(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) An announcement from Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., that he was officially launching a 2024 presidential campaign entered virgin tabloid trash territory on Monday.
After Scott announced his decision to enter the race, a reporter from the far-leftist Washington Post was compelled to dig up an old hit job on Scott from a 2012 interview. That was when Ben Terris, in a profile piece of Scott for National Journal, had asked the senator if he was still a virgin. Terris took to Twitter to regurgitate the smear while pimping his new book.
(It wasn’t a completely random question. He had spent his young adult life preaching abstinence until marriage. He’d give talks and mention that he was saving himself until marriage, and during my interview with the then-congressman he was, and continues to be unmarried.)
— Ben Terris (@bterris) May 22, 2023
“One more thing. It was such an awkward question to ask that I wrote myself a script: You used to preach about the virtue of no sex until marriage… is that a virtue that you still adhere to today?” Terris wrote. “Ultimately he implied he did not. ‘I just wish we all had more patience.’”
The backlash was fierce from critics and constituents who ripped Terris for his self-aggrandizement and rehashing tabloid trash instead of focusing on what Scott, the only black Republican senator and one of only three black senators overall, brought to the presidential race.
“Every day I think that I can’t hate the media in this country any more than I do now, then @bterris tweets this garbage question and I realize that the media can sink even lower,” fumed one commentator.
“I’m willing to bet you’re not concerned the least little bit about the sex lives of those on Epstein’s list,” blasted another.
“Nobody cares if Tim Scott is a virgin or not. It’s irrelevant. But asking a question like that, says a lot about you: You have nothing of value to report on,” another poster wrote, adding that, “And if it was of value, then you’ve made Tim Scott look like a good and virtuous man with discipline & morality.”
"Journalist" at work.
— Constitutional Minarchist (@Da48990072Davis) May 22, 2023
“Liberal reporters don’t ask trolling sex-life questions to Bill Clinton or Kamala Harris, so why Tim Scott?” noted NewsBusters executive editor Tim Graham.
“Liberal reporters routinely seem to have more discretion with the sex lives of Democrats, perhaps because reporters don’t see them as sexually repressed religious people. Questions about virginity are meant to embarrass weirdos.”
Not that it mattered to Democrats, who were gleeful to see Scott’s sex life, or lack thereof, on public display.
“Tim Scott finding out there’s no such thing as a private life when you run for President,” sneered former Democrat strategist Greg Pinelo.
