Al Franken, Democrats’ Sacrificial Man
In order to go after Trump and reinvigorate the War on Women campaign theme, someone needed to be made an example. And that someone was Al Franken.
The speed with which Democrat Senators turned on Al Franken was startling.
After the first few allegations of groping, including the infamous breast-squeezing photo, Democrats mostly shrugged their shoulders. It was uncomfortable for Democrats, but not fatal. There were few calls for Franken to resign from his fellow Democrat Senators.
After all, it’s hard to claim zero tolerance for sexual harassment and assault when Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton are the two modern icons of the Democratic Party.
Then as if on a dime, everything changed in a day when an additional woman came forward to allege groping. Franken denied that allegation, but no matter, one after another after another female Democrat Senator lined up calling for Franken to resign.
NY Senator Kirsten Gillibrand seemed to be the straw that broke the Democrats blockade. Once six female Senators called for his resignation, the Democratic men of the Senate piled on. By the end of the day, I think the head count was over 30 Democrat Senators, representing the majority of their caucus, calling for Franken to resign.
Franken dutifully obliged, sort of, in a resignation speech that expressed very little if any apology, and left the door open just a touch to a change of mind. Franken would resign, he said, down the road.
When the pile on happened, it’s clear it wasn’t about Al Franken or even the women accusers. It was about Democrat politics and plans.
Franken was just a sacrificial man in a greater Democrat cause.
If I were a progressive who voted Democrat, I’d be furious. One emotion I’ve seen a lot of on Twitter is that Democrats don’t defend their own while Republicans do. Historically that’s not an accurate view, Democrats defend their boorish women-abusing men to the bitter end. But in the age of Trump it’s hard for them to view anything with historical perspective.
At one level, the sacrifice was to set up Democrats to make an argument against Roy Moore and later, Donald Trump. Democrats and their supporters couldn’t even wait for Franken’s quasi-resignation speech to shift gears into arguing that getting rid of Franken proved Democrats were more pure than Republicans. Demands were made immediately that Republicans turn on Roy Moore, but Democrats really don’t care about Moore. Those demands quickly shifted into demands that Republicans dump Trump, or at least put Trump on trial in the Congress for Trump’s alleged sexual misdeeds.
Throwing Franken overboard was about getting rid of Trump, or at least relitigating the 2016 election.
At a deeper level, the sacrifice of Franken reflects a deeper Democratic obsession with the War on Women as a campaign theme. That’s a theme which worked wonders on Mitt Romney, and his mythical Binders Full of Women. And by any logic, it should have worked wonders on Donald Trump with a woman on the Democratic ticket. The charges against Trump were litigated during the election, the women accusers held press conferences and were featured in the mainstream media, and it all failed spectacularly.
Democrats have not yet recovered from the 2016 loss to Trump. It wasn’t just that their worlds collapsed around 2 a.m. on November 9, it’s that their campaign worldview collapsed. How could the War on Women fail against this guy? It was the ultimate insult.
Like the hammer that thinks every problem is a nail, Democrats are going back to the War on Women campaign theme for 2018 and 2020. In order to do that, they need to clean house in a very visible and public way, in a way that allows them, in their own minds, to claim the moral high ground.
Someone needed to be made an example. And that someone was Al Franken.
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Comments
You know, as sacrifices go, I think I can live with this one. It’s not like the Democrats are sacrificing somebody who has moral character or ethics. His departure and the arrival of his replacement will make DC just a little less repugnant, and that’s not bad, regardless of party.
Just wondering where they have hidden the Democrats with moral character or ethics…
It ain’t the ’60s anymore.
Don’t you just love how Stanken Franken “resigned” but the biggest bit of the speech was that
Franken ISN’T Resigning at all!
Well, Franken may be a bufoon, but he is not dumb.
I expect at this point he is in negotiations with the DNC as to all the particulars of his ” Golden Parachute ” exit.
Retirement pension, health benefits, etc.
Yes, I believe they have decided to buy him out, and they are working on it currently.
Too bad it’s our money…
Wasn’t he the first one elected with the Felon vote?
You are correct.
Yep, and a critical final vote in ramming Obamacare up our asses.
I can’t define Franken as a “Man”.
He hasn’t resigned yet. He said he would in the coming weeks. How long is that?Did he give himself any wiggle room to back out on his promise? I bet he won’t resign. He wouldn’t admit he had done anything wrong. He insinuated that the accusers were liars.
Well, that is exactly the premise I present.
He threw that out there as his initial signal that he was willing to cut an exit deal.
Jan 31
don’t know what year though 😉
I suspect that he is playing Lucy teeing up the football to the Roll-Over Party as Charlie Brown. Get the ROP to concede something then crawfish out of the announced resignation.
Here’s the big difference. Franken won by a little over 300 votes. Conyers speaks for himself so there is no need to even talk about his situation. But for most of these hacks, they were elected without anyone suspecting them of being perverts. Trump and now Moore are facing the charges against them BEFORE the voters get their crack at them. So if the voters know all of the jazz and STILL elect them then where is the outcry? Looking at hillary vs Trump most of us took the choice of voting for Trump knowing that with all of his baggage he was still more likely to change our broken government than hillary.
” Trump and now Moore are facing the charges against them BEFORE the voters get their crack at them.”
This is where the rubber meets the road. The information out there for the voters to see and they give it whatever weight they think appropriate, and pull the handle.
With Franken the alleged assault took place well before his election and people knew about it and sat on it. Would knowledge of his boorish behavior towards women have made a difference in the outcome? Quite possibly since it took several recounts and finding some “lost” ballots to get that 300 vote victory.
Or maybe not. The Ds elected Slick Willy with all those accusations flying around, and MA kept sending Teddy the Swimmer to the Senate without a second thought to his behavior… which included a dead campaign worker.
Reviewing the Constitution for the eligibility requirements to be a Senator (or Representative or President), they are straight forward and don’t mention clean backgrounds or being acceptable to other members of the body. The Founders probably hoped the people would choose good people but they did not require it. Free societies based on democratic principles are messy that way.
Oh yes, they are clearly gearing up to hold Trump to the Franken/Conyers/Franks/et al. standard of allegations leading to resignation from office.
The problem for Democrats and their progressive GOP allies is that it won’t work. And it won’t work, largely, because of the rubric the Dems have established: this is about accountability and believing accusers, this about social justice, about feminism, about their imaginary war on women.
No one but Democrats and their base care about any of that. Accountability is a joke in government, and we all know it. Believing accusers on the basis of their word alone is just nuts; anyone with any ax to grind can pipe up that so-and-so grabbed their butt five, ten, fifteen years ago. Who’s to say it happened? And frankly, who’s to say that grabbing a butt two decades ago was really sexual abuse, particularly when one of Franken’s own accusers was photographed grabbing the butt of a male musician on the same tour?
The moral equivalency being applied here is also a problem. Grabbing a butt is not the same thing as raping someone so violently they were left bleeding and shattered (as one accuser alleges of Weinstein) or gang-raping teenage boys at Hollywood parties (as has been alleged of various movie moguls). Making a pass-however clumsy and boorish-and accepting “no” for an answer is not the same thing as drugging, raping, and sodomizing a teenager (as Roman Polanski was convicted of doing).
Yet all are being treated as the same thing; in fact, women are coming forward with claims that they were sexually abused because they heard someone tell a sexist joke or make a comment that “made them uncomfortable.” REALLY? That’s just like being violently raped and left a battered, bleeding mess. Just. Like. It. No normal person thinks like this, and happily, the majority of American voters are normal and can tell the difference between a socially-inept loser who tells offensive jokes and a sexual predator.
Democrats do seem to have sacrificed not just Franken but also Conyers (they really didn’t want to force him out), but it will all be for naught. Their crazy witch-hunt for anyone who told an off-color joke or tried to kiss someone in an elevator and then screech “sexual abuse!” will fast become a laughingstock.
It seems, oddly enough, that they’ve forgotten their Alinsky. You hold your enemy to THEIR standards, not yours.
Let them ‘gear up.’
While they are selling their scams, the rest of the nation is pulling away in the ‘Trump’ direction and they will be left behind.
The more the left tries to shuck and jive and sell their scams, the rest of the nation is pulling away in the ‘Trump’ direction, and the left will be ‘left’ – left behind.
So is it the end of the perv/Al Franken decade? Yes, because people like him: Al Franken.
“The moral equivalency being applied here is also a problem. Grabbing a butt is not the same thing as raping someone so violently they were left bleeding and shattered… Making a pass-however clumsy and boorish-and accepting ‘no’ for an answer is not the same thing as drugging, raping, and sodomizing a teenager … Yet all are being treated as the same thing; in fact, women are coming forward with claims that they were sexually abused because they heard someone tell a sexist joke or make a comment that ‘made them uncomfortable.'”
This.
The real story here, I think, is the Witch Hunt (TM?) itself. I find it especially ironic that this is happening in environments where it appears that off-color behavior was common and accepted. Much like we (collective we) are retroactively applying our weird modern standards to (western) historical political figures, we are now retroactively applying hysterical feminist behavioral standards to men in power. And to heck with questions of credibility or evidence; we just go right to the pitchforks. It’s not pretty.
Fuzzy slippers
Agreed, they are calling individuals sexual perverts for grabbing a buttock or telling dirty jokes, it’s really insane. They are put in the same category as a rapist , how ridiculous, where will this end?
It will end pretty soon because we won’t tolerate this craziness. Once they shift their focus to the president, they will learn quickly enough that while they confuse a butt-grabbing or ribald joke with a violent rape, we do not.
The left is at war with us – literally – to maintain control of the swamp.
The hacks of the GOPe apparently have too much invested in that swamp to make any sacrifice for their country. (Compare that, with soldiers, ready to lay down their lives for our flag.)
We’ve got that weirdo traitor obama running around saying the US is the new Third Reich. We’ve got Swamp/Uranium One Sessions doing everything he can to protect hillary klinton’s crimes. (It’s apprent now that Sessions is dirty, and desperate to cover his ass.)
Just like any great war, this will end, but it won’t be for years to come.
Keep the faith and no matter what, stay the course.
Jan 31, 2018 – we will see if he is still there – is this so that he can get a larger pension from the abused taxpayers ?
I don’t think he has any intention of resigning. This is just theater so they can continue virtue signaling. The accusations against Roy Moore are falling to dust. The best they have against Trump is an ,admittedly, very crude statement. So they have to do something to keep the rage alive.
“… they have to do something to keep the rage alive…”
Damn right. Because if their rage is extinguished, every useful idiot of the left will suddenly realize the complete and abject fool they have been, and the damage they have done to both their nation and their lives.
That day will come. Save some popcorn for that one, when the awakened useful idiots of the left tar and feather their betrayers.
You can buy tar (tree pruning compound) in spray cans at Ace Hardware. Feathers are more of a problem.
Keeping the rage alive is the mantra of the Democratic Party. Apparently, almost anything will evoke rage in leftists, so all spoken words must be uttered in complete neutrality with no “triggers.”
The future the left wants to “progress” toward:
Person 1: Greetings, person of unknown but accepted non-gender.
Person 2: Greetings, person of equally unknown but equally accepted non-gender. This is a fine day, is it not?
Person 1: Did you just question my ability to distinguish a fine day from a not-fine day? I am hurt and befuddled and I suspect you are a sexist homophobe racist who equates good weather with white male privilege.
In come the antifa black shirts to arrest Person 2 for daring to possibly but not quite clearly offend Person 1.
Dear Fuzzy,
I do believe your “future” is already here, located at a local campus of “higher learning”.
You’ve got to hand it to the fascist left: they know how to cook up scams to manipulate themselves into power.
But the whole gender id thing is just that. Or global warming? Or social justice? Or race divisiveness? Or anti semitism? Or scaring and then corrupting the GOPe to lead it around by the nose?
This is war. Btw, Ivanka is sweet but not a war time consigliere. (Melania is, by the way.) Dont know about jared yet. Don Jr. is a loyal, brave soldier. Keep your eye on Barron: he’s learning, and he’ll be pissed.
Thought you might be interested in this Tweet today @RoyMooreSenate… (for some reason I can’t copy and past the web address)
I am officially announcing this afternoon I filed lawsuits against each of my false accusers for libel and or slander. And I will not settle, see you in court. #RoyMoore #Alabama #Senate #Election #RoyMooreSenate #MAGA #FakeNews
This will no doubt make Rags sputter and spit
#pleasedisregard
Seems that may be a fake account.
Apologies
Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but I would think that there are a thousand things that are a thousand times worse in Washington, DC (AKA cesspool of the USA). I can’t believe how they are so pompous in the accusations and are able to accuse with a straight face.
Why shouldnt they be pompous? They’ve scamming us for three generations.
Frankenstein won’t resign. The Dems aren’t going to go the extra mile to force him out. Imo, he won’t get reelected. But, man, that photo…..thing is, those sitting in judgment of him are much worse. Just wait until the Pedophilia scandal breaks wide open….. Pizzagate doesn’t sound so ridiculous now, does it?
If Moore gets elected, Franken is staying put. The Dems will argue they are entitled to their pervert since the Republicans have one of their own
Still waiting to hear on whose behalf those 17 million dollars of payouts were made. We need to know the answer with names before November 6, 18. There are going to be quite a turnover next November. The Democrats have decided to play a very dangerous game before thinking and looking for potential unintended consequences and collateral damage. They are not geniuses at prior planning.
The question I have is about Judge Moore. Some of the information against Moore has been shown now to be fabricated and much of the rest nothing more than moral indignation about what was normal behavior back forty years ago. The voting public appears to have no issue with Moore’s behavior so if no new credible information appears and the public votes in Moore, then why does the Democrat party have an issue? Are democrats now going to act as judge and jury to tell the nation that those voters in Alabama elected the wrong person and that because of their voting choice the entire Republican party is corrupt, misogynistic, and who knows how many other kinds of terrible. Never mind how Democrats have covered for the sins of those in their party for years, why do they think that they get to override the decision of the voters? I will be curious to see how the Moore election and aftermath plays out.
I’m waiting for Trump to tell Franken in a Tweet, “Better put some ice on that.”
It looks like the party of “Hate” is at it again. The only thing they have to run on is Anti-Trump and now anti-sexual abuse. The blue-collar vote in 2016 showed that the Demorat party had lost touch with them, especially hillary. Now they want to take the same group and try to force them into agreeing with this fake outrage over what may be bad manners in most instances but not actual sexual abuse. My God, when I was a young man I can not even imagine the number of times I tried to cop a feel on some sweet girl I took to the movies or to a drive-in. If she said “Stop it” or “No” that was the end of it. But now that would be the beginning of a sexual abuse suit. The blue-collar crowd is not going to join them in their nonsense. That means that all they will run on is women and their fragility. My wife does not like that meme nor do I suspect many others. This shows the weakness of the Demorat party and their pitiful platform.
Today’s democratic party
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UxVASWqJhc
The Democrats are about to get bit in the ass by their own Identity Politics kennel. Tossing treats to War On Women while turning their backs to Black Lives Matter and The Ninety Nine Percent. Growl!
More popcorn please
Have any republicans called for Franken’s resignation?
The feminist cohort deemed Franken nonviable.
Off with his head!
Or, in progressive parlance, there was a Choice and he was Planned to be aborted.
In the days preceding Pro-Choice, the denial of due process ex post facto, including years and decades after the fact (accuracy decays with time and space), would be characterized as a lynching.
I think it is more survival than use against Trump or Moore. It is about saving the seat for a Democrat. Franken would be toast if he ran for reelection and would in all probability give the seat to the Republicans. If he steps down now they can anoint the next Democrat senator while it is safe to do so. Wouldn’t of even been on the table if Minnesota had a Republican Governor.
They can afford to “sacrifice” Franken. Ultralib and complete loon Dem Mark Dayton’s term doesn’t expire until January 2019. S whoever replaces Franken will be as bad or worse.
Same goes with Conyers. He just retired and endorsed his son. Interestingly Conyers’ great nephew, state senator Ian Conyers, announced he intends to run.
Since this is one of those Dem Royal Fiefdoms we can be sure another lib perv named Conyers will inherit the throne. Courtesy of the losers who still vote in Detroit.
I left a few details out. Dayton is the MN governor. He gets to appoint Franken’s replacement.
If Franken ever goes anywhere.