The Daily, a NYT podcast, had an episode on an interview with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and how Gillibrand remained steadfastly unapologetic about calling for Al Franken to resign from the US Senate. This is despite recent reporting that suggests the claims may not have been 100% factual, and despite numerous other senators going on the record recently saying that they now regret the rush to call for him to resign.
I have to say, the interview left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, and I’m trying to figure out why. On some level, I almost feel like she’s trying to have it both ways. When asked why she called on Franken to resign without waiting for an ethics committee investigation etc, it’s because she felt like (paraphrasing here) otherwise, her silence meant she was opposing the accusers. She then goes on to say that hey, Al Franken was the one that decided to resign, not her, so that’s on him etc etc. She says, ‘hey he could have waited for the ethics committee. He could have sued them for fraud, but he chose to resign’.
And yet - if he -had- said he wasn’t resigning, he was waiting for the ethics committee, he was suing the accusers - does anyone really believe that Gillibrand would not have blasted him for ‘blaming the accusers’ and such? Does she really not understand that his actions at the time - including apologizing - were in part specifically due to the fact that he was concerned that any ‘denial’ etc would be taken the wrong way?
Gillibrand comes off very very poorly in this interview.
…people complaining about Gillibrand calling for Franken’s resignation come off very poorly in real life. She did absolutely the right thing. It was Franken’s actions that are the issue here. Franken chose to do what he did, he chose to resign when he didn’t have to resign, that really should be the end of it.
And former senator Al Franken comes across as a decent human being, erring on the side of caution, by resigning and “doing the right thing.” This is more than we’ve seen from most members of the GOP with respect to inappropriate actions.
Worth pointing out that Warren, Sanders, and Harris all joined the Franken-must-resign brigade. Sure, KG started it, but a whole mess of high profile Democrats were delighted to sign on.
I have no problem with Gillibrand calling on Franken to resign. She’s free to call on Trump to resign as well.
She didn’t fire Franken (admittedly she didn’t have the power to fire him). She let Franken know that the Democrats were not going support him if he was guilty the same way the Republicans have supported Trump and Kavanaugh and others. Franken, who knew he was guilty, resigned.
So Gillibrand upheld an important principle when it was politically costly to her to do so.
But…that’s not what she did. She didn’t say, ‘let’s ensure the ethics committee etc can do it’s job’. She called on him to resign precisely because of the political climate at the time made it beneficial to do so.
I suspect she’s lost some Democratic donors etc recently, now that they see that maybe things were not quite as clear-cut as it seemed, and she’s refusing to admit she may have been too hasty.
And I don’t believe for a second that she would have supported Al Franken’s decision to not resign.
I certainly didn’t think the interviewer was ‘adversarial’ at all. He asked tough questions concerning a difficult topic. The technical term for it is ‘journalism’.
We’ve discussed this in other threads. Are you claiming that Franken was innocent and all of the charges against him were false? Because it wasn’t just one woman that accused him.
I’m guessing that the interview was supposed to be about her Presidential campaign because that’s what she’s doing right now. If he had invited her to do an interview to rehash the Franken story . . . again, I’m again guessing she might not be as eager to spend the time to rehash that. The interviewer spent almost the entire interview on Franken. There was only time for a question or two about the campaign.
Sure interviewers can do that, but I’d call it adversarial.
…this is simply your spin. A narrative. From what I could see she called on him to resign precisely because resigning was, in her opinion, the right thing to do.
She wasn’t hasty. Admitting she was hasty when she wasn’t, in her opinion hasty, would be the wrong thing to do.
Of course not. Neither would I. Why does that matter?
The questions have already been answered. What did we learn that was new? Person who had an opinion two years ago holds the same opinion now. Were you expecting something different?
:smack:
Its politically costly to her…now. It was very advantageous to her then.
Politician makes a political decision. It doesn’t go as hoped. Nothing big, move on.
Boy howdy, that’s quite a choice of wording. I will hope that it was one of those accidental bad choices we all make from time to time when firing off a quick post.
I don’t think it was ever advantageous to her, really. Franken was easily the biggest star in the Senate, and apparently a friend of hers. The press elevated her as “the one who pushed Franken out” even though apparently it was Schumer’s lack of support for Franken that convinced Al to leave. The press then exploited the public’s affection for Franken to make Gillibrand look like a villain, but oddly, no one else, not even Schumer.
I think there are two big reasons to scapegoat Gillibrand but not, for example, Schumer:
One, it helps shore up a sexist portrayal of women in power as backstabbers.
Two, she was obviously running for President from the beginning of 2017, positioning herself as the anti-Trump; and the people who own the networks are all extremely wealthy & lean very, very Republican.
What is with the reverence, the near-deification of Al Franken that many of my fellow liberals annoint him with?
All of his accusers (except the one with photographic proof of his degrading actions) are/were fans of his comedy career and/or his politics, a couple of whom said that they would even still support him staying in office over any possible Republican replacement, they just wanted people to know as a person, as a man, he isn’t really the noble, enlightened “Champion for Women” he claims to be. (yeah, yeah, I know, he never used that specific phrase to describe himself, but he clearly pretended to be one of the Good Guys, not some vile caveman like Trump)
None of you would advocate giving someone like Mitt Romney or Ted Cruz (two truly reprehensible people, but for altogether different reasons) a pass for the actions that Franken took over the years (his little grab-ass schtick had been going on for decades) so why should a rank hypocrite like Al Franken get special treatement?
For the record, I was watching Al Franken since I was probably too young to fully understand some of his more obscure political jokes, back when I was just 9 or 10 years old, back when “Saturday Night Live” was in its prime in the late 1970’s-early '80’s, as far as I can tell, his politics are largely identical to mine, and his favorite band happens to be my favorite band as well, (apparently we attended several of the same concerts together over the years) so I am not some puritanical prude who is offended by naughty jokes between consenting adults or someone who despises his counterculture persona.
Wow. Excluded middle much? There’s a lot of daylight between ‘one of the good guys’ and ‘Trump’ in terms of treatment of women.
What we all REALLY wanted was Franken to run for President so we could get the hilarity of Trump vs and improvisational comedian in the debates. Let’s just face that.
I miss having Franken in the Senate, no doubt. He was a fighter. But I’m glad that he chose the right thing and resigned. It was simply the right thing to do, and hopefully it’s a lesson for those who could use it. Priorities and values are proven to be valid in the actions one takes, not the empty garbage that most politicians speak.
Kirsten Gillibrand isn’t the real story in this interview; the real story is the apparent desperation of the New York Times, trying to find a controversial angle to a story that was settled with little controversy in late 2017 (it’s now 2019).
The real story is that the New York Times is being pushed into the right wing conspiracysphere. They’re clearly trying to engineer news, as we’ve already seen with its headline mishap and now this. They’re supplicating for millennial “bro” subscribers and capitulating to the pressure that Trump and the right wing is putting them under.
The Senate ethics committee announced an investigation would be started after some accusations were made. A week later, before anything happened with this, two more accusations surfaced. Gillibrand called for Franken to resign then, before the accusations against him were fully investigated. It goes without saying that if you are okay with this, you have no beef with her in regards to her action. I am not okay with it, so you know where I stand. The point that I want to make is that it’s absolutely, without question a legitimate stance to take without it being a deification of Franken. Some believe in full investigations for their own sake. And some, I suppose, do not always believe in this. I remember you from the other thread a while ago and don’t remember if you said I was one of the deifiers, just to be clear, but I just wanted to get this out there.