“Well, that’s good enough, some one has accused him. Get the stake and start the fire…”
This latest grandstanding, dishonest, transparent and irresponsible stunt by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who led the metaphorical lynch mob to force Al Franken to resign from his elected Senate seat, is almost too stupid to bother with. Almost. Unfortunately, some people respect Senators, and think they know something. Thus she is making many members of the public more ignorant than they already are. You know how I hate that. So now she is making me repeat myself. I apologize. I bore myself sometimes. But I have no choice.
“President Trump has committed assault, according to these women, and those are very credible allegations of misconduct and criminal activity, and he should be fully investigated and he should resign,” Gillibrand told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview.
b) “According to these women” does not make what they say true. It simply does not. You—did I mention that you are a witch-hunting disgrace?—showed your respect for fairness when you championed the vendetta of “Mattress Girl,” aka Emma Sulkowiczs, as she pursued a cruel vendetta against a Columbia University student whom she accused of rape and then stalked him all over campus as “performance art.” Eventually an investigation showed no evidence that there was a rape, and Columbia had to pay a financial settlement to her victim for permitting her to proclaim him as a rapist, aided by you, who brought her as a guest to the State of the Union. Columbia doesn’t believe Sulkowiczs was raped, and her accusation has been thoroughly discredited. You believed her, just as you believe Franken’s and Trump’s accusers, because you are a sexist, anti-male bigot who believes women should be able to destroy lives and careers with mere accusations.
c). “He should be fully investigated and he should resign,” apparently regardless of what the investigation shows. This is a Senator who doesn’t believe in due process or fairness.
Now comes the repetitious part.
The Trump situation is not like Franken’s. Franken was elected by voters who did not know about any of the allegations that surfaced last month. That at least makes resignation plausibly just. However, nothing has been added to the allegations against Trump that voters heard about ad nauseum in the last months of the campaign. He was elected anyway, just as Bill Clinton was elected despite his known infidelities, Ted Kennedy was elected despite causing a girl to drown, and if he’s elected, just as Roy Moore will have won his seat with voters knowing that he has been credibly accused of being a pervert. When that happens, no one can argue that an elected official should resign because of conduct known to the voters who elected him. This is no more nor less than attempting to overturn a lawful election, admittedly a near full time pursuit for Democrats where President Trump is concerned.
Now I’m going to re-publish what I wrote here just three days ago. Will somebody please read it to the Senator, please? It involves Gillebrand’s theory…
“Very interesting theory, but you overlook one very important point! Is stupid. Is most stupid theory I ever heard!” –Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers) in “Murder by Death.” by Neil Simon
That theory, which I have now heard others raise, and that I sniffed out a few days ago, is the Democrat/progressive fantasy that if they make every member of Congress who has been accused of sexual misconduct resign, they have a new and powerful means to try to force President Trump out of office.
They need a new and powerful theory, because the Emoluments Claus (Santa’s inscrutable younger brother) is a non-starter, the 25th Amendment doesn’t apply, the Russian investigation is not finding any high crimes and misdemeanors (just sleazy Trump team members), the “obstruction of justice” theory is risible, and a desperate and thin impeachment resolution put forth by the Congressional Black Caucus just lost 368-58. This one is that if they establish that allegations of past sexual misconduct without due process, admission of guilt or evidence mandates high elected officials resigning (as Bill Clinton did not, but he’s going to be retroactively forced to resign in an alternate universe, or something, thus cleansing Democrats, feminists and the complicit news media of their cynical hypocrisy and altering the present by changing the past, like in “The Terminator” or “Back to the Future”), President Trump will be forced to resign because of the Access Hollywood tape and his alleged accusers.
Not that this is more ridiculous than many of the other ways the Democrats and “the resistance” have plotted to overturn the election results they promised to respect when they assumed they would win, but it’s still indefensible. Voters decided, wrongly or not, that they didn’t care about this, all of which they knew about before they elected Trump. None of the alleged misconduct occurred while the President was in office (unlike in the cases of Clinton, Franken, Conyers, Packwood and Franks) nor are they only recently disclosed allegations of pre-election misconduct that were not known to voters before the official in question was elected (as in the cases of Franken and Clinton). None of the elected officials who have resigned are analogous to the President.
Are journalists, pundits and the Democratic plotters really so dim that they can’t see this, or are they just trying to bluff through—again—an intellectually dishonest anti-Trump theory? I guess Hanlon’s Razor applies: stupidity over malice.
I know I have mentioned this already here and there, but please etch it on your brain so you can tell your Facebook friends who espouse the “If Franken must go, so must Trump” theory that they are embarrassing themselves, because they are.
The Democrats have a duly elected Representative from Florida, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, in fact, by the name of Alcee Hastings. He’s been representing Florida’s 20th congressional district, serving in Congress since 1993,—that’s 24 years. He was elected after he was impeached as a Federal judge by the Democrat majority U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 413–3, and then convicted by the Senate, becoming only the sixth Federal judge to be so removed from office. Knowing all of this, the 2oth elected him to Congress. He is the Democratic Roy Moore, except that Moore just defied the law, while Hastings broke it to line his own pockets, as a federal judge. (Hasting was acquitted in his trial, because co-conspirator, William Borders, refused to testify, going to jail instead. (Then President Clinton pardoned Borders. Isn’t this a nice story?)
If you don’t think a judge taking bribes is more serious by far than imposing a sloppy kiss on an unconsenting colleague as Franken was accused of, you have some strange values or you are Kirsten Gillibrand. Why, then, is nobody calling for Hastings’ resignation? It is because his misconduct was known by voters when he ran the first time, and every time since, exactly as the allegations against Trump were known a year ago.
She doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Anyone who echoes her is making a fool of themselves.
Ethics Alarms 
This is so depressing. What could have become a watershed for women, workplace ethics and anti-sexual harassment in the workplace, has become, BECAUSE OF WOMEN, simply a witch hunt which requires “due process,” etc., etc., ad nauseum. Of course this has become the university approach to “right wrongs” against female students, where the accuser has totally different rights than the accused. God help us: we’re taking our lead from the Ivy League?
I mentioned in an earlier thread that I’ve heard Sen. Gillibrand opine that President Clinton should have left office, without a word as to the perjury that was at the bottom of the impeachment charges against him. I think Gillibrand’s grandstanding with “Mattress Girl” at the State of the Union and recent blusterings reveal her to be the closest thing we’ve seen to Joseph McCarthy since McCarthy himself.
She’s just spouting Democratic Party talking points. This has all been orchestrated as a follow on to the Franken thing last week where, guess what, sixteen female Senators signed a letter. We’ll just have to let this little drama play itself out. Next will be op-eds from all the usual suspects that have been provided to them in press releases generated by the DNC or the Clintonistas. I’m sure there’s at least two more weeks worth of scripts already in the pipeline.
Can one assert that the congresswoman must resign because she has violated her oath of office to preserve and defend the Constitution insofar as she declares an individual guilty without any due process? Theoretically, she is attempting to usurp powers of the judiciary by acting as judge, jury and executioner.
This woman is regarded as a serious contender for the 2020 Presidential nomination. Yes, Democrats are that desperate.a) No, you witch-hunting disgrace for a public servant, President Trump has NOT committed sexual assault, just as Clarence Thomas and Al Franken did not commit sexual harassment. Some women say he did, and that is called an allegation and an unsubstantiated accusation, since the President denies it. It is a lie to say, on TV or anywhere, “President Trump has committed assault.” You have no way of knowing that.
I think I know your answer to this, but would it be a lie to say “Bill Clinton has committed assault?”
Nobody can say that but Bill and the accusers. Bill’s most serious alleged assaults, with Willey and the rape, would be criminal if proven. I think its overwhelmingly likely that Bill is guilty, just as I think its overwhelmingly likely that Trump engaged in far less serious, non-criminal sexual misconduct. But yes, it’s a lie to assert as a fact that he did it. As an opinion, fine. But nobody should be punished based on an opinion.
None of the articles of impeachment against Clinton involved sexual misconduct.
Bill’s most serious alleged assaults, with Willey and the rape, would be criminal if proven. I think its overwhelmingly likely that Bill is guilty, just as I think its overwhelmingly likely that Trump engaged in far less serious, non-criminal sexual misconduct.
Why do you not think it is likely that Trump is guilty of sexual assault, as several women have accused him of?
“I think its overwhelmingly likely that Bill is guilty, just as I think its overwhelmingly likely that Trump engaged in far less serious, non-criminal sexual misconduct.”
I said I think Trump is probably guilty. But he’s a harasser, a rich spoiled kid used to women giving in to him because of his money. I think Clinton is pathological. But that’s just from observation.
The one serious, potentially criminal allegation smells bad to me, and seems like a shakedown. These women all came out during the election, to support Hillary. It has an Anita Hill feel to it. I would not be surprised if some or many were phonies.
Part of the same script Gillebrand is reading from and following. Very coordinated.
I think both of them are pigs in their personal lives, and I think the fact both were elected despite that speaks volumes of the two major political parties and the American voter. The parties are just both cynical entities looking to capture political advantage, by hook or by crook, and I don’t blame them for using every cynical trick in the book to do it. It looks terrible that both the party of family values and the party that supposedly champions women against oafish behavior by men are obvious hypocrites.
However, it looks worse that the American public, or some portion of it, is either selectively or generally looking the other way both on this cynicism and on the underlying rotten behavior. The fact of the matter is that personal honor and the social issues that often flow from acting in a personally honorable or dishonorable manner are just not that high on the list of important things for Americans. The Clinton days just brought this out in the open, as the White House and his enablers told the American people at length that character didn’t count…and the American people bought it, hook, line and sinker. The fact is we just aren’t comfortable with our personal lives being looked at too closely and judged. We haven’t been for probably 40 years. The days of gossipy cocktail hours and tea parties being where reputations were made or broken as everybody knew everybody’s business and was quick to judge anyone who broke the rules are over. This isn’t the village Ukraine, where talking to someone not of the Pale could lead to a fight, or 19th-century Sicily, where an affair could be punished with death, and, more to the point, both would lead to shunning by the community at large.
These days, until recently, America didn’t give a damn about the goings-on in DC or Hollywood, at least partly because it doesn’t give a damn about what goes on at home. No one gives a damn that Hugh Hefner regularly screwed younger women or that Anna Nicole Smith married a much older man and carefully gathered up his money after he expired, because they all know some old guy who’s buying love from a much younger woman and buying Viagra. No one gives a damn about Hollywood execs slamming actresses and giving out favors in return, because we all know that lawyer doesn’t only hire hot associates and that doctor doesn’t hire only good-looking office staff because they are all talented. No one gives a damn about high profile people having messy personal lives because messy personal lives are all too common now. My dad was married to my mom 47 years, from his getting out of the US Navy to her death, and they were together 5 years before that. My uncle is with my aunt 50 years and then some married, and together since they were both 16, in high school in a small town in northern NJ. Her heart never went yonder when he was in South Korea for 2 years, and he never sought to fool around on the side. However, my cousin went through two live-in relationships before he finally found his wife, and when he entered local politics he firmly refused to discuss his home life. My brother slammed at least three other women before he finally married my sister-in-law (both of them in their 30s) and just laughs at the idea of anyone judging anyone else on their decision as to what to do behind closed doors.
Interestingly, a lot of the people I know who are apoplectic about Trump’s disgraceful rich-kid antics are the same people who, twenty years ago were defending Bill Clinton to the hilt. We’re a nation of hypocrites and partisans, and it’s time we faced up to that fact.
And once a critical mass of people decide that character does not matter, it is nigh impossible to make character matter again.
Nothing is more effective in undermining standards than double standards.
CNN calls this a “drumbeat.” Hah. Rhythm sections are usually part of an orchestra led by a conductor where all the players are reading from their respective scores.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/11/politics/female-democrats-send-letter-trump-investigation/index.html
Today’s installment.