How @alfranken got railroaded: my story here https://t.co/zNzRMPRoa2— Jane Mayer (@JaneMayerNYer) July 22, 2019
While I really think Jane Mayer generally does great work, this piece does nothing for me. I felt like Tweeden's political bias was irrelevant to whether or not her claims should be taken seriously at the time, and still do. I think it was pretty clear at the time that conservative media was positively gleeful about reporting a liberal senator as having been accused of sexual harassment, and that dynamic, while interesting, isn't surprising to us after years of their paying attention to "but Bill Clinton's penis" (which was, in its day, somehow even more ubiquitous than "but Hillary Clinton's emails").
What remains the case is that there were more allegations, that numerous senators called on Franken to resign, that he made that decision himself, that once he resigned, no further investigation was going to happen (or would satisfy the right wing radio scandal-mongers) and that looking back in anger, regret, or anything else will simply never tell us "what might have been". Hindsight isn't 20/20, it's 50-50.
For me, the bigger picture was the accused sexual harasser/rapist in the White House, the accused pedophile Roy Moore, and the ability to take seriously claims that we believe and stand with women who report sexual harassment on the left. It couldn't be a "both sides" issue. Life isn't fair.
I think Franken was right to resign when he did instead of dragging it out, and I can totally understand his regret now, just as I can understand how his friends and supporters feel about that. I think it definitely is that case that right wing media cynically seized on it, and whether it was true or not never would have mattered, and the same people who wanted Franken's scalp, would go on to defend Kavanaugh or any other conservative figure under allegation of sexual wrongdoing. We don't know what would have happened had anything been just a little different.
And for what it's worth, people who want to blame any of this on Senator Gillibrand can pretty much stuff it.
1 comment:
Yes, exactly. The accusations against Franken were credible by the same criteria we've used with accusations against Republicans, such as the fact of multiple accusers. Franken's defenders often sound disturbingly similar to the Republicans who minimize or reject out of hand accusations against politicians on their side. I expect that sexual harassment is more common among right-wingers, given their reactionary social views, but some leftists do it too, and when such a case comes to light, there can be no double standards.
This is going to be important to remember as the seized photos (and perhaps video) from Epstein are reviewed and analyzed. I suspect quite a few big names, some of them Democrats or liberals, are going to be exposed as having done things worse than what Franken was accused of. Again, there can be no double standards.
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