For a quarter century we had been stuck in He Said/She Said. Now predators are on notice.
To repeat the obvious again, journalists broke the back of the scandal when they broke the code on how to report it. For a quarter century we had been stuck in the He Said/She Said. Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas gave their testimonies, each offered witnesses, and the fair minded did their best with the evidence at hand while sorting through all the swirling political agendas. In the end I believed Mr. Thomas. But nobody knows, or rather only two people do.
.. What happened during the past two years, and very much in the past few months, is that reporters and news organizations committed serious resources to unearthing numbers and patterns. Deep reporting found not one or two victims of an abuser but, in one case, that of Bill Cosby, at least 35. So that was the numbers
.. The testimony of the women who went on the record, named and unnamed, revealed patterns: the open bathrobe, the running shower, the “Let’s change our meeting from the restaurant to my room/your apartment/my guesthouse.” Once you, as a fair-minded reader, saw the numbers and patterns, and once you saw them in a lengthy, judicious, careful narrative, you knew who was telling the truth... Maybe the difference now is that the Clintons are gone.. “What’s remarkable is that these women are being believed.” Most didn’t have police reports or witnesses, and many were speaking of things that had happened years ago. “We have finally come to some kind of national consensus about the workplace.. “But Clinton was not left to the swift and pitiless justice that today’s accused men have experienced.” He was rescued instead by “a surprising force: machine feminism.”.. Gloria Steinem in March 1998 wrote a famous New York Times op-ed that, in Ms. Flanagan’s words, “slut-shamed, victim-blamed, and age-shamed” the victims and “urged compassion for and gratitude to the man the women accused.” This revealed contemporary feminism as “a weaponized auxiliary of the Democratic Party.”.. Ms. Steinem characterized the assaults as “passes,” writing: “Even if the allegations are true, the President is not guilty of sexual harassment.”.. An aging Catholic priest suggested to a friend that all this was inevitable. “Contraception degenerates men,” he said, as does abortion. Once you separate sex from its seriousness, once you separate it from its life-changing, life-giving potential, men will come to see it as just another want, a desire like any other. Once they think that, then they’ll see sexual violations as less serious, less charged, less full of weight. They’ll be more able to rationalize. It’s only petty theft, a pack of chewing gum on the counter, and I took it.
The White House gives a green light to sexual harassers
An educated woman from the corporate world asked me recently: “What is wrong with your profession?” The answer: nothing that isn’t wrong with every other profession. Indeed, the problem is worse for women in low-wage, low-skill jobs
.. 60 percent of American women voters say they’ve experienced sexual harassment, the vast majority in the workplace.
.. 1 in 5 women said they had been raped or experienced attempted rape, 1 in 4 said they had been beaten by an intimate partner, and 1 in 6 women said they had been stalked.
.. industries that generate most sexual-harassment charges. Some of the leaders:
- hospitality and food services (14 percent of complaints),
- retail (13 percent),
- manufacturing (12 percent),
- health care (11 percent), and
- administrative and support (7 percent). The
- “information” (3 percent) and
- arts and entertainment (2 percent) sectors are well down the list.
Farmworkers, janitors and restaurant workers (as The Post’s Maura Judkis and Emily Heil powerfully described) are particularly vulnerable, as are women in any position where they are isolated or work at night.
.. Almost exactly a year ago, Conway participated in a Women Rule Summit, where she preached about the importance of sisterly solidarity. “It’s great to ask how we’re making opportunities for women, but do we even have each other’s support, frankly, on our way there?” she asked.
.. President Trump excuses his support for the accused child molester by saying Moore “totally denies it,” a standard under which the late Charles Manson was also innocent.
.. This is not a he-said/she-said case. It’s a he-said/she-said-she-said-she-said-she-said-she-said-she-said-she-said-and-others-corroboratecase.
.. As a practical matter, there’s little doubt Moore sexually exploited girls
The end of shame
“I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed,” Jonathan Swift observed
.. it feels, more and more, that we are experiencing the end of shame.
.. two oddly connected stories: Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore and the tax bill.
.. For some, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and most of his colleagues, the answer has been a welcome yes.
.. To conclude that electing an accused child molester to the Senate is preferable to seating a Democrat is the epitome of shamelessness.
.. The White House line on Moore has descended from “if/then” to “let the voters of Alabama decide” to “we need the seat.”
.. Kellyanne Conway, who had once touted the no-Senate-seat-more-important line, found something even more important than defeating an accused child molester: “I’m telling you that we want the votes in the Senate to get this tax bill through.”
.. Mick Mulvaney .. once styled himself a deficit hawk and now is pushing a measure projected to add at least $1.5 trillion to the debt over 10 years.
.. the bill is so studded with gimmicks that the real cost is more like $2.2 trillion.
.. Mulvaney’s brazen willingness to admit that the price tag is phony — specifically the notion that individual tax cuts will expire. Mulvaney, making the rounds of the Sunday shows, felt no need to dissemble. “One of the ways to game the system is to make things expire . . . a lot of this is a gimmick,” he told NBC. And, on CNN, “It’s simply trying to essentially manipulate the numbers and game the system.” In other words, we’re lying to you to ram this through, and we’re not even going to bother to hide it.
.. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, what does it say, exactly, when our most senior public officials feel no such compunction?
For Slimy Senators, Our Conviction Should Be Expulsion
It involved comedy skits written by Franken, who slyly worked a kiss into the plot. When they were alone backstage before the debut, he pressed the reluctant Tweeden to rehearse the smooch. After some awkward protest, she acquiesced. He proceeded, she says, with tongue-plunging force. Humiliated but not wanting to ruin the tour, she did not make a fuss beyond warning him not to pull such a stunt again. Through the remaining two-week tour, she avoided him when possible, and he reacted with “petty insults.”
.. A statute-of-limitations defense, by contrast, simply means the state is barred from prosecuting. It is not a finding that the accused is not guilty.
.. Patently, Al Franken is not fit to be a United States senator. That is not a close call, certainly not if we judge Franken in accordance with threats by lawmakers to expel Roy Moore if he is elected. Of course, if Moore makes it to a Senate swearing-in, it will be because the citizens of Alabama, fully aware of claims of egregious abuse of women, voted him into office anyway. In Franken’s case, the voters will not have endorsed him and his abusive conduct is not merely “claimed” — it is readily provable.
.. Democrats like to posture about the “war on women.” Shouldn’t Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell force them to take an accountable vote on Al Franken? And if there is any thought of refusing to seat Roy Moore, wouldn’t a Franken expulsion put Alabama voters on notice