It is, and you are right, I was confusing the two. In fact, I’d lumped them both together in my head as one person - doing a disservice to both women. But Bill being a horndog - with the predator connotations thereof - was well known during the primaries to anyone who wanted to look.
The governor of Minnesota is a Democrat, which means Franken was going to be replaced by a Democrat.
He was a very popular and charismatic Democrat, and a very serious potential 2020 candidate. Not the equivalent of disavowing a party’s presidential nominee, but still not nothing. The Democrats did the right thing with Franken and Conyers, and the Republicans did not do the right thing with Moore and Trump (doing the right thing, IMO, would have been a complete and total disavowal of Moore, withdrawing all party money and support, and a complete and total disavowal of Trump once it was clear there were numerous credible accusations of sexual assault, including his own bragging, including withdrawing all party money and support). Doing the right thing is better than not doing the right thing. Even when the cost is less. I’m not saying this is a sign of any massive permanent change, just a tentative first step in the right direction – and the Democrats are making it, while the Republicans are not.
Also, the governor’s appointment only lasts until this November, when a special election will be held to fill the seat for the rest of Franken’s term, which otherwise wouldn’t be over until 2021. There’s a legit possibility that a Republican candidate could win. (Cook Political Report is currently rating this race as a toss-up.)
“To anyone who wanted to look” is an ambiguous phrase. But we’re talking about the first half of 1992, very much a pre-internet era. If one “wanted to look,” you couldn’t do a Google search. You could maybe go to the library and look through the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature and similar resources.
But other than that above-and-beyond level of ‘wanting to look,’ you knew what the network news and the newspapers and news magazines told you. That Bill Clinton was a horndog was in the news. That he was a sexual predator, or that that was the easy-to-spot implication of ‘horndog’ when used to describe him? I’d need a cite on that, and quite frankly I don’t believe there is one. Even if you were a news junkie in the spring of 1992, you had no reason to suspect that Bill Clinton was a sexual predator.
iiandyiiii, I don’t agree with you very often but you’re totally right about this one. Being a Libertarian myself, I have no reason to get into shouting matches between the two major parties, but it’s certainly true that if they were judged on this issue alone, the Democrats would get a “better late than never” card, while the Republicans’ conduct is just an embarrassment.
You may prove to be right. But since you’ve said this twice, I’m going to nitpick. I don’t think Conyers and Farenthold are comparable. Conyers is much higher profile, but more to the point, he was simply going retire at the end of his term until it became clear that, if he stayed in office, a number of other allegations were going to come out. (It seemed fairly obvious to me that Conyers had a long history of harassment).
Farenthold, as I understand it, had one accusation (which was settled). There are comparable examples that you can use to compare the responses. I think that Alcee Hastings or Ruben Kihuen would work (another Republican example is Pat Meehan, although that’s a weird story). But I don’t think Conyers is in this category.
I hope you’re right about the Democratic party, I really do. But I’m going to withhold judgment until I see evidence.
You point out Al Franken. Even at the time of his resignation, there was discussions that the main driver here was pressure against Trump and Moore, and less about what Al did. And as many have pointed out, Al’s seat went to a Democratic. And while his seat could be won by a Republican, it will be filled by a Democrat with the likelihood of another Democrat in that seat.
I think the same argument could be made about Conyers. His seat should be chiseled in stone “Democrat.”
Now the Republicans did send Larry “wide stance” Craig packing (and he’s not really in this category). But he’s in the same lane as Conyers and Franken, with the same party keeping the seat.
While Clinton was quite a while ago, Democratic rallied by him, culminating in the rose garden party. My Democrat friends turned themselves into pretzels defending that guy. My goodness that left a bad taste in my Independent mouth, no pun intended.
Roy Moore. Roy Moore is a pig. He shouldn’t be elected as dog catcher. The Republicans should be smacked down hard for that.
But I’d really be interested to see what would happen if the opposite were to take place. What would the Dems do If there was a seat that is solidly Democrat, that had a chance to go red if they would pull support from the Democrat candidate. I’m not sure they would. Until I see that, I’m not sold that the two parties are all that different. I wish they were.
The idea that Republicans don’t care about the character of the people on ‘their’ side is hard to square with the fact that the Trump nomination/election caused a major rift in the Republican party, with a whole lot of prominent Republicans becoming ‘Never Trumpers’ who even voted for Hillary Clinton over Trump. The pre-eminent Conservative magazine National Review refused to endorse Trump. Prominent Republicans like P.J. O’Rourke, Jonah Goldberg, John Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, George Will, Andrew Sullivan and others announced they were voting for Hillary or abstaining because Trump was morally unacceptable. When Trump said outrageous things he got lots of pushback from Republican politicians, including both the Speaker of the House and the Majority leader in the Senate.
Can anyone remember Democratic politicians during an election coming out against their own candidate like that?
On the SDMB, lots of resident ‘righties’ including myself came out against Trump.
Show me a similar case where a large percentage of movers and shakers in the Democratic party jumped ship and endorsed a Republican for President merely because their candidate was not a good enough human being. Bear in mind that these people shared the same politics as Trump, mainly. Perhaps not on the border, but on regulations and taxes they are very happy with the way things are going. And they still won’t endorse him.
Also, from the Right’s perspective a guy like Bernie Sanders flirts with ideologies that were responsible for the deaths of millions of people. I consider a committed Marxist to be every bit as evil as a Nazi, and yet the left is very tolerant of the Marxism in its midst. You should be ashamed when you march and see someone marching alongside you with a hammer and sickle flag or a Che Guevera T-shirt - every bit as ashamed as a Republican should be if the Klan shows up at a right-wing rally. Instead, you vote for people like Bernie Sanders, who was a Soviet dupe long before the left discovered that Russia likes to interfere in American politics. And you allow Marxist organizations to provide funding, campaign materials, and other benefits. Hell, the left has tolerated and even accepted the Communist Party of the USA, even though it was essentially run out of the Kremlin as an attempt to destabilize American politics. No one on the left cared about Russian meddling in elections - so long as the meddling was tomtheir benefit.
You also had no problem with Barack Obama’s questionable relationships with domestic terrorists and radical preachers. So I guess it really matters what you consider to be outrageous, too.
The fact that the prospect of nominating and electing an addlepated ignorant narcissistic sleaze-addicted reality-TV celebrity with zero experience or ability in statecraft and no interest in any civic issue except its potential for exploitation for his own self-aggrandizement was rejected by only a minority of Republicans doesn’t strike me as something for the GOP to dislocate its collective elbow patting itself on the collective back for.
It has been many decades (note that I’m not arguing it never happened, back in the days of Jim Crow for instance) since the Democratic Party even considered promoting for national office anybody as exceptionally unqualified, moronic, venal, and thoroughly repugnant as Donald Trump.
You don’t really get to rebuke your opponents for not being as quick as you to dissociate themselves from their party’s shameful misdeeds when the shameful misdeeds in question are ones that your party has committed and theirs hasn’t.
This thread is about mistreatment of women, not political extremes or other political hypocrisies and sins, so I’ll skip all that, but I’d be happy to respond in an appropriate thread if you’re interested in discussing it.
As to mistreatment of women, I think you’re excusing the Republican party far too easily here. All those names you mentioned are not welcome in the party right now. They essentially left it. The party, right now, is Trump’s party, and very, very few Republicans in Congress or the Senate are seriously critical of his treatment of women (what he’s admitted as well as what he’s been accused of). The party apparatus, including leadership in both houses of Congress, along with the vast majority of Republican office-holders, even the ones that criticized him during the campaign, have ceased criticizing him at all with regards to his treatment of women. The party apparatus supported Roy Moore, and virtually no prominent Republicans in the House or Senate came out in favor of Moore’s opponent. The party (apparatus and colleagues in Congress) has put much, much less pressure on those like Farenthold than the Democrats did on Conyers and Franken.
Taking all that into account, I think it’s entirely reasonable to assert that the Democratic party organization and apparatus and officeholders have made a few tentative steps in the right direction on this issue, while the Republican party organization, apparatus, and officeholders have not.
Kimstu is understating. NINETY PERCENT of Republicans who voted in the Presidential election voted for Trump. Unless you have some kind of cite for a massive number of Pubbies who didn’t vote at all, you have some serious ‘splainin’ to do.
I agree 100% with this. I think it’s very odd to get angry with Dems for not initiating a wholesale purge, or saying their efforts are insincere if they wouldn’t do the same if there was a real possibility of a Republican taking the spot. When faced with Al Franken’s antics vs a person who might want to rollback abortion protections or other women’s health progress, I can see how someone might make a strategic decision to fight another day, some other way (see: Clinton).
It’s the same as people who critique proponents of tolerance as intolerant of the views of supremacists…it’s a philosophical/ political stance, not a suicide pact.
Show me a Democrat as bad as Trump.
There have certainly been instances where LaRouchians have nabbed the Democratic nomination in uncontested seats at lower rungs of government and been rebuffed by the party membership including in at least one case endorsement of the Republican challenger. But by and large - and this is a rather key point - Democrats generally don’t nominate people that terrible for election to high office. Your argument is predicated on the assumption that “both sides do it”. But both sides don’t. Sure, the odd loon gets through (I’m looking at you, Alvin Greene) but where are the left-wing Trumps we’re supposedly ignoring?
And it’s not like the Dems don’t clean house. Where is John Edwards these days? Why did Eliot Spitzer lose his job but Mark Sanford was welcomed back with open arms?
So the chain of logic goes “Bernie Sanders likes socialism, socialist is a form of Marxism, Stalin was a Marxist, Stalin killed millions, therefore Bernie Sanders endorses the murder of millions”? Have I got that right? Did that make sense in your head?
By that argument, the right has “tolerated and even accepted” Nazis and other white nationalist groups as well as various armed militia and a wide assortment of right-wing US terrorist groups. Is that the syllogism you want to make? Because if you want to compare the left’s “acceptance” of a bunch of ineffectual and deluded idiots running the Communist Party of the USA and the right’s acceptance of actual FBI-identified terrorist groups and individuals who are considered a greater threat than radical Islam and have murdered far more Americans in the last 30 years than their left-wing equivalents, we can certainly discuss that.
If you meant to say “You didn’t buy into the dishonest right-wing propaganda about Obama”, you’d be correct.