Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee, a longtime bachelor with a recently revealed secret daughter, totally schooled the media this time: The Democrat got journalists to report that he called Cyndi Lauper “hot” by tweeting that Cyndi Lauper was hot, and then deleting it. “It was all a ruse,” Cohen told Howard Kurtz today, ahead of a press conference on the matter. “I knew by deleting it they would run it, it would give it news, give it life. That was the hook.” Ha ha … ha?
Lauper performed “Try a Little Tenderness” at the White House on Tuesday, as part of a Memphis Soul event. Aftewards, Cohen tweeted, “@cyndilauper great night,couldn’t believe how hot u were.see you again next Tuesday.try a little tenderness.” He deleted the message after 21 minutes, but it was saved by the website Politwoops, which chronicles deleted tweets from politicians, drawing light coverage across the Internet.
When an elected official makes a public comment about a woman’s looks, as we saw last week, it usually warrants mentioning.
But it was Politwoops that brought attention to Cohen earlier this year, when he sent messages to a 24-year-old model during the State of the Union address. After a day of unconvincingly explaining why, Cohen admitted the woman was his daughter, whom he’d only learned about a few years earlier.
Again, when an elected official publicly lavishes attention on a young woman, and then later reveals her to be his love child, it usually warrants mentioning.
But Cohen was “P.O.’ed,” he told Kurtz, and the Lauper tweet was payback (of an indiscernible nature). “Just because she’s posed in a bikini, it was assumed I’m screwing her,” Cohen said of his daughter. The press “went way overboard with that. It hurt my daughter and my relationship with her.” So he tweeted another message that could be interpreted as skeevy and waited for the media to accurately report on it. Boom. Punk’d.
