Last week 32 of the 46 Democrats in the Senate called for Al Franken to resign his seat following allegations of groping women and other improprieties, and he complied, but also made it a point to look really butt hurt.
The allegations are as follows: Eleven years ago, before he was elected to the Senate, Franken grabbed the breasts of a woman named Leann Tweeden while posing for what he clearly intended to be a comical photo while they were on a USO tour together. She also claims he forcibly tried to kiss her. She didn’t bring it up for eleven years.
Tweeden, a former Playboy covergirl turned radio broadcaster, has not explicitly stated her Republican affiliation, but she is from a military family and her husband in the military. Her Facebook page features an onslaught of Support the Troops memes and several photos and videos of herself firing off guns. She also appeared on The Sean Hannity Show several times and was incredibly chummy with the show’s eponymous host, with Hannity at one point stating “I love your husband”, and discussed how herself and Sean Hannity agree on most things.
She is most obviously a Republican. She first told her story in a detailed essay posted on the website KABC, the radio station she works for, and the onslaught of allegations against Franken began.
Interestingly, the sinister Republican strategist Roger Stone, who brags about spreading misinformation and disinformation, tweeted about Tweeden’s accusations hours before her essay was published:
“Franken next in long list of Democrats to be accused of “grabby” behavior.”
How did Stone know this was coming? He definitely has a lot of contacts in the media, so someone who works for KABC could have tipped him off, or, he and Tweeden could have colluded to bring negative press to Franken at an opportune time in this country’s “climate” when everyone from Harvey Weinstein to Garrison Keillor are losing their jobs for everything from veritable rape to accidentally touching a woman’s back, in the case of Keillor.
A quick aside: Former linebacker Ray Lewis works for Fox Sports. He once plead guilty to obstruction of justice because he lied to police after two guys were stabbed to death outside of an Atlanta nightclub. Blood was found in his limo and he disposed of the suit he was wearing that night before investigators could test it for DNA. He rolled over on his two friends and they were convicted of murder. Nobody is calling for him to resign. Matt Lauer was fired for being an annoying pervert. Our culture is out of whack.
Another Franken accuser, Lindsay Menz, who has openly stated that she and her husband voted for Donald Trump, claims that then Senator Franken grabbed her butt during a photo op in 2010 before he was elected to the Senate.
Stephanie Kemplin claims that Franken grabbed her breast 14 years ago while she was deployed in Kuwait and Franken arrived for a USO tour. Her political affiliation is unclear but the odds are that she is a Republican, as members of the armed services overwhelmingly identify as conservative and support Trump and you would know this if you ever talk to them.
Aside from several anonymous accusers, the last to come forward as of this writing was Tina Dupuy, who is a syndicated op-ed columnist, journalist, and comedian. She claims Franken grabbed her ass, and she identifies as a Democrat.
It should be noted that two of these women are media personalities and that accusing Franken would be a surefire way to land themselves in the news cycle. Not that they have ulterior motives. But it is a possibility. Especially Tweeden. It should also be acknowledged that many of them are avowed Republicans, which in its current form is most certainly the dirtiest and most insidious iteration of a political party in American history.
We could also have a Citizen Ruth situation on our hands.
Here’s the thing about anonymous accusers, they should not be deemed credible. They simply have too much leverage to screw someone’s career with an accusation they don’t even want to attach their name to.
If an anonymous accuser, or ten of them, can get you fired from your job, then anyone reading this can be fired from their job without due process if they piss off a weird woman who is part of a book club.
The bar has been set incredibly low. If you can now be ousted from your job because you allegedly attempted to kiss a woman eleven years ago, before you were a Senator, then frankly nobody is safe. The status quo will retain the ability to ferry off any man with mere accusations, and perhaps that is the entire point.
Franken, who just days before had been a vocal advocate for the rights of women, appeared to be caught somewhere in the demilitarized zone, defending his innocence, abiding by the wishes of his virtue signaling self sabotaging and ultimately ineffectual party (more on that later), all while appearing utterly baffled at his own circumstance.
As all of this was going down Roy Moore, who appeared to be something of a fledgling pedophile, who wrote in young girls’ yearbooks, which perhaps makes him the most pathetic man to have ever lived, was in a dead heat in an Alabama special election to be that state’s junior Senator behind one of the guys from American History X.
Moore was heavy on the mainstream media’s radar, and this is precisely why the Democrats decided to oust Franken for his transgressions, which are not even in the same ballpark.
They wanted to prove a point, that they are better than the Republicans. Donald Trump is on record as saying he grabs women by their pussies. That’s not even easy to do, you’d have to be incredibly calculated. It’s highly possible he was just talking shit, but let’s take him at his word for once. Not like when your arm is around someone when the two of you are posing for a picture while Promiscuous by Nelly Furtado is playing (the most popular song of the year Franken allegedly assaulted Tweeden) and the meat of your thumb grazes her boob and she decides it was real fucked up a decade or so later.
This is the modus operandi of the Democratic Party. They think the American people understand or respect absolutism and token symbolic gestures of their progressiveness, which they appear to prioritize based on what’s trending on Twitter. They participate in the same corporate whoring and think their use of buzzwords, pandering to various demographics, and leaning slightly to the left of whatever psychotic shit the Republican party is doing will earn them respect with voters.
This brilliant strategy has lead them to lose control of the Senate, Congress, and the Presidency, and it takes a special group of dumb fucks to figure out how to lose the presidency to Donald Trump.
I think a Republican will win Franken’s seat in the next election. They’re obviously going to appoint a woman in his place for the time being. Who saw that coming? The Democrats really have an ace up their sleeve!
Minnesota leans blue, but a Republican could easily win. I don’t want it to happen, but I think it will. That’s just the way fate works. You pushed out one of the more progressive and visible members of the Senate because there’s a photo of him grabbing a woman’s boobs, as a joke. Not a good joke. It’s ugly. And he should have apologized. But it’s really not that big of a deal.
Republicans would never push out a member of their own party. This is why they are more successful. Trump colluded with Russia to win the election. The party which constantly effuses gaudy displays of patriotism, which claimed that the former President was not an American, do not care.
They are assholes.
Their playbook is simple. Roy Moore simply denied all of the accusations against him and won nearly half the vote. Trump says every one of his accusers are liars, and that the constant barrage of credible, incriminating evidence against him is Fake News. It works. People are stupid.
Franken’s party doesn’t permit him to have balls like that. He had to be all wishy washy about his innocence. Before he resigned he attempted to defend himself, and sounded fairly reasonable, at least as credible as the anonymous Twitter eggs making up the bulk of accusations against him:
“I’ve met tens of thousands of people and taken thousands of photographs, often in crowded and chaotic situations. I’m a warm person; I hug people. I’ve learned from recent stories that in some of those encounters, I crossed a line for some women — and I know that any number is too many.”
This is confusing. Did he do anything nefarious or not? Does he feel that he is guilty? What does “crossed a line” mean? What if these women had drawn an unreasonable line? Or, what if they revised where their line was a decade later? In his resignation speech, Franken was equally ambiguous as to the legitimacy of the allegations:
“I also think it gave some people the false impression that I was admitting to doing things that in fact I haven’t done. Some of the allegations against me are simply not true. Others, I remember very differently.”
It appears Franken was being intentionally vague. Accusing his accusers of lying or embellishing their stories would have seen the Democrats pile on him even harder.
There is something else he could have done, which the Democrats would have hated, but which would have garnered him respect from reasonable people on the left and right. That would be speaking his mind in an honest and uncoded language, and saying what he really thought. Trump was the first presidential candidate in modern history to do this, and it won him the presidency. It would have gone something like this:
“Are you fucking kidding me? You want me to resign over accusations which happened before I was a Senator, and aren’t really that serious in scope in the first place? You want me to resign before there’s an investigation? Before these claims are vetted? I am genuinely sorry I thought grabbing that woman’s boobs in the photo was appropriate or funny. I wholeheartedly apologize for that. But resigning right now would be incredibly stupid for our party. This is all over a photo which I knowingly posed for. If there was no photo, none of this would have happened. Can you people not understand the difference between what I am accused of doing and Harvey Weinstein or Roy Moore? Sorry, I’m not going to be the Democratic Party’s sacrificial lamb on this one. Find someone else to force to resign. In fact, concentrate on more serious problems. Now, let’s figure out how to make this right, and learn from it, and move forward.”
Instead Franken turned into Stuart Smalley, the painfully insecure neutered character he played for several years on SNL, his resignations speech delivered with his tail between his legs, like he hoped Nancy Pelosi would burst into frame before he finished and let him out of timeout. He appeared reluctant, as if he is not capable of making decisions on his own behalf. While wrapping up his speech Franken made a point to acknowledge that the Democrats were in some failing way attempting to do the right thing while Republicans were clearly, consciously, doing the wrong thing. Republicans probably agreed with him, but none of them were stepping down:
“I of all people am aware there is some irony in the fact I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party.”
Well, you could always stand up for yourself, and offer a definitive statement on exactly what is going on here. For example, which of the accusations are false? What do you remember differently? Do you feel you’re some sort of martyr here?
In one of his final sentences, Franken appeared to claim he would be found innocent if this were to be investigated, which it now will not be:
“Nothing I have done as a senator — nothing — has brought dishonor on this institution. And I am confident that the Ethics Committee would agree.”
A quick aside: You’ve probably never heard of Bob Menendez. He is currently the junior Senator of New Jersey. He is a Democrat. In 2015 he was indicted by a grand jury for bribery, fraud, and making false statements. Basically, he was caught pressuring the State Department into granting a businessman friend of his government contracts. He also personally got several of this friend’s girlfriends visas to come to America. The two of them then spent a lot of time on his friend’s jet, going to Paris and playing golf, and in exchange for the government contract his friend gave Menendez $750,000 in campaign contributions, which Menendez largely failed to report. There was a mistrial.
There were few, if any, calls from the Democrats for Menendez to resign, presumably because rancid corruption wasn’t making a lot of headlines at that time. This would also lead a thinking person to believe that the Democrats have no actual values.
Republicans have values. They are fucked up, but at least they have them. People want to know you believe in something. Even if it’s putrid. I’d honestly rather talk to a member of the KKK than some shifty hipster asshole who lies about where he’s from. I really would. I like to know where people stand and then proceed from there.
Here’s an honest question to all of the Democrats who called for Franken to resign: Do you really think his behavior is the worst thing a current representative of your party has done? And, if you answered yes, this is another honest question: Are you a fucking liar?
Another quick aside: Bob Andrews, a Democratic Representative of New Jersey’s 1st discrict, took his family on a $30,000 vacation to Scotland in 2011 and paid for it with his campaign contributions. There were few, if any, calls for him to resign.
Maxine Waters, a Democratic representative of California’s 43rd district, successfully lobbied the US Treasury to give $12 million in Federal Aid to OneUnited Bank, which her husband owned a significant amount of stock in, having previously served as its director. Nobody cares.
In 2018 some Republican douchebag running for Al Franken’s seat will use Franken’s stepping down to insinuate that he is guilty and that the Democratic party is full of gays and perverts, and you know it’s true, because they admitted it!
He could have just served out his term. Al Gore could have fought for the presidency when it was stolen from him. The Democrats could have just staged a massive protest when the Republicans decided, simply because they wanted to, to steal the most recent Supreme Court seat.
But they didn’t, they lay down and wallow in self pity, espousing one of the grossest, and one of the most accurate, stereotypes when it comes to liberals.
They resign.
Keep cutting yourselves, idiots.
Republicans are assholes.
Democrats are losers.