Not Good

 

Text messages from a Cuomo accuser, via Gothamist.

Do we have to talk about Andrew? I'm afraid we do, just briefly.

This case seems to me different from all the other cases from harassment to assault, in a very particular way. Not that it's worse, though it's certainly very bad and I think Cuomo should resign now and will certainly get impeached if he doesn't.

It's that it's so textbook, if I can put it that way. Like so many of us, I have to go through this annoying harassment "training" every year, sometimes the one for managers, mostly watching videos and taking quizzes cumulating with a final test where you have to score 100%. It's irritating and repetitive. The filming and acting aren't great, though I'd like to shout out a couple of actors, one terrific trans woman with the courage to look really plain and irritable and office-workery, not even slightly exotic, and the asshole who keeps asking her horribly inappropriate questions, who gets a wonderful wistful look when he's getting chewed out ("We're not allowed to joke?") that makes you see him being an asshole because he thinks assholes are probably more attractive than he is—which doesn't mean his behavior should be tolerated, it shouldn't, but allows you a glimpse of the fact that he's still human.

It's Complicated, Ross

 

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, has a new complaint, or meta-complaint, above and beyond the usual ones that liberals are too permissive about sex (1960s hippie edition) or not permissive enough (2010s feminism)—that we can't make up our minds between the two at all ("Can the Left Regulate Sex?"):

in its retreat from the Polanski era, its concession that sometimes it’s OK to forbid, cultural progressivism entered into a long internal struggle over what its goal ought to be — to maximize permissiveness with some minimalist taboos (no rape, no sex with children) or to devise a broader set of sexual regulations that would reflect egalitarian and feminist values rather than religious ones.

This tension is visible all over recent history. The mood in which liberals defended Bill Clinton’s philandering was an example of the more permissive option. The mood of the #MeToo era, which condemned cads as well as rapists, is an example of the more regulatory approach.

Taken for granted that "we" literally have to "regulate sex", because

You Know Me Al

YouTube screen capture, from the Sessions confirmation hearings.

I only wrote one brief post on Al Franken's resignation from the Senate, not saying much more than, "I really hate everything. I certainly hate Al Franken, though I obviously hate Roger Stone a lot more," with reference to the clear indications that ratfucking was involved, and archratfucker Roger Stone was somehow involved in it:

I'm guessing same way he knew "Podesta's time in the barrel" was coming in August 2016? https://t.co/2OOdM1kj5k i.e. ratfucking he was personally engaged in, with or without Assange and the Putinist mob.

— O'er the Airports We Watched (@Yastreblyansky) November 17, 2017

And with the understanding that Franken had set himself up for this, which quickly began to look more and more unfair as the character of the ratfucking exposed itself in more depth, and I found myself hating him a lot less. As I put it last spring, with reference to attacks on Joe Biden for his disturbing-uncle behavior:

I also thought and continue to think Al Franken was essentially innocent, in similar ways and indeed still more so (in the sense that his dopey comedian behaviors are less creepy than the Biden massages and hair sniffings), but nevertheless right to resign from the Senate, because what loyalty to the party demanded at the moment of accusation was to not allow that to become an issue for diluting the party message on sexual assault...

So that I was fully prepared, as many of us must have been, for Jane Mayer's excellent New Yorker report, though maybe not for how angry I'd start to feel as I began to appreciate how obvious Franken's innocence should have been from the start, whenever we learned who the accuser LeeAnn Tweeden was (conservative radio "host", Fox figure and Hannity friend, and an inveterate liar about a large number of subjects, including that USO tour); what Tom Arnold of all people was able to report accurately in early December 2017 must have been possible for the press to check out, and I don't know why they didn't.

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer investigated the sexual misconduct allegations against former Sen. Al Franken. "Almost NOTHING His Main Accuser Said checks out," she tweeted. https://t.co/IMYBdz2kPU

— HuffPost Politics (@HuffPostPol) July 22, 2019

I still think Franken was right to resign (agreeing with the conclusion, if not many of the premises, of Matt Yglesias)—even though he seems to be second-guessing himself at this point—and I'm not going to scream at the Democratic Senators who did what they felt they had to do, including Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer in the leadership roles they took, though I'm glad Gillibrand's never going to be president after reading about this slightly Frank Underwood moment:

at a previously scheduled press conference, Gillibrand added insult to injury: she reiterated her call for Franken to resign while also trumpeting her sponsorship of a new bill that banned mandatory arbitration of sexual-harassment claims. She didn’t mention that Franken had originated the legislation—and had given it to Gillibrand to sponsor, out of concern that it might be imperilled by his scandal. 

Still, politics is ugly, and nobody's indispensable. But I miss him, shooting barbs in the Senate Judiciary Committee and representing exactly the kind of progressivism the whole party has begun to move toward. I hope we get him back in public life.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Joe

Valedictory: 2017 Cornell University Convocation; photo by Michael Suguitan for the Cornell Sun.

I think Steve is 100% right when he accuses old Joe Biden of Trumpiness in this game he's playing at the moment, hugging male persons up on stage and grinning his sweet open-hearted grin and telling the audience, "I want you to know I had permission to do that," as much as to say "unlike some of these new-fangled ladies who for some unaccountable reason think they feel threatened by my goofy and harmless old self," which as any fool can see is insane and perhaps insanely self-regarding. He's almost the Trump who says he couldn't possibly have assaulted some given woman because she's not hot enough, but makes it about what a silly old good he is.

Then he turns around and says some proper words about understanding that he needs to listen etc. etc. But he's winking, not in the obvious clown Trump way—he's a million times smarter than Trump anyway—but winking nevertheless.

Then blogfriend Lance Mannion comes out to do some handicapping, which, like me, he rarely does, and suggests that Biden's going to win the nomination, because he's kind of "our" Trump:

The Use of Tragedy

I may have something more useful to say on that whole "call-out culture" thing, thanks in the first place to the ongoing collapse of Virginia Democratic governor Ralph Northam since he's been called out for his repellent self-presentation in his 1984 med school yearbook, in a photograph where he was either in minstrel-show blackface or KKK robe and hood (we haven't yet been told which of the two people was him), and it looks as if he's going to have to resign eventually or, as David Brooks will be saying any day now, his life is being destroyed.

Or maybe sooner—as I write, AP is reporting what looks like an effort to plead innocent to the thing he just abjectly apologized for:

A Virginia Democrat who has spoken with Gov. Ralph Northam has told The Associated Press that the governor now does not believe he was in a racist picture in his 1984 medical yearbook and has no immediate plans to resign.

How's that? Had he thought at first we were talking about some other picture? [Update: He's confessing that he actually did darken his face in 1984 for an entirely different purpose, dressing as Michael Jackson in a dance contest, and thought initially that was the yearbook picture, although it's hard to figure how you could remember wearing a Michael Jackson costume and not remember that Michael Jackson rarely dressed like this:

Bad

This is...inexcusably bad. Period. Bye, Eric. https://t.co/AlewFJLp8f

— Zandar Wakandar (@ZandarVTS) May 7, 2018

OK, I'm really sad now. I've long had a kind of personal thing about Schneiderman, in that when he was a state senator and I was a harried househusband our kids were in the same public school, not that I've ever met him, and I've loved watching him fight the good fight in our national emergency, suing the Trumpery right and left and stopping evil in its tracks. That will go on, obviously it's the staff that does all the work, not the attorney general himself, but he was just not supposed to be like that; he was supposed to be on the clear right side, as Mayer and Farrow write:

Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, has long been a liberal Democratic champion of women’s rights, and recently he has become an outspoken figure in the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. As New York State’s highest-ranking law-enforcement officer, Schneiderman, who is sixty-three, has used his authority to take legal action against the disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein, and to demand greater compensation for the victims of Weinstein’s alleged sexual crimes. Last month, when the Times and this magazine were awarded a joint Pulitzer Prize for coverage of sexual harassment, Schneiderman issued a congratulatory tweet, praising “the brave women and men who spoke up about the sexual harassment they had endured at the hands of powerful men.” Without these women, he noted, “there would not be the critical national reckoning under way.”

Now he's denying the very persuasive, and awful, stories that are being told about him. My kneejerk partisan first thought was like the first thought I had about Al Franken, that he must be the victim of some kind of conspiracy (I still kind of hope it's in some sense true of Franken) but you can't—at least I can't—sustain the thought for even a page of this story (here's a link to the Times coverage). It's really very bad. Damn.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.