The Blatant Democratic Hypocrisy on Sexual Misconduct
If you don’t apply your principles consistently, you don’t have principles at all…
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/the-blatant-democratic-hypocrisy-on-sexual-misconduct
Here’s something that shouldn’t need saying: if you claim to oppose some kind of conduct, but modify your stance on it based on whether the person who is engaging in it is a member of your political party, people will probably not believe that you are very sincere in your convictions. The test for whether you’re actually principled is whether you are consistent. If someone condemns George W. Bush for some act, but defends it when Barack Obama does it, they don’t really care about the act itself. Likewise, one’s response to sexual misconduct by Democrats has to be the same as it would be to sexual misconduct by Republicans.
Garrison Keillor has just written a column in the Washington Post entitled “Al Franken should resign? That’s absurd.” Keillor favorably quotes his pastor, who cautioned against “[judging] past actions by present standards and with a benefit of hindsight that is, morally, highly questionable.” Keillor then meanders a bit about renaming lakes, before getting to his defense of Franken:
[Franken] did USO tours overseas when he was in the comedy biz. He did it from deep in his heart, out of patriotism, and the show he did was broad comedy of a sort that goes back to the Middle Ages. Shakespeare used those jokes now and then, and so did Bob Hope and Joey Heatherton when they entertained the troops. If you thought that Al stood outdoors at bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and told stories about small-town life in the Midwest, you were wrong. On the flight home, in a spirit of low comedy, Al ogled Miss Tweeden and pretended to grab her and a picture was taken. Eleven years later, a talk show host in LA, she goes public, and there is talk of resignation. This is pure absurdity, and the atrocity it leads to is a code of public deadliness. No kidding.
Question #1 here is this: if we were talking about Ted Cruz instead of Al Franken, would Keillor be presenting the facts this way? Would he be praising Cruz’s deep patriotism? Would he have called it “absurdity” and an “atrocity” to even “talk of resignation,” and suggested that we were just applying unfair moral judgments to old fashioned Shakespearean bawdiness? Unless Keillor’s judgment would be exactly the same, given the same set of facts, nothing Keillor says can be taken as sincere.
Actually, Keillor’s defense of Franken is somewhat stunning in its dishonesty. He suggests Franken is a decent man victimized by the retrospective application of unreasonable moral standards. Now, we can suspect, but we can’t actually prove, that he wouldn’t write the same editorial about a neoconservative. But what we can prove is that Keillor’s defense requires him to ignore the actual facts of the case: he only mentions one of the allegations against Franken. He does not mention that Franken has been accused of being a serial butt-grabber, who touched multiple women inappropriately when they took photos with him. Nor does he relate the details of what “Miss” Tweeden actually said happened: that he deliberately wrote material that would force her to let him kiss her, and then “came at me, put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.” Keillor’s argument is that Tweeden was simply too much of a stuck-up Puritan to appreciate old-fashioned Shakespearean humor, but he’s only able to say that by lying and saying that her problem was with “jokes” rather than with being french-kissed against her will.
But we might expect this from Garrison Keillor, who has a long record of ugly public statements. I began to dislike him when he called Keith Ellison a “lackluster black Muslim” as if the words “black” and “Muslim” were pejoratives. And Keillor has actually demonstrated even more blatant moral double-standards: despite having been married three times himself, he once suggested that flamboyant gay people were undermining wholesome American monogamy:
Under the old monogamous system, we didn’t have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck…. And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it…. The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men—sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control.
Keillor, however, is not the only Democrat defending Franken. Another Washington Post contributor literally suggested that a greater amount of leeway should be granted for Franken’s behavior because he is a Democrat and Democrats stand for women’s interests. I find this argument somewhat peculiar, because if anything I am even more revolted by people (like Harvey Weinstein) who publicly profess their feminism and use it as a way of deflecting attention from their bad acts. Which one is worse: a sexual harasser who openly says they don’t understand the problem with sexual harassment, or the one who says they deplore sexual harassment and care deeply about women? The harm caused by each may be equal, but when measuring culpability, the harshest judgments should fall on those who understand just how wrong their conduct is and do it anyway. (By the way, if you want to see Democrat after Democrat making excuses, look in the comments sections of Franken articles in liberal newspapers, which almost entirely consist of What about Roy Moore? reposted dozens of times.)
Al Franken’s own responses to the accusations are what convinced me he ought to be hounded from office. His initial apology to Tweeden was so bitter and brief that he was swiftly forced to issue another. (“I certainly don’t remember the rehearsal for the skit in the same way, but I send my sincerest apologies to Leeann… As to the photo, it was clearly intended to be funny but wasn’t. I shouldn’t have done it.”) The revised apology was somewhat better, in that it at least suggested that Franken takes sexual misconduct seriously. But his response to the subsequent groping allegations was downright appalling: “I’ve met tens of thousands of people and taken thousands of photographs, often in crowded and chaotic situations. I’m a warm person; I hug people. I’ve learned from recent stories that in some of those encounters, I crossed a line for some women — and I know that any number is too many.”
(More at above url)
If you don’t apply your principles consistently, you don’t have principles at all…
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/the-blatant-democratic-hypocrisy-on-sexual-misconduct
Here’s something that shouldn’t need saying: if you claim to oppose some kind of conduct, but modify your stance on it based on whether the person who is engaging in it is a member of your political party, people will probably not believe that you are very sincere in your convictions. The test for whether you’re actually principled is whether you are consistent. If someone condemns George W. Bush for some act, but defends it when Barack Obama does it, they don’t really care about the act itself. Likewise, one’s response to sexual misconduct by Democrats has to be the same as it would be to sexual misconduct by Republicans.
Garrison Keillor has just written a column in the Washington Post entitled “Al Franken should resign? That’s absurd.” Keillor favorably quotes his pastor, who cautioned against “[judging] past actions by present standards and with a benefit of hindsight that is, morally, highly questionable.” Keillor then meanders a bit about renaming lakes, before getting to his defense of Franken:
[Franken] did USO tours overseas when he was in the comedy biz. He did it from deep in his heart, out of patriotism, and the show he did was broad comedy of a sort that goes back to the Middle Ages. Shakespeare used those jokes now and then, and so did Bob Hope and Joey Heatherton when they entertained the troops. If you thought that Al stood outdoors at bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and told stories about small-town life in the Midwest, you were wrong. On the flight home, in a spirit of low comedy, Al ogled Miss Tweeden and pretended to grab her and a picture was taken. Eleven years later, a talk show host in LA, she goes public, and there is talk of resignation. This is pure absurdity, and the atrocity it leads to is a code of public deadliness. No kidding.
Question #1 here is this: if we were talking about Ted Cruz instead of Al Franken, would Keillor be presenting the facts this way? Would he be praising Cruz’s deep patriotism? Would he have called it “absurdity” and an “atrocity” to even “talk of resignation,” and suggested that we were just applying unfair moral judgments to old fashioned Shakespearean bawdiness? Unless Keillor’s judgment would be exactly the same, given the same set of facts, nothing Keillor says can be taken as sincere.
Actually, Keillor’s defense of Franken is somewhat stunning in its dishonesty. He suggests Franken is a decent man victimized by the retrospective application of unreasonable moral standards. Now, we can suspect, but we can’t actually prove, that he wouldn’t write the same editorial about a neoconservative. But what we can prove is that Keillor’s defense requires him to ignore the actual facts of the case: he only mentions one of the allegations against Franken. He does not mention that Franken has been accused of being a serial butt-grabber, who touched multiple women inappropriately when they took photos with him. Nor does he relate the details of what “Miss” Tweeden actually said happened: that he deliberately wrote material that would force her to let him kiss her, and then “came at me, put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.” Keillor’s argument is that Tweeden was simply too much of a stuck-up Puritan to appreciate old-fashioned Shakespearean humor, but he’s only able to say that by lying and saying that her problem was with “jokes” rather than with being french-kissed against her will.
But we might expect this from Garrison Keillor, who has a long record of ugly public statements. I began to dislike him when he called Keith Ellison a “lackluster black Muslim” as if the words “black” and “Muslim” were pejoratives. And Keillor has actually demonstrated even more blatant moral double-standards: despite having been married three times himself, he once suggested that flamboyant gay people were undermining wholesome American monogamy:
Under the old monogamous system, we didn’t have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck…. And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it…. The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men—sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control.
Keillor, however, is not the only Democrat defending Franken. Another Washington Post contributor literally suggested that a greater amount of leeway should be granted for Franken’s behavior because he is a Democrat and Democrats stand for women’s interests. I find this argument somewhat peculiar, because if anything I am even more revolted by people (like Harvey Weinstein) who publicly profess their feminism and use it as a way of deflecting attention from their bad acts. Which one is worse: a sexual harasser who openly says they don’t understand the problem with sexual harassment, or the one who says they deplore sexual harassment and care deeply about women? The harm caused by each may be equal, but when measuring culpability, the harshest judgments should fall on those who understand just how wrong their conduct is and do it anyway. (By the way, if you want to see Democrat after Democrat making excuses, look in the comments sections of Franken articles in liberal newspapers, which almost entirely consist of What about Roy Moore? reposted dozens of times.)
Al Franken’s own responses to the accusations are what convinced me he ought to be hounded from office. His initial apology to Tweeden was so bitter and brief that he was swiftly forced to issue another. (“I certainly don’t remember the rehearsal for the skit in the same way, but I send my sincerest apologies to Leeann… As to the photo, it was clearly intended to be funny but wasn’t. I shouldn’t have done it.”) The revised apology was somewhat better, in that it at least suggested that Franken takes sexual misconduct seriously. But his response to the subsequent groping allegations was downright appalling: “I’ve met tens of thousands of people and taken thousands of photographs, often in crowded and chaotic situations. I’m a warm person; I hug people. I’ve learned from recent stories that in some of those encounters, I crossed a line for some women — and I know that any number is too many.”
(More at above url)
