Good Morning!

That’s called “morning rush hour” in Yellowstone…

1. Child services, please! Recalling the scofflaw fool who was kicked in the cajones by a wild horse he was supposed to avoid touching, we have this story in the Washington Post, about a bunch of tourists who defied Yellowstone National Park rules until this happened…

Wow! That’s the gold medal in the Bison Olympics “Little Girl Toss” for sure. She was treated and released, but her parents should be prosecuted. In the category of Rationalization #22, “There are worse things,” here’s a comment on the Post story, flagged by Ann Althouse:

I grew up about an hour outside of Yellowstone and have spent many happy years in the park. I now live on the east coast, but try to go back every few years. Every single time I’m in the park, I see people doing the stupidest, most dangerous things. The last time, I was leaving the Old Faithful Inn after supper and noticed a small herd of bison hanging around. (A very common sight) Not being a complete idiot, I decided to take a different path back to our campground, a path and would not take me near the bison. Then I noticed a man with his small child heading toward the herd. I stopped him and warned that he might want to stay away, particularly with his child. He told me to f-off and kept walking. I watched as he got very close to the first bison and then saw him pick up his child and start to try to put the kid on the back of the bison. A bunch of other people started shouting and I ran for a ranger. Thankfully, the ranger managed to stop the idiot before tragedy. Unusual? Not really!

2.  Can #MeToo survive progressive hypocrisy? Personally, I hope so. Sexual harassment is a massive problem; I keep telling my legal ethics audienbces that the legal profession’s Harvey Weinstein will be exposed any time now, and probably will lead to many Harveys-at-Law. However, the more the movement is weaponized for political expediency, the less credibility it has.

As I noted in yesterday’s warm-up, Al Franken has surfaced (in a New Yorker profile) with regrets about resigning his Senate seat while proving beyond all doubt that he was unqualified to fill it, being a weenie of the first water. This has (I doubt unintentionally) focused unwanted critical attention on one of the worst of the Democratic Presidential candidates, Kirsten Gillibrand, who led the mob of pitchfork and torch-carrying #MeToo-ers to hound Franken out of the Senate (and, conveniently, eliminate a potential rival for the 2020 nomination.) Now she’s spinning like mad. “There is no prize for someone who tries to hold accountable a powerful man who is good at his day job,” she said at a town-hall event this week, responding to Franken’s allegations that he was railroaded.  “But we should have the courage to do it anyway.”

The problem is that the major evidence against Franken was prank photo making light of sexual assualt while he was a comedian (who are supposed to make light of things). The rest were allegations of unwanted touching in various encounters—you know, like Joe Biden has been doing for decades. Gillibrand has been far less vocal about Biden’s handsiness, but still defends running Franken out of the Senate before any of the claims against him had been vetted. My favorite rationalization for ignoring due process that Gillibrand  now wields:  she has argued that Senator Doug Jones, a Democrat, would not have won a special election in Alabama if  Franken had not stepped aside and provided the party with a clear message against the Republican candidate, Roy S. Moore, a state jurist accused of sexually assaulting teenage girls.  In the annals of “the ends justifies the means,” that has to be a classic: if we hadn’t forced a Democratic Senator to resign because of unproven sexual harassment claims, we couldn’t have defeated a ridiculously unqualified candidate who was also accused of statutory rape, even though there is absolutely no evidence that Franken’s fate affected a single vote.

Then we have The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who authored the defense of Franken. Somehow, she managed to argue that Al was convicted without due process, though she was one of the loudest advocates of the collective smear job attempted against Justice Kavanaugh. Mayer quotes Franken friend and fellow comic (and deranged resistance loud mouth) Sarah Silverman on the proposition that the photo-op allegations (Franken was allegedly Biden-like) , if true, were still of a different magnitude than the more serious sexual misconduct that has often been exposed by  #MeToo, saying, “This isn’t Kavanaugh It isn’t Roy Moore.” Writes Mollie Heminway in The Federalist:

This isn’t Kavanaugh? This isn’t Kavanaugh? You’re darn right this isn’t Kavanaugh, in that while there were pictures of Franken’s described behavior, there is no evidence that Kavanaugh had even met his primary accuser, much less that he tried to rape her. There is no evidence whatsoever that he led a serial gang rape cartel that roamed suburban Maryland, as Michael Avenatti and Julie Swetnick accused him of. Neither is there evidence that he had gone on a nationwide rape spree from California to a boat off Rhode Island.

With cynical, corrupt and dishonest friends of #MeToo like Meyer, Silverman and Gillibrand, it doesn’t need enemies.