Indeed, it’s like false equivalency roulette.
Not to speak for him, but I’m pretty confident he’s using the word in the legal sense.
If I walk up to you on the street and put you in a headlock, that’s battery. But if you’re a shoplifter and you’re refusing to submit to detention, and I’m a store owner, then I have a legal privilege to commit the act that would otherwise be battery.
I would withdraw it if I were convinced he did not commit a crime. My opinion does not depend on what a jury decides.
John Mace: it means that the force is allowed, which includes things like self-defense or reasonable force in an arrest or to remove a trespasser, etc.
Yeah, let’s cut to the chase:
(1) A politician commits an assault.
(2) If he’s a Republican, go to Step (5)
(3) Announce all the reasons he shouldn’t suffer any career-ending consequences.
(4) Go to step (7)
(5) Announce all the reasons that violence is never to be tolerated under any circumstances; demand resignation or removal.
(6) If removal is not effected, go to step (5)
(7) Success! Full stop.
OK, I figured it was a term of art, and that’s what you meant. But I wanted to make sure. Is the issue that the heckler was acting violently? If I read the NYT article, it seems like Franken jumped in before any violence actually occurred. That was from an eye-witness who was actually accompanying Franken at the time. “It seems to be veering towards actual violence” isn’t, well, actual violence.
Is there a link to the Union Leader article? I’d like to be able to read the whole thing.
Did you call him out on it? Or did you not say anything because his politics generally align with your own?
Right. You’ve gently tip-toed past the usual “It’s not actually a crime, show me the specific state statutes”.
We’ve meandered around and through the meadow of “He has not been charged, nor will he be”
And we’ve just gone past the forest of “There is no likelyhood of a conviction, so there was nothing wrong done here”.
This is your normal route. Now, we’ve skipped right on down to “It was only one assault, so this is not a deal breaker. Everyone look away” With a short detour past the lane of "Look at these other people who did something similar. " and the back alley of “Liberal media are all so mean”.
It sure seems like it’s fine with you, as long as this particular guy is on-side with you in the pro-fetus camp.
It’s classic Brickerism defense lawyer crappola.
BTW, for folks dis’ing on The NY Post, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Manchester Union Leader, but it’s just about as right wing as you can get. Granted, my info is from back from the days when I used to live around Boston, and we’d pick up the MUL on ski trips up to NH many years ago, but I don’t think things have changed much. I was, almost literally, shocked the first time I picked up that paper and saw how unapologetically conservative it was.
The article itself isn’t preserved, but you can find the text if you google a sentence from what I posted above.
One account has the protestors getting violent first, and I don’t see that contradicted. But even if not, security was entitled to remove them and Franken was entitled to use reasonable and necessary force to assist.
By contrast, no neutral witness gives any defense of Gianforte and he apologized.
A reasonable observer should think Gianforte probably committed a crime and Franken probably didn’t, recognizing that we have imperfect information on both.
Yeah, let’s cut to the chase:
(1) A politician commits an assault.
(2) If he’s a Democrat, go to Step (7)
(2a) If he’s a Republican, go to Step (3)
(3) Demand the specific statutes that he broke. Argue over whether it should be state or federal. Devolve discussion into arcane finer points of law.
(4) If (3) does not work, assert that he will never actually be charged due to the trivial nature of offence
(4a) Work the “media is biased” offence
(5) If he is charged, assert that he has not been found guilty, therefore nobody should make anny further comment, as he is presumed innocent. Why do you hate America?
(5a) Find examples of others doing the same thing. LIBERAL HYPOCRISY!
(6) If found guilty say that the crime was not a big deal, why are you ruining his life, it’s all over now, it’s time to move on.
(7) Announce all the reasons that violence is never to be tolerated under any circumstances; demand resignation or removal.
(8) If removal is not effected, go to step (7)
(8) Success! Full stop.
Let’s test your pseudo-code:
I said about Al Franken, a Democrat: *And guess what? That doesn’t bother me either. Good for Al Franken. *
Your pseudo-code says:
(1) A politician commits an assault.
(2) If he’s a Democrat, go to Step (7)
(7) Announce all the reasons that violence is never to be tolerated under any circumstances; demand resignation or removal.
But that didn’t happen with me, did it?
Shall we test my pseudo-code on you now?
Franken also apologized, conceding that what he did was dumb.
I don’t think he apologized to the protestors. I think he said it was dumb for him to have gotten involved. Am I wrong?
(9) Nitpick another post with trivial crap. Look smug.
Wait, so you think Franken’s challenge would have amounted to duel?
That sounds serious. Should Franken resign?
How is it trivial?
I posted a set of instructions that, if tested, correctly describe what’s happening in this thread.
You posted a response set that demonstrably does not correctly describe my reactions in this thread.
And when I call you on that, you claim it’s a nitpick and slither away.
Is this an admission that your steps were a lie?
He apologized to his wife, to friends over lunch, and to the reporter he had invited to join him in the attack. But I agree – not to the heckler.
I think I did, actually. Don’t remember, and don’t remember the thread, so I can’t check, but it seems I made a comment about it. In any case, there were quite a number of fellow liberals calling him out on it as well.
Actually, when I read the first account, I lost what respect I had for Franken. I never found him funny, and as a senator from a state hundreds of miles away, I never give him much thought.
Then, when I read the account that he was actually assisting legitimate security for removing a heckler, I changed my mind, in that he did nothing wrong, other than involving himself in a situation where he could get hurt.
The difference between the two stories is quite stark, where one makes him look like a pretty terrible person, and if that had been the story, I would agree that people should not vote for him. But, once it was clarified that the story that you quoted had a touch of bias, and that the real story was very different in every conceivable way, I went back to just thinking he isn’t very funny.
Are you really trying to draw an equivalence between assisting security with a legitimate matter, and body slamming a reporter for asking questions?
As the clarifications and cites showed, that was not the case with Franken, so again, are you recommending others that violence or threats are ok to use when a reporter or anybody else confronts someone with information that is not good for the one being confronted?
Really, that is not what a lawyer should advice,