Abby,
You want Biden as President? The man is senile. He's a racist. He favors banks
and big business. He's a war monger. Why in God's name do you want him to be
our president?
Al Franken was a comedian before he became a politician and a lot of that stuff
that he was accused of was done as a joke. But the point of the article is that
if a woman is always to believed, than if Franken was forced to resign, then
Biden should not be a candidate.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Abby Vincent
Sent: Thursday, April 2, 2020 10:26 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: For Top Democrats, Joe Biden Is No Al Franken
Joe Biden should’ve been disqualified for the way he treated Anita Hill. So our
franking because of a tasteless joke gets kicked out of the Senate but Biden
will probably be the Democratic nominee and hopefully become president.
Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 2, 2020, at 6:15 PM, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
For Top Democrats, Joe Biden Is No Al Franken By Branko Marcetic,
Jacobin
02 April 20
Two years after forcing Al Franken's resignation from the Senate over
sexual misconduct allegations, prominent Democrats now have to decide
whether to stand on principle or keep silent about the latest assault
accusations against Joe Biden. We asked them - and so far, most are
choosing to keep silent.
n 2017, the resignation of Senator Al Franken (D-MN) over a series of
allegations that he had groped or kissed women without their consent
was viewed as a pivotal moment in the long history of sexual abuse on
Capitol Hill. As the allegations mounted, thirty senators from his own
party, joined by two independents, placed what he later called a
"tremendous amount of pressure" on Franken to resign, which he did.
Now, as a sexual assault allegation against Democratic front-runner
and former vice president Joe Biden trickles from the world of online
news into the mainstream media, all but one of those thirty-two
senators are staying silent.
Last week, Tara Reade, a former staffer of Biden's, alleged that in
1993, he had pushed her up against the wall and groped and penetrated
her with his hands, telling her afterward, "You mean nothing to me."
Although Jacobin was unable to reach Reade and has not independently
corroborated her story, the Intercept's Ryan Grim, who originally
broke the story, spoke to Reade's brother and friend, who recounted hearing
the story from her at the time.
Grim had originally also broken the story about then-Supreme Court
nominee Brett Kavanaugh's accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.
Biden has previously said that "for a woman to come forward in the
glaring lights of focus, nationally, you've got to start off with the
presumption that at least the essence of what she's talking about is
real." His senior adviser, Symone Sanders, whose personal website
describes her as "a champion for women," had said in 2018 she believed
Ford's allegation, stressing that she didn't "think anyone that has
ever done that, whether it was once in their life or fifty times,
deserves to sit at the highest precipice of power." Biden's campaign has
called Reade's allegation "false."
Jacobin reached out to the twenty-nine Democratic and independent
senators who had called for Franken's resignation three years ago and
are still in office, in some cases leaving multiple voicemails and
emails, and sometimes speaking directly with staffers. Some of those
senators have since endorsed Biden for president, including Kirsten
Gillibrand (D-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Cory Booker (D-NJ). Of
those twenty-nine, only one - Ohio's Sherrod Brown - offered a statement in
response:
"Every woman has a right to be heard without fear of intimidation or
retribution, and I will always fight for that right."
Perhaps the most surprising silence came from Senator Gillibrand, who
has carved out a profile as a champion of women and sexual assault victims.
Gillibrand has fought for years to ensure accusers in the military can
be heard and see justice, and she was the first senator to call for
Franken's resignation in 2017, without an investigation into the allegations
first.
"We must not lose sight that this watershed moment is bigger than any
one industry, any one party, or any one person," she wrote in a
Facebook post at the time. "We have to rise to the occasion, and not
shrink away from it, even when it's hard, especially when it's hard."
Gillibrand later said that Franken, someone she considered a personal
friend and an effective legislator, "wasn't entitled to me carrying
his water, and defending him with my silence." Though she suffered
political backlash for the decision, with major Democratic donors and
bundlers vowing never to back her again, Gillibrand stressed she had
"no regrets" and, if she could go back and change anything, she "might have
done it sooner."
Gillibrand endorsed Biden a little over a week ago, saying he would
"be a champion for women." The senator's team did not appear to be
aware of the sexual assault allegation when Jacobin reached out late
last week, her press assistant welcoming an offer to share Reade's
recent interviews. Though Jacobin was told Gillibrand's team would see
if they could provide a statement by Monday, and despite multiple
phone calls and emails, Gillibrand's office has not yet offered a
response, nor did they reply when asked if the senator was standing by her
endorsement of Biden.
According to the New Yorker, Gillibrand was one of seven female
Democratic senators who confronted Senate minority leader Chuck
Schumer on December 1,
2017 about the Franken allegations, leading to his eventual
resignation. The magazine reported that the group grew only more
determined when they learned of a seventh accuser - one who, like Reade, was
a former Senate staffer.
None of the five other members of the group who are still in Congress
- Kamala Harris (D-CA), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Patty Murray (D-WA),
Maggie Hassan (D-NH), and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) - offered a
response to Reade's allegation.
Cortez Masto never publicly called for Franken's resignation, but she
did say at the time that she was "disappointed & disgusted with the
allegations"
against him and that "he should be held accountable." After he
resigned, she put out a statement declaring that "we must create an
environment where every woman or man feels empowered to come forward."
Though Cortez Masto has not weighed in on the ongoing Democratic
contest, Hassan and Harris have, endorsing Biden for president, and
both Harris and Cortez Masto are reportedly on Biden's short list for the
vice presidency.
Sources told Mediaite the latter is one of Biden's "top three" for the
position, while Harris is one of a number of names being urged by
Biden's wealthy donors, according to CNBC. In calling for Franken to
step down at the time, Harris said that "sexual harassment and
misconduct should not be allowed by anyone and should not occur anywhere."
In all, eleven of the thirty-two Democratic and independent senators
who called for Franken's resignation have formally endorsed Biden,
with two of them now gone from Congress. One endorser is New Jersey
senator Cory Booker, who has said Biden would "restore honor to the
Oval Office," and had earlier praised Franken for doing "the honorable
thing" and resigning, calling for Donald Trump to "do the same thing,"
owing to the "more serious allegations against him." Another is
California's Dianne Feinstein, who had said about the Franken
allegations that "the American people don't look lightly on these
kinds of actions, no matter who they're committed by." Still another
is Tom Carper, Biden's Delaware colleague for seven years, who had found the
allegations against Franken "deeply troubling."
One notable silence came from Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose coveted
endorsement continues to elude both Democratic candidates left in the race.
Though Warren had lagged behind other Democratic woman senators to
call for Franken's resignation, an aide told the Boston Globe she had
personally phoned him to urge him to resign, and she made the issue of
gender discrimination a cornerstone of her presidential campaign in 2020.
Warren received plaudits for her takedown of billionaire Michael
Bloomberg in the Democratic debates over his long history of misogyny,
at one point confronting the former New York City mayor over his
alleged instruction to a pregnant employee to "kill it," referring to
her pregnancy. When asked by a debate moderator what her evidence was
for the charge, Warren replied, "Her own words." She repeated that
point in a testy post-debate exchange with former MSNBC anchor Chris
Matthews, telling him, "I believe the woman, which means he's not
telling the truth." She later told Rachel Maddow the attacks were
aimed at bringing down Bloomberg's campaign, because he was "the
riskiest candidate," as his "history with women," among other things, meant
"he could never launch any of those attacks against Donald Trump."
In an interview with Hill.TV's Rising, Reade alleged that when news
outlets ignored her, she went to senators Harris and Warren with her
story. She got no response from Harris's office, she said, while
Warren's office sent her a contact form letter telling her to get in
touch with her local representative. Despite multiple requests for
comment, Warren has not yet issued a response to Reade's allegation,
nor commented on this particular charge.
Also silent has been Bernie Sanders, the only one of Biden's
challengers left in the Democratic contest. In the midst of the
Franken allegations, Sanders had initially put out a statement calling
sexual harassment "completely unacceptable" and calling for an Ethics
Committee investigation into the first accusation against Franken. As
the number of allegations piled up, he called on Franken to do "the
right thing" and resign, and later said Trump should "think about
doing the same thing" due to the assault allegations against him.
Sanders's DC office declined to respond to questions about Reade's
allegation, saying all questions about Biden should be directed to the
campaign, which hasn't responded to multiple enquiries.
Others who are silent now may have reconsidered the notion of
automatically believing the stories of sexual assault accusers since
pushing Franken to leave the Senate. Last year, seven of those
senators expressed regret for having called for Franken's resignation,
including Tom Udall (D-NM) and Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), both of whom
have endorsed Biden, and Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, who called it
"one of the biggest mistakes I've made."
Even so, Leahy has expressed sympathy with women on the other side of
sexual misconduct in recent times, saying more senators "should have believed"
Anita Hill when she came forward with sexual harassment charges
against now-Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, and calling for
delaying Kavanaugh's confirmation vote, as "we cannot brush aside
these extraordinarily serious allegations in an unseemly rush." Yet
Leahy's office did not appear to take the allegation against Biden
seriously, his spokesperson asking if Jacobin was "a right-wing
screed" before saying Leahy was busy with Appropriations Committee
business all weekend and there was little chance he would have a
statement by today. An email forwarding an interview with Reade and
recent mainstream news coverage of her allegation went unreturned.
The response from Leahy's office may reflect the dynamics of media
coverage of the race. While Reade's allegation was the talk of social
media and some left-wing outlets, like many real but unflattering
stories about Biden, it has primarily been covered by the right-wing
media sphere, going almost completely unmentioned in most mainstream
reporting on the race, including during Biden's Friday town hall on
CNN and his Sunday appearance on Meet the Press. Krystal Ball, who
interviewed Reade on Rising, has said she offered Reade's story to
reporters in the mainstream press, but "heard back crickets."
Biden has a fraught history on gender issues. He's been on the
receiving end of decades of feminist criticism for his support for
abortion restrictions, and he has long tried to shake off the stain of
his handling of Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations, where he
didn't believe Hill's story, blocked witnesses from corroborating it
under oath, and generally assisted Republicans in neutering the
effectiveness of her testimony. Upon launching his campaign last year,
a series of women came forward to accuse Biden of inappropriately
touching them, including Reade herself, who now says she wasn't ready to tell
her full story at the time.
As Reade's allegation slowly filters to the mainstream press,
Democrats are in a tricky position. On the one hand, Biden is the
overwhelming favorite to clinch the Democratic nomination, and
speaking out against him, particularly in an election year, means not
just facing the wrath of powerful Democratic donors and party leaders, but
potentially alienating the next president.
On the other hand, since 2016 - driven by the deep, bipartisan outrage
at Trump's own history of sexual assault and misogyny, and the #MeToo
moment in late 2017 - the Democratic Party has rebranded as the party
of women and believing survivors, accompanied by a genuine realignment
that has seen women voters increasingly flock to the party. Democrats
have made winning over the kinds of conservative suburban women
disgusted by Trump a key part of their electoral strategy. They have
done so by taking well-publicized stands against Republicans accused
of sexual misconduct, including alleged pedophile Roy Moore, Brett
Kavanaugh, and Trump himself, but they have also earned themselves
credibility by forcing Franken's resignation, showing that not even
high-profile Democrats could get away with such behavior.
If the party elects not to speak out on an identical allegation facing
the Democratic front-runner, or even chooses to stand by him and
dismiss the story out of hand, they risk not only damaging that
credibility, but undermining the ability of any future accuser,
whether victimized by a Democrat or Republican, to have their stories heard
and be believed.
Democrats face a choice between principle and partisan hypocrisy. We
may be watching them make their choice in real time.
