If I die, I die."

Read the hilarious letter some poor lawyer had to issue today on behalf of his Jesus-loving ass-goblin of a client:

In April 2008, Senator John Ensign's parents each made gifts to Doug Hampton, Cindy Hampton, and two of their children in the form of a check totaling $96,000. Each gift was limited to $12,000. The payments were made as gifts, accepted as gifts and complied with tax rules governing gifts.

After the Senator told his parents about the affair, his parents decided to make the gifts out of concern for the well-being of long-time family friends during a difficult time. The gifts are consistent with a pattern of generosity by the Ensign family to the Hamptons and others.

None of the gifts came from campaign or official funds nor were they related to any campaign or official duties. Senator Ensign has complied with all applicable laws and Senate ethics rules.

Paul Coggins
Fish & Richardson P.C.

Counsel for Senator John Ensign

Ha! How stupid do they think Americans are if they think for a second that we'd buy this gift nonsense as an excuse for 51 year-old U.S. Senator funneling money to his mistress and her husband through his freaking parents? Wait, don't answer that—Sean Hannity will explain how this is all perfectly reasonable tonight on his show and millions of conservative sheep will fall in line with this horseshit.

Would it be crass of us to say that we ever find out our lady is cheating on us, we sure hope that she does it with a good ole "family values" Republican U.S. Senator. That way we could at least pay some bills and take an all-expenses paid trip to Amsterdam when it was all said and done.

Ensign Still Bringing Home Dirty Laundry to Wash [TPM]
Pic via

In a statement, Coburn, who is a doctor, said any conversations he may or may not have had with his pal Ensign about how to best keep his adulterous affair a secret are strictly confidential:

I was counseling him as a physician and as an ordained deacon. ... That is privileged communication that I will never reveal to anybody. Not to the Ethics Committee, not to a court of law, not to anybody

Except as Josh Marshall points out, Coburn is an OB/GYN. So any treatments he was giving to Ensign were highly unorthodox.

Or, rather, the Las Vegas Sun has it. And it is much more business-like, and much less poetic, than the emails of Governor Sanford.

So. Doug Hampton, the guy who is married to the woman Ensign was sleeping with, "spoke publicly" about the affair today. And apparently Tom Coburn "and others" urged Ensign to not only stop this affair-ing, but also to pay off the Hamptons' sub-prime mortgage, so that they could move to Colorado. That is probably a really bad suggestion from Coburn there, to tell a Senator to pay off a mistress and her husband!

Hampton and Ensign were bonded by their conservative evangelical faith. Hampton said he reached out to intermediaries involved in a Christian fellowship home in Washington, D.C., where Ensign and several other powerful Washington figures live.

The group, including Coburn, a well-known conservative, confronted Ensign and suggested that the Hamptons needed to be given financial assistance — in the millions of dollars — to pay off their $1 million-plus mortgage and move them to a new life away from Ensign.

During the confrontation, Ensign agreed to write a letter to Cynthia Hampton expressing remorse, Hampton said.

The letter, which was authenticated by Ralston's executive producer Dana Gentry, is filled with contrition: "I was completely self-centered and only thinking of myself. I used you for my own pleasure not letting thoughts of you, Doug, Brandon, Blake or Brittany come into my mind," he wrote, referring to the Hampton children.

But after sending the letter, which bears the date "Feb. 2008," Hampton said Ensign quickly disavowed it in a conversation with Cynthia Hampton and continued to pursue her.

Hampton said that on that same February weekend, Ensign told him, "I'm in love with your wife."

Christ. Why are the sex scandals this year so sad and pathetic? We can't wait to hear what Michael Wolff has to say about this though!

K-Lo's excuse is that she is simple-minded. Former assistant US Attorney Andy McCarthy can say no such thing, as idiotic as the things he writes are.

At least K-Lo's apologia for Ensign succinctly exposes an important difference in how dumb conservatives and dumb liberals interpret the world: dumb liberals justify their mean-spirited glee at seeing a member of the other team brought down in shame by claiming it exposes hypocrisy; dumb conservatives don't understand that it's not a tragic tale of a moral man felled by temptation, it's just a holier-than-thou asshole getting his*.

All McCarthy's doing, though, is absentmindedly flinging shit at the wall in the hopes that something sticks.

So Andy McCarthy's piece is a helpful attempt to explain just why Barack Obama has not yet personally flown into Iran to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei and grant free-market democracy to the grateful protesters. Some apologists have suggested that it would, in fact, strengthen the ruling regime for the American President to more actively take sides. Others have suggested that Obama might be better able to bargain with whomever eventually runs Iran if he hasn't pissed them off. You can fairly criticize the rationale behind both of those interpretations! Unless you are Andy McCarthy. In that case, this is your explanation.

The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.

Andy McCarthy is well-educated enough to know that a theocratic dictatorship is not compatible in any way with Leftism. He knows, when he writes that the "hard-Left... was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists," that many of these anti-Communists were, in fact, fascists, theocratic totalitarians, and dictators. (Like the heroic Afghani freedom fighters who beat back the Russians! Now we call them "the Taliban.") He knows that a ridiculously inequitable oil state that throws occasional sops to its massive underclass is more or less the opposite of the Socialist ideal. And yes, of course he fucking knows that Barack Obama is not even close to being "a man of the hard Left." (Why did President Barack Castro over here appoint Geithner?) Any idiot knows that the President of the United States would obviously rather see a non-insane moderate in charge of Iran, because seriously, how does Obama benefit by having Ahmadinejad still in power, again? He just likes the dude because they both hate America so much? In fact not a single one of the sinister insinuations made in that one simple sentence should even require any sort of rebuttal, because it is all just half-assed trolling.

But it is all especially shameless because neo-conservatives—not the "hard Left"—were the only Americans publicly begging for an Ahmadinjead victory, so that they could—as they are now!—demand that Obama take a harder line against the Iranian regime. One guy said it right there on National Review Online! And look, they won, and they are doing exactly what they said they would!

Anyway. Andy McCarthy: what a prick.

*Seriously, her attempts to frame Ensign's Clinton-era harangues about the sanctity of marriage as a bold truth heroically stated, one that Ensign, tragically, could not live up himself, are mind-boggling, unless you are as dumb and conservative as she is. Like, if she believes that his moralistic pandering was actually an attempt to preach the gospel, then she will forgive him for not living up to those high standards (the high standards he demanded Bill Clinton live up to, but whatever!) himself, because we are sadly all too human, except for abortionists. "I confess that my first instinct was certainly not to praise Senator Ensign upon learning of his infidelity," K-Lo writes, but then she performed the mental jujitsu necessary to align the facts—a man on "her side" does not live up to her standards of morality—with her worldview—she and her friends, the Republicans, are Holy and Right. And so, John Ensign's affair with a married woman is the fault of "the left-wing blogosphere," and all is right with her world. If K-Lo's boyfriend Mitt Romney was caught on video nailing an underaged Thai sex slave she'd probably find a way to make it Keith Olbermann's fault. Ok we promised we wouldn't actually talk about this column so much but come on.

When Hampton decided to go pubic with his tale of woe, which involved his boss seducing his wife, he chose Fox News because, according to a letter he wrote to Fox's Megyn Kelly, only Fox could "address this professionally and correctly. I could have sought the most liberal, Republican hating media to expose this story, but there are people's lives at stake and justice is about proper process as well as outcome." Bad choice!

That letter, obtained by the Las Vegas Sun, was written on June 11, five days before Ensign came forward. It detailed Ensign's "very evil and completely unjustifiable acts" and pleaded for Kelly's help in exposing them:

Here is my story. In December of 2007 in the midst of some very difficult personal issues that deeply impacted my family and marriage, Senator Ensign pursued and engaged in a relationship with my wife. Our families were lifelong friends, our children attend school together to this day, and our homes are in neighborhoods across from each other. My wife was the Senator's campaign treasurer.

[snip]

The actions of Senator Ensign have ruined our lives and careers and left my family in shambles. We have lost significant income, suffered indescribable pain and emotional suffering. We find ourselves today with an overwhelming loss of relationships, career opportunities and hope for recovery. Our pursuit of justice continues to place me and my family in harm's way as we fear for our well being.

Wow! Great story. So what did Fox do? Nothing. Or at least nothing on the air. The network presumably received the letter and followed up on it, because Ensign clearly knew that the story was going to come out, which is why he got out ahead of it. Kelly and Fox didn't return the Sun's calls. Fox's failure to break the story is understandable—if the letter was snail-mailed, and the network received it, then they could have had only a couple days to nail it down before Ensign came out.

UPDATE: Fox tells the Huffington Post that a booker for America's Newsroom, which is co-hosted by Kelly, did receive Hampton's letter via e-mail on June 15, the day before Ensign's press conference. Producer Tom Lowell says "it wasn't something we needed to move on immediately. And before we could nail everything down and confirm this story the Senator had already announced his press conference." He also says that Fox never contacted Ensign regarding the story.

But after the story broke, Fox didn't report that it had received Hampton's letter or that it was the news organization whose pursuit of the story prompted Ensign's admission. More importantly, it repeatedly and unskeptically regurgitated spin from anonymous sources in Ensign's camp that Hampton had tried to extort money from the senator in exchange for his silence. That claim may or may not be true—the FBI says it is not currently investigating the matter, and you'd think it would if there was credible evidence. And Talking Points Memo details how Ensign's anonymous sources have walked back the allegation, most recently simply pointing to Hampton's discussions with "a major television news channel"—which we now know was likely Fox—as Ensign's motivation for coming forward.

But whether Hampton had tried to extort Ensign or not, Fox was uniquely situated to tell his side of the story, which he told Kelly involved both Hampton and his wife being fired as a result of Ensign's "heinous acts." He claimed he had "facts, a paper trail, phone records and personal witnesses to testify to its truth." So what did Fox have to say about the story after Ensign came forward?

Greta van Susteren: He says he and his wife had gone through counseling. So why did he come forward now? FOX News confirms and found an extortion was the reason the senator came forward. Allegedly, the woman's wife wanted money from the senator. The center says a relationship happened more than a year ago, and that he remains deeply committed to his service in the US Senate.

And this:

Brett Baier: Senator John Ensign has resigned his leadership post one day after admitting to an affair with a former member of his campaign staff. The Nevada Republican was chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, the fourth ranking spot in the leadership. Sources close to the senator, who insisted on staying anonymous, say he may have been the target of an extortion scheme. The woman's husband, who worked in ensign's Senate office, allegedly asked the senator for money after he learned of the affair.

No mention was made of Hampton's accusations. Megyn Kelly, according to Nexis transcripts, hasn't uttered a word about the story on the air.

Two things should be noted about Hampton's letter: 1) It is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. These people actually work in the Senate? And 2) it baldly contradicts a statement released by Hampton and his wife's lawyer two days ago, which said "it is unfortunate the senator chose to air this very personal matter, especially after the Hamptons did everything possible to keep this matter private." That's a transparent lie. The Hamptons are probably not blameless in this, but if anyone had the capacity to get to the bottom of it, it was Fox. We wonder why they didn't?

Roll Call reports today that Ensign's intern coordinator sent a sad email to a bunch of other Senate intern coordinators asking if maybe any of them had room for a couple really "great" and apparently morally self-righteous kids who don't want to work for Ensign for free anymore, because it was totally fine to work for him when he was a war-mongering gay-hating asshole but now that he's a war-mongering gay-hating asshole who slept with some lady who he was not married to, no thanks!

"This is Jessica from Ensign's office. I am trying to find out if anyone has any openings for interns. I have some really great interns that want to relocate to another office. If you have anything or know of someone who does please let me know," Walton wrote in the e-mail.

Hey, they should all go work for David Vitter!

Also, about those two jobs Ensign got for the husband of the woman he was sleeping with while he was separated from his own wife: he would totally do the same thing for any staffer of his, and not just one he was cuckolding!

"Just as he has done for many other staff members, Senator Ensign made recommendation calls for Mr. Hampton," Ensign spokesman Tory Mazzola said in a statement.

Yes, sure, right. This guy!

Ensign's affair was with Cynthia Hampton, his reelection campaign treasurer. Hampton's husband was an administrative assistant, which is awkward. Even more awkward: the Hamptons are broke, and maybe defaulting on their shitty mortgage.

Douglas Hampton was paid about $101,000 in 2008 and $144,000 in 2007 as Ensign's administrative assistant. But a financial disclosure form he filed in 2007 and 2008 – required for senior congressional staffers - showed only checking and savings account worth a maximum $30,000 combined.

A review of public records shows that the Hamptons in 2006 took out a $1.2 million mortgage on their Las Vegas home, at an interest rate of 8 percent.

God, where is that Fannie Mae money when you need it? Cynthia shoulda slept with Harry Reid!

Nevada is the home of the second-highest rate of delinquent or foreclosed mortgages in the nation and also rapey governor Jim Gibbons, so it is frankly just remarkable that all of this didn't come out earlier.

Ensign admitted the affair today because he's too cheap to pay off his mistress' husband to keep his mouth shut. From Politico:

Ensign met with the husband of the woman involved and had what this source described as a positive encounter. But the source said that the man subsequently asked Ensign for a substantial sum of money – at which point Ensign decided to make the affair public.

Fun fact: Ensign is the Senate's only Pentacostalist and was a Promise Keeper. Remember them?

Conveniently, the source told Politico that the affair began while Ensign was separated from his wife, with whom he later reconciled. After healing his marriage, Ensign "gave the aide a severance package and parted ways." Class act. If this is the transparent lie that it appears to be, it will presumably come out fairly quickly, since Ensign's camp is saying the alleged separation lasted nearly a year.

Ensign is the head of the GOP Policy Committee, and the Washington Post calls him "a rising star in the Republican Party considering a 2012 presidential bid." But that's a bit much, given the fact that he ran the National Republican Senate Campaign Committee during the last election cycle, which was an unmitigated disaster for the GOP.

UPDATE: The Associated Press reports that the staffer Ensign was banging was married to another staffer. She worked for his PAC and campaign, and her husband worked in his Senate office. So when her husband demanded hush money, that was a Senate staffer trying to extort a sitting Senator, which one would imagine the Justice Department might be interested in.