Congressman Steve Cohen Tweets "ilu" -- Usually Meaning "I Love You" -- to 24 Year Old Coed/Model/"Friend"

Yes, he's a Democrat.

Rep. Steve Cohen repeatedly tweeted, and then deleted, messages to a woman on Twitter who his office is calling “the daughter of a longtime friend” and who has the same name as a Texas State University blonde bombshell featured in a college co-ed calendar.

In a Tuesday night message ahead of President Obama’s State of the Union address, a Twitter user named Victoria Brink tweeted to the Tennessee Democrat, “just saw you on tv!”

According to a tweet captured by the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation’s Politiwoops site, Cohen replied to Brink, “pleased u r watching. Ilu” The tweet was deleted after three minutes.

Both Wikipedia and UrbanDictionary.com define “ilu” as Internet slang for either “I love you” or “I like you.”

In another message sent Wednesday morning, Cohen wrote again to Brink on Twitter: “nice to know you were watchin SOTU (state of the union.) Happy Valentines beautiful girl. Ilu.” That message was deleted within 15 minutes of being posted.

I've done some of my own sleuthing (which consisted of clicking on a prominent link in the above article) and I've discovered this. (Apparently now getting a 404 error on that.)[link fixed - Andy]

Cohen has previously expounded on "the Big Lie:"

They say it's a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels. You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That's the same kind of thing. The Germans said enough about the Jews and the people believed it and you had the Holocaust. You tell a lie over and over again. And we've heard on this floor, government takeover of health care.

Cohen's actually unmarried (I believe) but one of his flacks say he has a "longtime girlfriend" in Memphis who presumably is more age-appropriate.

Congressman Cohen is 137 years old (estimated by tree rings).

In completely unrelated news -- seriously, I've been meaning to post this and just haven't had a chance, and I'm just randomly throwing it in here -- cheating service Ashley Madison has pronounced Washington DC the most unfaithful city in America for the second year in a row.

Given that Cohen is unmarried, I don't expect this to go anywhere, and it probably shouldn't. Yes, he has a "longtime girlfriend," but conservative commentators have objected to treating that as equal to the sacrament of marriage.

And yet...

By the picture, he appears to be some type of weasel. --
Lurking Canuck

And yet. Powerful and accomplished men have long attracted much better looking (and much younger) women than they'd otherwise attract. Nothing new there.

But is Cohen powerful? Is Cohen accomplished?

Now even backbenching blowhard idiot Congressmen apparently have so much money and power and connections as to attract the favors of fetching young girls; should that be the case?

Citizen legislators, indeed. I'm not saying a Congressman should wear the hairshirt, but I am definitely saying that if he's got enough Bank to Pull the Young Hotties then we're doing something wrong.

It's not so much that he's tweeting "ilu" to a 24 year old girl, you know. Humans do what humans have done for centuries. Bad behavior is nothing new, and hardly uncommon.

It's that I don't think a Citizen-Legislators should be in the category of people with the money and connections and power to be able to indulge bad behavior.

This all feels very Roman to me. Our little Rome-on-Potomac is booming, tax-farming the hinterlands to the breaking point, and our little cadre of Roman senators is having a never-ending fantastical party. On our dime.

Ah well. L'amour, qui peut le connaître?

posted by Ace at 02:43 PM

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