Wingnut Morality In Action

Lying is fine because the ends justify the means, right? That's what I learned in kindergarten....

Two days after his election to the Yakima City Council, Rick Ensey admitted his wife was in fact the anonymous blogger who badmouthed his opponent throughout the campaign.
Now Ensey's vanquished opponent, Councilmember Ron Bonlender, is threatening to sue Ensey and his wife, Diane, for slander and defamation.

"I don't want to sound like I'm threatening, but I am making inquiries," Bonlender said Thursday after Ensey came clean to KIMA-TV about the blogger's identity.

On Thursday, the newly elected council member acknowledged in an interview on KIMA that the suspicion first raised in the Yakima Herald-Republic on Oct. 30 was true -- Diane Ensey was the writer and voice behind InsideYakima.com.

"He's right. It is my wife," Ensey told the CBS affiliate.

Signing as Publius, the blogger delighted in ridiculing Bonlender throughout the campaign as a clueless tax-and-spend liberal Democrat. One controversial post Oct. 4 referred to "rumors" that Bonlender had been arrested several times on charges of drunken driving and that the arrest reports were being covered up by the police, the Herald-Republic and City Manager Dick Zais.

A review of state records found no evidence of the rumors, and the blogger offered no evidence of any suppression of records.

Despite Inside Yakima's obscurity, growing curiosity among city insiders in the waning days of the campaign gave rise to speculation about the blogger's identity. Bonlender wasn't the only target -- the blogger took swipes at Zais, Council members Susan Whitman and Neil McClure, the Herald-Republic editorial board, and Democrats in general.

The blogger's snarky attitude seemed somewhat in character for a campaign race awash in partisanship. Ensey, a property manager, criticized Bonlender for being a Democrat and suggested he was out of step with Yakima. Bonlender, a sandwich shop owner, took Ensey to task for promoting an endorsement from the Yakima County Republican Party when he was competing in a nonpartisan race.

Ensey won with 52.5 percent of the vote.

He told KIMA on Thursday that his wife started the blog without telling him, and that she thought it'd be a fun way to put voice to the issues they cared about.

Diane Ensey, who served as Ensey's campaign treasurer, is a Web developer and professional blogger.

In a Herald-Republic story on Oct. 30 that raised questions about the ethics of an anonymous blog and controversial postings at Inside Yakima, Rick Ensey variously described the blogger as a friend or acquaintance but wouldn't name names.

When asked to deny that the blogger was his wife, he refused to answer the question.

"If I start listing off a bunch of people, then I'm down a road I don't want to go," he said, adding, "I'm sworn to secrecy."

But the newspaper story -- and reaction around town -- apparently raised concern.

"I said 'Hey, we gotta pull this thing off. People are upset with it, we shouldn't have posted it. Pull it off,'" Ensey said in the KIMA interview.

The site was taken down the day after the election and the domain is now up for sale.

On Thursday night, Ensey did not return a call to his cell phone seeking comment about his wife and the blog.

Bonlender, meanwhile, chalked up the entire who-wrote-it episode to partisan rancor.

"If I had done it to him, oh my God, KIT would talk about it for two weeks straight," he said, referring to the local radio station. "There's a different standard in this town for Republicans (than for Democrats). That much is obvious."

Link.