Looks like the Stormy Daniels story is worth paying attention to

I've held off on posting about Stormy Daniels because I generally like lots of corroboration and fleshing out of sensational stories before I touch them. LITD is not in the tribalism business and does not jump on tidbits whether true or not just to damage or help particular public figures.

But two new aspects to the SD / DJT story seem to indicate that this is of a different nature than, say the golden showers alleged in the Fusion GPS dossier.

There's FNC sitting on some information it had because of the timing:

One of the network's reporters, Diana Falzone, had filed a story in October 2016 about an alleged sexual relationship between Clifford and Trump, people familiar with the matter said. 

Falzone had an on-the-record statement from Clifford's manager at the time, Gina Rodriguez, confirming that her client had engaged in a sexual relationship with Trump, three of these people said, and Falzone had even seen emails about a settlement. 

But the story never saw the light of the day, to the frustration of Falzone, two of the people said. 

"She had the story and Fox killed it," one of the people familiar with the matter told CNN.

And Daniels / Clifford's denial about the hush money raises some questions, given that long before her non-disclosure agreement, she had a lot to say about being, um, pals with the Very Stable Genius:

On Wednesday, InTouch magazine ran excerpts from an interview with adult-film star Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford) wherein she detailed having a 2006 affair with then-future-president Donald Trump. 

The piece was the first confirmation from Daniels about the affair, which had been much rumored prior to the 2016 election and drew renewed attention this past week after The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s personal lawyer paid her $130,000 to keep quiet. 

But Wednesday’s story is just the beginning of the saga, not the conclusion of it.  According to a source familiar with the matter, later this week, InTouch is planning to run the entire unedited interview it conducted with Daniels. All 5,500 words of it. 

The interview with Daniels was conducted in 2011, which means it occurred before the performer signed the reported NDA. The magazine also verified Daniels’ account with two sources at the time and had the actress take a polygraph. 

According to Daniels, she and Trump first met at a golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in July 2006, just four months after his youngest son Barron was born. Trump asked for Daniels’ number and invited her to dinner. When she arrived, he was wearing sweatpants, and they ended up eating in his hotel room. She excused herself to the bathroom and when she emerged, Daniels told InTouch Trump was sitting on the bed and invited her to join him. 

“Ugh, here we go,” thought Daniels. She described the sex as “textbook generic.” 

In the print version of the magazine, Daniels expanded further, describing the sex as "nothing crazy. It was one position, what you would expect someone his age to do." She also said that they did not use protection, which, the magazine reported, "is unlike her." 

Daniels revealed that Trump asked her to sign a DVD copy of her film 3 Wishes and that he called her roughly every 10 days after their first encounter. As for the later encounters, she said: “We had really good banter. He told me once that I was someone to be reckoned with, beautiful, smart, just like his daughter.” Trump even had a nickname for her, she said: "honeybunch." 

A source tells The Daily Beast that the full, unedited interview that will run later this week is 5,500 words of “cray.” Daniels didn’t leave much out in describing the affair, which involved a few more encounters in the months following their first tryst in Tahoe. 

According to the source, the transcript contains details of “[w]hat he’s like in bed, pillow talk, she talks about what he’s like down there…” 

The source declined to go into more details but added that Daniels was not paid for the interview. Suffice to say, the American public is going to learn much more about the President’s body than they could possibly have learned from the physical he performed last week.

By the way, my respect level for Bookworm, a blogger I once admired a great deal, continues to go south fast. She actually had this to say about this affair:

Incidentally, I don’t care if Trump ran after porn stars. I didn’t vote for him because of his morals.

Let that in. What kind of grotesque transformation has to take place in someone's soul to get to where she doesn't care?  What happens to bring an ostensible conservative to the point where one sees no necessity to couch discussion of one's decision to vote as one did in any kind of acknowledgement that it was a tragic choice, only made because the alternative was Hillary Clinton?

I'm obviously glad Evan McMullen isn't our president, but I have no regrets voting for him. It allows me to be in the position of applauding the fine moves of the last year without owning anything unsavory or embarrassing or alarming about Donald Trump.

But we must all remember this: A major piece of evidence that post-America is one sick place is that the Republican Party, which is supposed to be the nation's bulwark against the truly evil Democrats, passed on Ted Cruz and went with this guy.