I won’t here because none of my examples are running for Senate in 2022. But you REALLY can’t think of a prominent Democratic politician that the party stood by in circumstances similar to Al Franken?
If you are suggesting Clinton, he wasn’t running for office at that point. It doesn’t change the fact his behavior was wrong. But the difference is he did own up to what he did. Walker and the GOP are in denial mode.
And the Franken accusations and Bill Clinton’s behavior are not in any way the same IMO.
But I don’t want to hijack this thread any further.
While he’s denied the accusation, Walker has yet to go full “Brett Kavanaugh.” The genius of what Kavanaugh and his Republican enablers did was they turned the very fact that he was being accused of such behavior into the REAL outrage. Kavanaugh quivered with anger that his good name would be subject to such lies. Republicans fulminated with righteous fury at the Democrats and their stooges in the mainstream media spreading such filth. Democrats were utterly unprepared for the audacity.
And it helped rally Republican voters in 2018 to defeat four Democratic incumbents.
Republicans clearly want Walker to execute this playbook, but he seems unwilling to go along with it. He’s called the claim a “flat-out lie,” but he hasn’t shown the necessary rage and indignation. He threatened when the story broke that he would sue the Daily Beast “the next day” but hasn’t. He hasn’t smeared the accuser, though he must know who she is by now. And he hasn’t said a word to repudiate his son Christian’s claims.
Maybe he’s saving it up for Friday’s debate. Or maybe he just has no clue what he’s doing. If I had to bet money . . .
As with unhappy families, circumstances are different in each case.
Warnock’s ex says he ran over her foot. A police report fails to back this up, but many Democrats distrust the police when it comes to taking complaints from Black women seriously. So why aren’t they against Warnock? I hope the answer has to do with his senate record and policy positions, not with the he-said she-said of his ugly divorce.
There were press reports, before his 2014 reelection, that my former congressman, Chaka Fattah, controlled non-profits that paid millions to his allies. His constituents then properly re-elected him based on the proven record, rather than the character assassination.
The next year, he was indited. The year after that, he was convicted and left office. This is my idea of a fair process.
Indeed, Fivethirtyeight flagged both Walker AND Warnock as “scandal-tainted” — with equal weights in their predictive model — because there was a at-least-semi-credible accusation that Warnock misused some campaign funds.
And, Walker received this flag NOT because of the abortion thing — because that’s not illegal*!
In their podcast Nate Silver and friends stated they’re not implying moral equivalencies — just that they’re trying to avoid (inevitably biased) human judgments in their mathematical model building (at least for this particular tweak).
*yet
I think the gun charge would be a little shaky, though. I wonder if there is any precedent for charging someone that was never arrested or convicted on a drug charge for lying about drug use on their federal gun application.
The reporting said they has enough evidence to charge him, but there is more that goes into a charging decision, and if there is not precedent for what I described above, I think such a charge would appear political. I do not know enough about the tax charges to offer my opinion.
This has me wondering if Mike Lindell ever purchased a gun during his time as a crackhead? Maybe they could charge him to “even the score.”, like the Trump DOJ did with Greg Craig.
Greg Craig was a Democratic political consultant charged with failing to register as a foreign agent in the wake of RussiaGate. Geoffrey Berman, the Trump appointed US attorney leading the Southern District of NY, said recently that the DOJ pressured him to charge Craig before Election Day in order to “even things out”. Bergman declined, saying his investigation showed no crime had been committed. The DOJ then shopped the case around until they found a Trumped up US attorney willing to bring charges. Craig was acquitted,
There is, but it is also “virtually non-existent.”
I do wonder how gun advocates would feel if this rule were to become rigorously enforced.
Against the “libs” they would be fine with it.
I saw that article before you posted it, but it doesn’t say whether the 283 people that were prosecuted had been arrested or convicted on drug related charges. I’m betting they all were.
Hunter Biden aside, I think it’s bad public policy to charge people that have voluntarily sought drug treatment for this felony gun charge as result of them admitting their addiction. It’s bad public policy because it dissuades people from seeking treatment.
I was talking about this with some family yesterday, gun owners, and they told me that all the gun stores have posters telling you how to answer the questionnaire and warning you that if your answers don’t match, you won’t get the gun. Anecdotal only.
This is probably a hijack for the Senate thread, though.
When my dad was moved to a care facility, he owned two handguns. My step-mom wanted to get rid of them, and gave them to me to sell. This was in California. The gun shop gut told me that I had to be a registered gun owner to sell them so I had to take a test. I asked if there was a study guide I could read first and they all laughed at me. I took it cold and, honestly, an eight year old could pass the multiple choice test that I was given.
No doubt. It is very easy to throw mud. However, none of the Dem candidates are traitors or seditionists. Child bore out of wedlock? meh. GF had an abortion? meh. Those are only critical if the candidate was a loud proponent of the Sanctity of Marriage or banning all abortions.
Kavanaugh could have cheerfully admitted most of the charges and still gotten confirmed.
Yeah, those sorts of things do not normally lead to arrests.
Nice cite.
Umm, no. But the test is not difficult.
He could well have been mistaken but he did make me take the test and then I would have to do some kind of inter-family transfer of ownership form.
My senate thermometer as of today shows the modal outcome is D and R each flip one seat. Democrats flip PA and Republicans flip… Nevada.
And here’s the PredictIt v 538 slope chart. 538 has OH, NC, and WI all around 30% chance Dem flip. That seems way too optimistic to me.
29 days to go.
I couldn’t hold out any longer and have started a 2022 Senate Confidence Pool Contest thread.
I’m going to drop invites to that thread into this thread today and probably a couple more times before election day.
This crowd seems pretty likely to overlap with the set of people who might enjoy such a contest.
NM. Helps to read the article first!
Four takeaways from Ohio’s US Senate debate | CNN Politics
quite the wild debate last night. i don’t believe i’ve heard hindquarters mentioned so much in any televised debate.
neither candidate looked good rolling in the mud.
What was the exact term they used? Just curious.
Ass
Kind of. Clinton lied up until he was acquitted in his impeachment trial THEN came clean.
I wish we had a race worth talking about here in KY.
We have a fantastic challenger. Charles Booker was born in Louisville to high school dropout parents, graduated from UofL Law, and for a time was the state’s youngest Black state rep. Married, three adorable daughters. By all accounts a genuinely terrific guy.
In the other corner we have–Rand Paul. Enough said.
If you’re not aware, the part of KY where I live had devastating floods a few months ago, with thousands of people left homeless and many dead. Rand’s commercials depict and describe this devastation, followed by Rand insisting that money from the federal government should come here to eastern KY, “not overseas”.
Never mind that Rand voted against disaster relief packages after Hurricane Sandy in 2013 and Hurricanes Harvey and Maria in 2017.
Booker was on the ground here within 48 hours, delivering and giving out supplies that he and his campaign staff had collected. (We really needed them at that point.) He was here off and on quite a bit in those early days, helping out wherever he could. Rand criticized him for it, saying that politicians should “stay out of the way”, at least until a few days later when he was getting backlash for it and popped in for a photo op, prominently featured in the above campaign ad.
I have a lot of friends doing intermediate-term disaster relief work right now, staying up until all hours (after their actual jobs) doing dull and depressing things like processing relief grant applications. One of them told me that a few weeks ago Booker called her up out of the blue just to thank her for the work she was doing and to give her some encouragement. He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t make a big deal out of it. It’s just a guy using his little bit of notoriety to give a boost to someone who needed it.
He’d be a great Senator. He’s going to get fucking crushed.