To hell with that, if Huffington Post is going to publish accusations made by anonymous people who don't want to identify themselves, they aren't any better than Breitbart. Anonymous accusations should be suspect up and until the people making them are willing to put their names on the actuations. For all anyone knows they're in the pay of the Mercers or Kochs or Sheldon Adelson or Vladimir Putin.
That the accusations are alleged to have been made by women is irrelevant, people have an absolute right to know their accusers, especially if the incidents alleged happened when the accusers were adults, not children. Anonymous accusers are rightly suspected of lying.
I keep thinking of Roger Stone saying it was Al's turn in the barrel...
ReplyDeleteAnything Roger Stone or the other known Republican ratfuckers are involved in should be considered a lie campaign. That they are considered as source by the media shows that the court rulings protecting lies has had the effect of making lies into "news".
DeleteI'm ever more convinced that the "enlightenment" ideology with its origins in an ill informed and absurd scientism was bound to do things like that because once you believe there is no sin and things like the truth being relative it turns into a matter of empowering wealth, which was the goal of just about all of the framers of the Constitution. The history, in that congress, of the text of the Bill of Rights looks like something that should be studied, exhaustively, because so many of our current ills have come from their blunders and intentional hindrances to equality and justice.
And the next round of establishing justice by saying everyone who is not as pure as me has begun. Anonymous accusations are fine, and why can't we relitigate Bill Clinton's case? Justice is as relative as morality, and no one is moral but me and thee. Or something equally foolish.
DeleteIt's the difference between real justice and the kind of thing that happens if you don't manage poultry to prevent the weaker ones getting pecked to death.
DeleteThe idea that it was ever difficult for someone to make a contemporaneous report of a man inappropriately touching a woman's ass in the same way that a 32 year old predator preys on young girls to assault or rape them is ridiculous. The idea that Al Franken would have done so to women, in public, where it could be seen, even by a woman's husband, is ridiculous on its face.
This is being whipped up by our domestic oligarchic class to try to get Roy Moore in the Senate, or to have him removed and have that asshole of a governor down there appoint a Roy Moore without the inconvenient history as a predator. You have to hand it to them, they know how to lead the media by the nose, by waving phony sex scandals by Democrats in front of them.
This is a result of the "free speech, free press" orthodoxy of the 1950s through today, as advanced by the ACLU. How shocking can it be that if you let them lie with impunity that they will lie on behalf of the rich and powerful because that's the side their bread is buttered on.
For anyone to think this kind of thing is going to advance anyones rights is incredibly stupid. Like the ACLU concept of "shall make no law" freeing the media to lie with impunity, it will end up destroying exactly the people the ACLU pretended to be empowering. I've come to think that the admiration that the founding members of the ACLU had for Soviet fascism - mostly because they liked its alleged scientific atheism - was a dead giveaway that they would always end up serving the same kinds of elites that arose by the time Roger Baldwin wrote his praise for Leninism in the 20s. That he changed his tune when his idea of a workers paradise was exposed was more self-serving than principled. And don't get me started on people like Crystal and Max Eastman.
I have come to believe that the majority of liberals making common cause with the various ideologies of atheist
"leftists" was one of the dumbest political phenomena of the 20th century. Especially the anarchists and the Marxists. Both of those were bound to devolve into fascism, red or overtly gangster fascism. Speaking of which, don't get me started on gangsta rap. Had to throw something for Simps to try to make hay out of, I'd rather it be something I said instead of something he made up all on his own.
Well, you know, "both sides do it." And Al Franken must be purged to make the Democrats pure again, and holier than the GOP. The affect on the Senate and national policy be damned, we must be pure!
DeleteI'm frankly astonished how widespread this notion is. As Michael Tomasky pointed out at Daily Beast, had Clinton resigned, godelpus today. Talk about sowing dragon's teeth and reaping the whirlwind.
But punishment must be meted, that pound of flesh paid in actual flesh. Vengeance is ours! It's part and parcel of why I'm so wary of punishing almost anyone for anything. And eye for eye and tooth for a tooth leaves us all sightless and toothless, but still we're determined that "they" be cleansed so "we" can be clean.
Oh, and not voting is purer and better than voting for the lesser of two weevils, because holiness, ya know? And so we get Donald Trump, but at least our holy vote is still holy!
It makes you wonder who has to be purged from the various publications, websites, cabloid networks, radio networks, etc. to make them pure and holy.
DeleteI would have traded all three of Lyndon Johnson's Democratic successors, of whom all three were arguably cleaner and purer (Jimmy Carter was probably the most decent man to have ever held the office) for someone like him and the policies he tried to establish. I'd have traded him for the Kennedy boys, too who were a lot more compromised in some areas.
Molly Ivins once wrote about how for all of their personal vices a lot of the most effective legislators on the Democratic side had a weakness for women and whisky.
If letting the Republicans is the price for the kind of purity that the journalists demand is letting the Republicans destroy women's equality and justice then that standard ends up being bad for women. What Franken and a few others are accused of is nothing compared to what the neo-Puritans want to give up. And they're Puritans only selectively because they would never tolerate their own field being held to those same rules.
What Franken allegedly did is nothing more than rude, and yet we must not tolerate even the accusation or Roy Moore must be canonized. Honestly the reasoning makes no sense at all.
Delete