Are Democrats As Rigid About Sexual Assault As Republicans?

I resubscribed to the Washington Post so I could read the comments and write some. As I read the comments on WashPo's top 15 candidates for president in 2020, what frightened me was the amount of venom in comments directed at Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). The toxic comments were made by men, mostly, but I've seen the same fury at Gillibrand from women on the "We the People" website angry at Gillibrand for forcing Sen. Al Franken (D-MN for another couple of days) to resign. He's resigning effective January 2nd, 2018, but Gillibrand wasn't the only one to force Franken out of the Senate. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) also wanted Franken out. So did many other senators.

Never mind the fact that eight women accused Franken of sexual assault. Believe me, I wasn't happy about it either! I'd just finished Franken's new book, "Al Franken, Giant of the Senate." I'd given his campaign at least $30. I'd read "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big, Fat Idiot and Other Observations." I remember him taking a nap, years ago, when he got the news from an aide that Fox News was suing him for his book "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."

"Good," he said, and went back to sleep. He was right. The lawsuit, which Fox News lost, accompanied by advice from Judge Chin to "learn how to take a joke," helped his book sales soar to #1 on Amazon's best-seller list.

Franken was funny. I looked askance at his rape jokes, especially his detailed joke about raping Leslie Stahl, and wondered if I should support him when he first ran for the Senate. I didn't send him any money. I had my doubts. He only won by 225 votes according to CNN or 312 votes according to Wikipedia. A close one, but he won.

Franken was great at raising money. He sent $1,500 to Abby Finkenauer, a Democrat running against First District Congressman Rod Blum, a millionaire who just voted for the Republican tax transfer of wealth from the working poor and the middle class to corporations and the richest of the rich. Abby Finkenauer donated Franken's $1,500 campaign donation to Riverside Center, a refuge for sexual abuse survivors.

So who should we be mad at? Al Franken, who betrayed a number of women, we'll never know how many, by pulling them close for photo ops, and then cupping their breast or grabbing them by the buttock? Or in the case of Leeann Tweeden, worse than that? Or Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand who blew the whistle on Franken and insisted he resign?

One WashPo commenter wrote that he hoped a woman would be POTUS "in my lifetime," but just not THIS woman (Gillibrand) or THAT woman (Sen. Elizabeth Warren). In 2016 Bernie Bros and Sisses just couldn't vote for Hillary Clinton. They hoped a woman would be POTUS in their lifetimes, but not THAT woman. And we got Trump instead, a man who bragged on the Hollywood Access tape that he kissed women without asking and grabbed them by the genitals. He was elected.

The Women's March on January 21, 2017, the day after Trump's inauguration, was the first wave of the backlash (2.6 million women, mostly, globally). The #MeToo movement was the second wave. Then prominent alleged sexual harassers and sexual assaulters started to go down, started to lose their jobs, lose their positions in society, lose their reputations, and lose everything they'd worked for except the money they'd already accumulated: Harvey Weinstein of Hollywood, Charlie Rose of CBS and PBS, Tom Ashbrook of NPR, a top or the top executive of NPR, Matt Lauer of NBC, Russell Simmons, co-founder of hip-hop company Def-Jam and other companies; Sen. Al Franken; former Rep. John Conyers (D-Detroit, Michigan); and interestingly, some Democrats are taking another look at former Pres. Bill Clinton and the women he had sexual relations with and were slut-shamed for it to save Bill Clinton's presidency.

One step forward and two steps backward. So what do a lot of Democrats in denial do? They don't blame the assaulter. They blame the messenger. They shoot the messenger. They say that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) must not be president. They say it's all her fault that Sen. Al Franken is no longer senator. He, good Democrat and funny man that he is, had nothing to do with it. There should have been an ethics hearing. The fact that ethics hearings rarely, if ever, come up with a conviction is beside the point.