A day after Alabama Governor Robert Bentley’s top political advisor, and possible extramarital affair partner, resigned from her campaign fundraising job, Bentley is receiving more bad news:
Gov. Robert Bentley personally bought multiple inexpensive, disposable cell phones last year at a Best Buy in Tuscaloosa, according to current and former employees of the electronics store.
Governor Robert Bentley was allegedly buying “burner” phones at a Best Buy in Tuscaloosa. That sounds like the opening line of a modern country music conspiracy novel. AL.com has been doing the lion’s share of reporting on this unfolding scandal:
Collier told AL.com last week that while he worked for Bentley, the governor was a text message user and frequently changed cell phones.
But Bentley's office only provided one short string of less than a dozen text messages between him and Mason in response to an AL.com public records request last year seeking text exchanges from his state cell phone, saying that he did not text often on that phone.
The two Best Buy employees, one current and one former, corroborated the fact that Governor Bentley conspicuously bought two to three burner phones at different times. Sex scandals are usually stupid sideshows that distract us from real issues, but when you have conservative Republicans trying to cut funding from Planned Parenthood (while spending millions on a governor’s mansion) and making statements like:
Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother.
You are a complete and utter hypocrite to break the Seventh Commandment. If you want to tell people how to live their lives morally and you want to legislate that, you will get your karmic comeuppance—that’s eastern-commie-religious stuff. But everyone involved in this fiasco seems to be touched with the blunt, gooey brush of hypocrisy. The woman possibly having the affair with Bentley, the one that led to the quick dissolution of his 50-year marriage, is named Rebekah Caldwell Mason. This is from Leada Gore, reporter from AI.com, talking with the Washington Post about this affair:
Mason has resigned her post. Her husband, who is a state employee -- of all things the director of the state faith-based initiative office -- is still there.
And then you get into all this crazy stuff. They all went to church together in Tuscaloosa. They've been asked to leave; he's no longer a deacon. We reported today her husband operated a separate communications company that was not on her ethics forms that received payments from the University of Alabama. And to make it even more of a tangled web, the chairman of the 501(c)(4) that the governor set up is the legal adviser to the board of trustees to the University of Alabama.
Wow. Just. Wow.