It's said a good scandal is one a casual bystander on the street can describe in one sentence.

Well, we aren't seeing anything like this with the media-pumped Stormy Daniels scandal.  Following her much advertised and much watched 60 Minutes interview, all one can ask is, what the heck was this really about?

Anderson Cooper interviewed the porn "star," who took $130,000 in hush money from Donald Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, to conceal a one-night stand the pair had in a hotel several years ago.  OK, it looks as if the hush money didn't work – we all know about the affair.  Big deal.  What's more, we weren't offered much in titillating sexual details in the 60 Minutes interview, which is what a sizable percentage of viewers were looking for.  Cooper seemed most interested in whether a condom was used in the sexual encounter, which kind of gives a whiff as to how exciting this was.  What we really heard was a lot about Stormy Daniels not being truthful about agreements she signed, not wanting to follow those agreements, being in league with left-wing political-machine lawyers (Cooper did have useful revelations there), and throwing out vague, hackneyed boilerplate claims about "threats."  None of this impresses.

Sixty Minutes seemed to realize this, which is why, in the second half of the interview, the program focused on the hush money as a potential campaign finance violation, citing a #NeverTrump Bush-linked lawyer as an authority on the matter.  Even if there was merit in what he claimed, the penalty for such a violation, based on similar violations from Democrats and how those were resolved, would amount to some sort of small fine.  Color us unimpressed on that, too.

The obvious problem with this interview is that Daniels kept contradicting herself, and Cooper seemed too naïve to pursue those actual news angles:

Daniels claimed early on that she wanted to be silent and that since all the news came out, she wanted only to "defend" herself.

Given that she's a porn actress, it wasn't clear what she wanted to defend.

"I was perfectly fine with saying nothing at all," Daniels disingenuously claims.

Yet based on Cooper's reporting, we know she sought $15,000 from a tabloid several years back in 2011 to discuss her tryst with Trump, which led to all the cash and agreements, which included signed denials that the tryst happened.  Sounds as if she wanted to talk – a lot, and well before Trump became president.

We also know she took $130,000 in hush money with no negotiations from Cohen, Trump's lawyer, suggesting that her silence was good so long as the money lasted, given that a mysterious leak of the Wall Street Journal happened right about when the money would have run out.  Someone leaked a story about the hush money to the Wall Street Journal a few months ago, alleging the tryst and hush money paid.  Daniels claimed she didn't do it, but that denial does not cover either her lawyer or any of his Democratic operative buddies with their vast pool of media allies.  It's unlikely it was Cohen, so that's a question that ought to be answered.

Here's another contradiction: That she is not in it for the money.

But I'm not okay with being made out to be liar, or people thinking that I did this for money. And people were like, "Oh, you're an opportunist, you're taking advantage of this."

Besides seeking $15,000 back in 2011, before Trump was even a presidential candidate, she's violating her signed agreements now, including the one where she claims there was no tryst and one where she took cash from Cohen, claiming that the Cohen agreement was invalid because Trump didn't sign it, although his lawyer did, and Trump's camp argues that that counts.  Still want to know why she didn't give the $130,000 back.

Meanwhile, back at the 60 Minutes tell-all, instead of talking about the size of Trump's privates, as viewers expected, she gave an anecdote about some spanky-spank thing with Trump and Trump watching some shark show, but she chiefly used the interview as a means to advertise herself, claiming that Trump called her smart and special.

"Wow!  You are special!" she claimed Trump said to her. "You remind me of my daughter.  You are smart.  You are a woman to be reckoned with," she told Cooper.  "I definitely surprised him.  A lot of people must underestimate me."

If it happened, it wouldn't be the first time a man courting a woman with plastic boobs said he liked her for her brains.  Yawn.  In reality, this was an ad for her porn movies and a warning to Trump's lawyers that she is smart, although her behavior suggests otherwise.

What is she selling? Do viewers really want to know what Trump thought of her at the time?  She's using her tryst with Trump as a means of advancing her porn career.  She's pushing 40 now; she's got wrinkles on her face; her breasts aren't perky anymore; and in porn world, her shelf life is limited.  It would not be surprising for her to want to extend her career by talking about Trump, which she is doing and doing, despite the agreements she signed.

She openly worried about alienating her fan base for her porn movies by speaking out, certainly calculating her risk-reward ratio there, too.

She also talked a lot about "large amounts of money" and offers – but somehow turned them all down, just to take the piddly $130,000 instead, without negotiations.  It doesn't sound as though there was a lot of money being offered.

Stormy Daniels in 2005.  Luke Ford, Creative Commons 2.5.

Then there are her contradictory claims about threats, in several aspects.

First, she claimed to be a victim of sex harassment by cleverly insisting she was not a #MeToo victim but then calculatingly describing a classic case of sex harassment, saying she had sex with Trump even though she didn't want to.

"And I was like, 'Ugh, here we go,'" Daniels told Cooper.  "And I just felt like maybe – it was sort of – I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone's room alone and I just heard the voice in my head, 'Well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this.'"

This is fodder for any feminist out to talk to the media to claim sexual harassment, given that it was non-consensual sex.  Nice try having it both ways, Daniels.

She claimed she signed her nondisclosure agreements out of duress and fear, without much detail.

She also claimed to be a victim of a shadowy figure approaching her in a parking lot and saying: "Beautiful little girl you have there.  Be a shame if anything happened to her mother."  This is pretty boilerplate, but nevertheless, it could have happened, although Cohen has since sent her a cease-and-desist letter.  What's credibility-killing is her lack of specifics, for one thing, and the detail of her heart-tugging claim of taking a baby to a fitness class, as if such a thing would be allowed.  What did she do, park the kid on a pull-up machine and then do jumping jacks?  I'm trying to picture this.

She also claims that her motive for speaking out now is to shield her daughter from the publicity of the affair – as if speaking out would protect her, and more to the point, being a porn star wasn't a problem right there.  Publicity in this case would pretty well be nothing, given what she is already subjecting her kid to.

As she was claiming that Trump threatened her, she was making quite a threat of her own, saying her lawyer told her not to talk about all the texts she may or may not have had from Trump.  Cooper brought up that he could be bluffing, but the lawyer claimed he was always credible in his threats, offering zero evidence – just claims about his classmates being out there to back him up.  Cooper didn't check those claims out.

GatewayPundit noticed something I also did: that the pupils of her eyes were strangely dilated in the klieg lights, which suggests something unnatural, such as the effects of drug use, and that was never explained.  Two other things I noticed were that she blinked in two critical areas: when she was saying she had sex with Trump and when she made her final warning to Trump, that he "knew" she's telling the truth.  A blink during such a statement is a classic signal of someone lying and could be the case with her, too.  It's something that ought to be checked out further, if such a story were actually worth it.

What it likely shows is that powerful forces from the left are behind these Daniels claims and her unwillingness to keep her contracts.  What loathsome enemies our president has.