I totally disagree in this instance. She didn't still work with him, she never interacted with him again, they were no longer in each other's spheres outside of that one USO trip as far as we all know. She had no professional reason to feel a need to retweet that specific photo - there was a photographer on the trip, we know this, so we know there were a bunch of photos.

She said in the video she balled up her fists every time she thought of him... But, we know she also tweeted out a picture of them on stage together. This is very different than, "Why did you keep working with him? Why did you take so long? Why did you smile at him in the hallway?"

I think it's fair to ask, "Why did you voluntarily tweet out a photo of you two together five years after the fact, when you say you got angry every time you saw him/thought of him?"

Now, her answer to that could be something like, "I figured if this photo helped my career more than another one, I might as well use it," or.. "I don't know, I wasn't thinking about it that day."

Those are fine answers, and they don't mean her allegations aren't 100% true, but it's a fair question to ask.

I'm going to bite my tongue for the most part, but this is way out of line. There are a bunch of things I take issue with, but in particular, "it will remove our ability to call for a judgement to be made at some unspecified time when we get 'more evidence' and we might be obligated to take action sooner rather than way later, if we get around to it," is absurd.

I said let's wait to call for his resignation until the ethics investigation or until another accuser comes forward (and no, I'm sorry, calling to argue politics - and specifically OMB budget figures - is not sexual harassment). That's not an unspecified time. That's a specified time. We know people who engage in predatory behavior tend to be habitual, so if nobody else comes forward with credible allegations, I think waiting to hear what the investigation into the incident reveals is totally reasonable.

There should be a big difference in how we react to people with one accuser and with multiple accusers, in my opinion.

We're not electing him President, building him a statue, or worshipping him in the mean time. We're dragging him over the coals and discussing his morality and character. If nothing is changed by the time the investigation is over, which I assume in this instance will be reasonably quickly, we can still call for his resignation, and end his political career. If we force him out now and something else emerges, his political career is already effectively over.

Your view seems to be anyone in Congress accused by one person should be immediately forced to resign, no questions asked. My view is if it's one person, we can wait at least a few days, or a reasonable amount of time for the ethics investigation (a couple weeks? a month?), and see what we learn. If it's unchanged, by all means, he should resign.

I'm also inclined to follow the lead of high-ranking women in the party, who seem to be taking a similar approach of running this through the ethics committee.

There's some reasonable place in society for how we handle this in between the way it's been in the past and immediately carrying out swift, career-ending punishment before we hear anything beyond the initial allegation and an initial statement.

She was 34 at the time.

I don't think we should consider it choking down that jagged pill. It's a principle. Celebrate it. It's good to have them.

So I don't think we ask Franken to resign reluctantly. It's an obligation. If you do wrong and your political opponents exploit it, that's still on you. I can sense the whole "but we really don't want to give into a right wing smear campaign here!" but ffs, Franken writes himself the photo is prima facie creepshow stuff and he understands why everyone is disgusted. If I took the same picture with a coworker, I'd probably be fired.

It's not a smear campaign when you admit guilt. Or it might be both. I suppose we could be saying, well, Franken did wrong but the right is exaggerating the extent of the wrongdoing? OK? This is the hill we want to die on?

If we think a good life principle is to believe women when they report harassment and assault, fancifully dreaming up a huge conspiracy to retroactively get Franken to do wrong but then aggrandize into worse later is...a pretty tepid conspiracy.

As for the practical political concerns, you can't win every political battle and most importantly, WHY do we want to win this one? To protect...Al Franken's sacred honor? To protect a seat that will wind up with qualitatively ~the same votes once Dayton replaces him with a Democrat? To protect Al Franken's Presidential aspirations?

Both as a matter of principle AND as a matter of practical political concerns, this one fails. It's not really a jagged pill. It's a pretty easy snap decision.

The ONE AND ONLY like argument here is "well, if we start giving right-wingers the power to hypocritically weaponize our virtues against us, we're not all angels, we'll never win!" but newsflash, the right wingers like Hannity and Fox News pundits and deplorables don't ****ing care what any of us do and say, they will insincerely and unscrupulously criticize any liberal or leftist with no genuine emotion or underlying principle regardless.

That cuts both ways. If they are yapping about this pretend scandal or that hypocritically enforced principle, you can absolutely go tell the right wingers to **** off. The principle isn't "the right wingers are always wrong" although they're always wrong. It's that we don't turn our moral and political agency over to them. Reflexively defending Franken (even when he admits he did wrong!) is exactly that. It lets them control the terms of the debate and lets them keep your head spinning, looking ridiculous in the process.

Don't play the game. Have principles, have norms, have virtues. Don't let them goad you into pretend virtues, sure (e.g., the canonical "don't be mean to racists" is THEIR principle, not ours, you don't have to genuflect to that one.) That's obvious. Be on the look out for that.

But "don't pull from the patriarchal grabbag of garbage talking points when a woman accuses a guy of sexual harassment/assault" and "believe women when they accuse someone of sexual harassment and assault unless you know they are lying" IS OUR DEARLY HELD PRINCIPLE, or should be. Don't let the right wing make you ABANDON that principle simply because Sean Hannity is yapping.

In the end then I implore the whole "sure we would like to enforce our norms against Franken but for the existence of insincere *******s on the right" to actually think deeply, critically about what power is and how it gets exercised. Taking a stand defending Franken from Sean Hannity and Roger Stone's hypocritical, insincere political punditry is not demonstrative of our moral and political agency against them. It's actually genuflecting to them. Getting us to embrace all the garbage right-wing talking points about how to deal with women who sexually harass women ("she MIGHT be lying? She was in Playboy! We need a length investigation!") IS them flexing their political will on the situation. They win when you give into those impulses simply to stand up to them.

Know the right way to behave. Know what you think and why you think it. Understand your principles and why you have them. Then, seriously, this becomes *easy*. It really does. Then we don't need our finger on the Sean Hannity Scales to determine our response; we're not saying "well, if Hannity does this, then we must, but if he stays silent, then we could..." **** all that. It's a fools errand.

But the tl;dr summary here is that the photo is basically prima facie evidence to have Franken resign and end his political career and therefore there's not much to discuss; and any fretting about our behavior in the context of the Hannity Stone cabal gives them everything they need to make America a garbage society, so don't do that either.

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Gonna be copypasting this one alot, I can see.

There's no good reason to disbelieve Leeann Tweeden's story, the photo is bad/firable and Franken admits we can all rightfully be disgusted. Investigations often victimize the accuser for no good reason and this is the perfect, just the perfect example of why. Al Franken literally writes this:

AND STILL we're like, fire up the investigations?

There's no good reason to disbelieve Leeann Tweeden here and Franken admits he's a creep anyway. That Franken admits he's a creep and took advantage of her and violated her is a GOOD REASON to believe the totality of Leeann Tweeden's story. This is literally the canonical example of why America is a wretched **** show of sexual harassment. There are almost no sequence of events that won't have the accused and their defenders diving for some, any plausible deniability and demanding we all withhold judgement even when there's no good reason to bother with the conversation and withhold judgement.

Woman: this man is a creep and hurt me
Man: I did most of what she said and I am deeply sorry and I support an investigation before I face any consequences
Rabble Rabble: just common sense wisdom of that man there, we can't take these accusations on their face

In before some new ad hoc, hand-crafted-at-the-point-of-sale justification that we scale the need to believe women by the number of women claiming to be sexually harassed as if that was always what we thought.

"Believe Women!®" (unspoken: but only if there's a lot of them! Gotta prove he's a habitual creep!)

If you want him to resign over the picture alone, that's a different story all together in terms of principles. Like, if you think that rises to the level of resignation than my last post is kind of arguing past you, thinking you're calling for his resignation specifically over the allegation about the rehearsal, but without thinking the picture alone is worth a resignation.

To me the picture is distasteful and stupid, but I'm not sure that's worth resigning over... I'd like to live in a world where any member of Congress would resign over that, and we'd never elect anyone who had behaved that way as an adult, but it's foolish to think that's the world we're in.

We live in a world where the President bragged about grabbing 'em by the hoohaa, had like 16 accusers with regard to sexual assault and still won, Kid Rock is seriously pondering a Senate run, The Rock is rumored to be a potential POTUS candidate in 2020, and Roy Moore is on the verge of winning a Senate seat as a serial pedophile.

I don't know about dying on the hill... but there are two dynamics here in terms of the smear campaign:

1. The false equivalency that Franken kissing her is as bad as Moore serially molesting/pursuing 14-18 year olds as a 30-something, or is as bad as the accusations against Trump.

2. Whatever happens to Franken, let's be clear here. The left is arguing over whether he should resign now or see what happens in the ethics investigation, then likely resign. The right elected Trump in the primary and the general, is supporting Moore's candidacy at multiple levels (while allowing it at others), and is calling for Franken's head.

There's a difference in dreaming up a conspiracy theory and saying, "Okay, he's saying he remembers it differently and welcoming an ethics investigation... Let's see what comes to light. The initial accusation looks bad, but she is the only accuser, so let's pause for a minute and see: a) how Franken claims to remember it and b) whether there is any corroborating evidence/testimony. If not, he should resign."

He's one of the best and most powerful Democrats in terms of messaging, and they suck at messaging. He's also very good at taking good lines of questioning in hearings, and that's also been a weakness (although a few have improved recently).

I'd consider any Presidential aspirations totally shot now, regardless of how this plays out. But I do consider Franken in that seat to be more valuable to the party than a random Dem in that seat. Whether that's worth fighting over? Probably not, I dunno...

I think waiting a couple weeks to burn him at the stake, in case there are more facts, is just the right thing to do as a matter of principle.

In terms of my personal principles, believe women when they accuse someone is one, but so is not rushing to judgment if there is potentially evidence/testimony that could exonerate the person. He did say he doesn't remember it the same way, so I think he has a right to testify in front of the ethics committee.

I think it's telling that the argument on the left is between those who want him to resign now and those that are basically saying, "I want to hear what comes out in this investigation, but if nothing changes, he should resign."

We have principles, we're using them. They don't HAVE to include a rush to judgment.

Dvaut1, you're a smart guy and I agree with many of your positions, but you can make your points without being such a giant douchecanoe.

"Be nice to people on the internet making bad arguments" is your principle, not mine.

I think having personal virtues and principles are good. I admire people who say stuff like "believe women automatically", even though this is far from the mainstream view, because I recognize they are doing so to correct a huge injustice which has existed for centuries.

I also like to point out that by doing this, by "going high when they go low", it probably transfers political power to some very bad people. Franken resigns, the GOP gains 0.25 or so expected Senate seats. Youre gonna have a much easier time stopping Al Franken than Roy Moore.

I actually can't decide if the principles are worth the sacrifice, but I often get the feeling that people getting zealous about the former don't even think about the latter.

If, ignoring the accusation, you think the photo is worthy of resignation, then that's a valid opinion. I think it would be if he did it as a Senator, and I'm not quite sure how we should handle a comedian doing it.

There seems to be a rush to group him into the list with Spacey, Weinstein, Louis CK, Trump and Moore. This photo isn't on that level of creepiness/assault.

Like, let's say he never became a Senator and that photo came out, he'd still have a career in comedy, right? Comedians tend to get a lot of leeway for attempted jokes that were in poor taste. He didn't touch her in that photo, either. So does a current Senator get held to a Senators' standards for behavior while he was a comedian? That's complex, and this falls into a gray area for me. If he touched her, resign/expel. If the kiss story is true, resign/expel. If he can't offer any proof/evidence to make us doubt the kiss story, resign/expel.

He says he remembers it differently, so if the photo doesn't rise to the level of resignation (which I think is a valid view), shouldn't he get to at least have a chance to tell the public what he remembers, and/or offer proof?

If it's not very strong (witnesses, accounts from people on other USO shows, perhaps even a copy of the script), he should resign or be expelled. I don't see what we gain from calling for that today instead of after he tells us what he remembers.

FWIW I considered exactly this question in post 303, maybe you didn't read it.

It's the same person smdh ffs, how do you even 'resign' as a comedian!?

Your brain is rotted on this man, listen to yourself. Al Franken Creep Comedian shouldn't have the sins of the past transported onto Al Franken, Senator? Oh we shouldn't judge Roy Moore 30 year old attorney harshly, Roy Moore the Judge and Prospective Senator deserves the benefit of the doubt.

His memory is going to IMPROVE now, somehow?

This is just "I'm waiting for all the evidence to come in before acting, let me know when we get there." You guys are just Roy Moore apologists. No different. Waiting for evidence you know can never satisfactorily prove the thing you're insisting must be proven before anyone can act.

Read the post. I think my point is pretty clear. Senators and comedians are held to different standards for acceptable behavior in their field.

If he took that photo last year, as a Senator, he should immediately resign - and if he refused, he should be expelled.

If that photo came to light two weeks later in 2006, before he ran for office, he would likely be given a lot of leeway for a poor attempt at humor as a comedian. Obviously you don't resign as a comedian, I don't think I ever said that. The fallout for unacceptable behavior is like what Louis CK will now deal with - he'll lose his deals for shows/movies, he won't be able to sell tickets to performances, etc...

Holding Franken to his current set of standards for behavior that took place before he ran for office is a complex problem. I assume he said things as a comedian that we would find unacceptable for a politician. I'm too young to be familiar with most of his stuff... But another example of a current celebrity who could run for office is The Rock. Is he disqualified for dropping F bombs left and right on social media?

Again, I'm addressing the photo here, not the other allegations. If you accept the premise that people in careers with very different standards of acceptable language/behavior, primarily comedians/actors, should not be precluded from holding office based on most of that behavior, then it's a complex issue.

I think the clear answer is that some of it should be accepted, but some of it should not. To me, that photo is not over the "resignation line" given what his job was at the time. It's close, it's arguable, but I don't think it's quite there.

I don't know if it's right or wrong to hold people to different standards based on their past careers, but I think it's necessary if we're going to accept a world where celebrities run for high office - and we're already there.

Ad hoc, hand-crafted-at-the-point-of-sale justification: Sexual harassment and assault scales by the profession.

"Believe Women!®" (unspoken: but it kinda depends on the context of what kind of line of work they're in)

Remember when we were all like "Yeah well New York game show host real estate guys, they're brash, locker room talk, grab em by the pussy is fine for that sector."

No wait, sorry. That was utterly deplorable morons.

Oops. Nope I missed that and I blame Tapatalk. Sorry.

I won't defend Franken here. Can't lie, I almost wanted to make a comment about "well ACTUALLY his hand wasn't touching her", then realized that's a ridiculous MRA type hill to die on.

I get really nervous about ditching due process, and all the bad things that could lead to. I really think we should treat that as a big deal.

But in this particular case, ya I won't shed any tears over Franken losing his Senate seat. With that in mind, I'll probably stop arguing in this thread.

Right wingers: left wingers weaponize their pretend sexual harassment concerns against our creeps
Left wingers: right wingers weaponize our pretend sexual harassment virtues against our creeps

American 2017, what a time to be alive

You must have edited while I typed, so...

That's an absurd comparison. You're setting up the false equivalencies for the alt-right now?

What percentage of comedians have said something in a standup routine that would disqualify a non-comedian from holding public office? 80%? 95%?

I'm talking about the picture, specifically, and if you can't see that a comedian would have a different standard of acceptable behavior than a DA, I don't know what to tell you.

He hasn't stated what his memory of the event is. So, his memory is going to be told at some point soon, I'd imagine? If he chooses not to, he's obviously guilty and should be resigned/expelled. He didn't say he doesn't remember it, he said he doesn't remember it the same way she does.

This is totally different from the Roy Moore situation. One accuser vs. eight (or are there more now?), totally different allegations, and a situation where there may actually be evidence versus one where there obviously won't be. Also one has an election in under a month, and one does not.

Also, I think there's a clear difference in motive. I don't see those of us saying let's see what he has to say are trying to find any possible spin to let him keep his job... Most of us, from what I see, are still saying, "Yeah, he's probably going to have to resign." In the Moore case, the people using "Let's see the evidence," arguments know there isn't going to be any and have no interest in ever holding him accountable. That's another big difference.

Franken's statement basically says he remembers the skit rehearsal differently than Leeann Tweeden. There are key questions that can be answered that will make it pretty clear what went down IMO, so I see nothing wrong with waiting for that to take place.

Like I said, if nothing else comes to light, he should resign or be expelled. I don't think waiting to call for that makes anyone a bad person.

Wait, what? Are you arguing the picture of Franken pretending to (or actually?) groping Tweeden was part of the act? Louis CK the guy who joked about jerking off inappropriately was not license for Louis CK to jerk off in front of women inappropriately. Bill Cosby doing a bit about Spanish Fleas was not license to drug and rape women.

If not, what the **** are you talking about here?

What's holding him back?

"Hey look guys, I'm not excusing Franken at all! I'm just imagining reasons he might have to plausibly deny this but which he hasn't yet communicated. No judgement until the man speaks. He has to do it on his terms when he's good and ready or else you have harassed him with a rush to judgement, UNFAIR witch hunt style behavior"

Just trying to keep the thread civil with decent discussion, unlike that disaster of a vietnam thread filled with personal attacks.

You're twisting my words and changing the context, but I guess it makes you feel smart and righteous, so good for you. If you're not willing to acknowledge that what is considered acceptable for comedians is quite different than what's acceptable for the rest of society or for politicians, and what is considered the normal course of action for dealing with a misstep is also quite different, I don't know what to tell you.

That's not a defense of sexual assault, it's an acknowledgment that a joke gone wrong can come off very bad, and usually society accepts an apology and moves on instead of burning comedians at the stake. Larry David on SNL recently would be one example. If a sitting member of Congress made a Holocaust joke, we'd want them to resign, right? Ignoring his age and complete lack of interest, is Larry David disqualified now from running for office? If not, then that's an acknowledgement that there should be some gray area on the standards before/after taking public office.

I think that applies to the photo. It doesn't apply to the coerced kiss, but he says he remembers it differently and we should be able to have a pretty quick process to get to the bottom of that. What's the problem with that?

Right. "Be nice to people on the internet making bad arguments" is your principle, not mine.

Part of the official act? No, obviously not. A comedian trying to get a laugh for a group of people on the plane? Yes.

I have no idea what's holding him back. The possibilities range from not wanting to attack an accuser and a desire to set an example that we as a society shouldn't do that even when we are innocent to trying to concoct a bull**** story to save his ass.

I suspect we'll be able to figure it out pretty quickly when he speaks.

What's it been? ~14-16 hours? But I'm guilty of letting him wait as long as he wants until he's good and ready? Give me a break.

Are you for real? Al Franken, Comedian gets to take the act on the road with him as a perpetual state of his and his co-workers being, just a property of them on and off stage, and he can subject performers to his jokes WHILE THEY SLEEP in ways Al Franken admits are disgusting? That's like the context I don't appreciate?

For all the fretting about Sean Hannity and Roger Stone gaming this situation, I'm surprised how much leeway Franken gets to take his sweet time explaining himself and ask for investigations. No potential unscrupulous strategizing there. No potentially political gamesmanship there. No way he can't use that time to obfuscate and circle the wagons and hope the political firestorm dies down.

Democrats have to be on guard for how our principles can be used against us, like "Believe Women." Give Sean Hannity an inch and he'll take a mile.

But ham-handed allusions to civic virtues like innocent until proven absolutely guilty of everything, everyone getting their day in court and have their conduct investigated is a normative principle we always, deeply respect, no questions asked. No way that principle can be leveraged unscrupulously.

I'd say that if the photo had come to light in 2006 then there'd be ~0% he'd be a senator now. It would have disqualified him from being a senator then but he could have still been a comedian or political radio host.

Curious, do you get the other side of this argument at all? Do you understand that "hearing both sides" is very deeply ingrained in most people who've taken a civics class in america? Do you see why this is an attitude that probably has more upside than downside, even though the downsides are pretty ugly sometimes?