For weeks, I have been telling you that in 2004, while Gov. Frank Cotton was making his first run for the White House, his son Calvin dug up his dead wife and disappeared with her. For weeks, some of you have scoffed and the governor has responded with anger and denial.
Then came the video and it was enough to send me skipping to the bars where I bought drinks for thirsty strangers. Just a day later, a timely news leak has transformed that prior victory into something monumental.
Behold “TALKING POINTS: THE JOEY NILAN VIDEO.” It is a summary of the Cotton team’s manufactured responses to the press for those instances when they can not avoid the subject. An official at the Cotton campaign’s Maine headquarters distributed it to other members of the team Thursday morning.
Unfortunately for someone, the addresses of three reporters, including yours truly, was also on the distribution list. I consider it an incriminating windfall.
I got the memo at about 11 a.m. By then, the Sun Journal in Lewiston had already posted it on their website. It doesn’t matter to me at all that another newspaper beat us to the story.
What matters is that the Cotton team’s anxiety over the matter has now become public. Cotton and his closest men have been trying to cover up this ghastliness for more than four years. Now it is falling apart and no amount of shallow rhetoric is going to bury it.
LaFlamme’s novel, the emergence of the video and now this timely leak. For all the world, it’s as though Fate herself stepped into to lay bare the sins of Frank Cotton and I’m happy to be a part of it.
One Comment
I’m glad that you’re a part of it too, Mr. Nilan. Sorry you got scooped, but keep on keeping us “regular” folks informed.