Senator Al Franken (D, MN) says he’s sorry, that his groping of women—he’s a warm person, and he hugs people, don’t you know—”crossed a line.”
I’ve learned from recent stories that in some of these encounters, I crossed a line for some women—and I know that any number is too many.
We’ve seen earlier the value of his apologies.
And we’ve seen already why he bothers to apologize.
And we know that he still wants to be a Senator.
Everett, WA, has passed two ordinances that presume to define “lewd” behavior and forces employees to stop wearing bikinis on the job or otherwise showing “too much” skin. Everett, it seems, has too many coffee shops that employee bikini-clad baristas to suit the prim town fathers.
After all, they claim,
The skin-flaunting coffee servers could turn men into the next Harvey Weinstein.
This is just projection. These Liberals, with their two ordinances, confess their weakness of character, their own lack of morality, their own inability to resist temptation, and they insultingly assume that all of us are as weak, amoral, and temptation-accepting as they are.
I’ve written before about the inherently racist and sexist nature of the Left’s “affirmative” action programs. Here’s another example of that, courtesy of Harvard University.
The US Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the use of race in Harvard University’s admissions practices and has accused the university of failing to cooperate with the probe, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The Justice Department is investigating complaints that formed the basis of a federal civil lawsuit filed in 2014 in Boston, according to the documents. That suit alleges Harvard intentionally discriminates against Asian-Americans by limiting the number of Asian students who are admitted.
Apparently, the only thing affirmative about such programs is the affirmation of the Left’s view of minorities (and of women, come to that) and their ability to compete on a level playing field, an affirmation first made appallingly plain by President Woodrow Wilson (D, and proud Progressive):
[S]egregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen [of the black press].
Wilson held this position because he considered blacks inherently inferior and so needed to be protected from competition he assumed they could not win. Today, the Left takes the same view, using a different tool. Today, the Left’s “affirmative” action also assumes blacks (and women) cannot compete on a level playing field, so it gives, openly and blatantly, additional weight to race and gender—because without that additional weight blacks and women can’t compete.
In Harvard’s case, too, the “affirmative” action program also apparently affirms that Americans with Asian heritage are so inherently superior that they must be held back so that those inherently inferior blacks (and women, mind) can keep up. It’s unimportant to the Left that this denies those held-back Americans their own equal opportunity right, the right as another Progressive icon, Theodore Roosevelt, put it at Osawatomie, Kansas, that
each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.
Go figure. And then go vote next fall and again in 2020.
Read the whole thing over at the Washington Post, it’s a long and shameful description of NLMSM icon Charlie Rose’s fall from grace—and a shocking between-the-lines read that Rose got to that position of grace in the first place—but I’m struck by a couple of comments in particular that Rose has made about these revelations and associated accusations. The first is this gem:
I am greatly embarrassed. I have behaved insensitively at times….
Wow. How does Rose suppose his embarrassment compares to the humiliation and damage suffered by those eight (and more?) women he abused? And his abuse was insensitive behavior, yet….
And this one:
I accept responsibility for that, though I do not believe that all of these allegations are accurate. I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings….
Now, as readers of my stuff know, and particularly from what I’ve written in this sort of scandal recently breaking, I’m a firm believer in innocent until proven guilty at trial, and Rose should be afforded the same consideration, but—again, wow. “I did some of this stuff, but not all of it; and it was all a big misunderstanding, anyway!?” This utterly destroyed what was otherwise a (structurally, anyway) sound apology.
Separately, but just as important, how is it possible that CBS, PBS, and Bloomberg TV were unaware of these abuses over that long stretch of time? Because no formal complaints were made? Who believes that?
That would be utter nonsense, unless we were to believe that those three teams of executives, every single one of them high-powered, highly intelligent, highly alert, fully grown adult humans were in fact just a couple of monkeys busily hearing no evil and seeing no evil.
Every organization has its rumor mill; these abuses were being talked about around the water coolers, in the wash rooms, in workers’ cubicles. It boggles the sensibility to claim that these things didn’t eventually bubble up to “management” separately from formal complaints. It boggles the sensibility yet further, that having heard these rumors, the executives were so lacking in initiative that they couldn’t look into them on their own initiative.
Furthermore, at least one knew from direct testimony. Here’s Yvette Vega, Rose’s longtime executive producer, responding to one women with an explicit complaint:
That’s just Charlie being Charlie.
Vega thought everything was jake. Guys are guys. No worries, dearie. Vega added, claiming to have learned better:
I should have stood up for them. I failed. It is crushing. I deeply regret not helping them.
Yewbetcha. Now, what is Vega doing with her “regret?” Besides bodice-ripping and wallowing in it, I mean.
And this, from an unnamed PBS spokeswoman:
PBS was shocked to learn today of these deeply disturbing allegations[.]
We’re shocked—shocked—to learn that inappropriate behavior is going on in this establishment. Right.
Maybe it’s time that, in addition to holding the miscreants to account, we started firing and, yes, jailing, supervisors and executives who actively condoned, if not outright encouraged, these behaviors through their own conscious decisions to ignore rampant rumors and their deliberate choices to hide their heads in the sand and not investigate—whether to protect the abused employees or to clear the good names of other employees subjected to salacious, but baseless, rumors.
These guys shouldn’t be allowed to hide under their desks in their corner offices anymore.
Germany’s President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whose position is less than that of the Chancellor’s (the current incumbent is Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Union) but currently has a critical role, has let the cat out of the bag regarding the attitude of that nation’s political elite toward democracy and the people of the nation.
Recall that Germany held an election a few weeks ago in which the governing CDU/SPD coalition was heavily defeated. The Social Democrat Party, a center left party, lost most heavily, and it has announced that it will not ally with the CDU in any new government. The CDU also lost heavily, although it retains the most seats in the German parliament, the Bundestag. That most seats, though, is a bare plurality, not enough to govern effectively. Merkel entered talks with The Greens Party and the Free Democrats Party, whose numbers combined with the CDU’s would have given such a coalition a (bare) majority in the Bundestag. These were difficult talks since the three parties are polar opposites socially, economically, politically, pick a dimension (and yes, I’m aware of the difficulty of a three-way opposite construction—as were Merkel and the heads of those two parties, but they went for it, anyway).
The talks broke down, and with the SPD in firm opposition, Merkel is left with the choice of a minority government or new elections. She prefers new elections.
Here’s where Steinmeier has exposed the elite’s Know Better attitude. The Wall Street Journal has quoted his position:
The parties have campaigned for responsibility in the Sept 24 elections, a responsib[ility] that Germany’s constitution says can’t simply be handed back to voters. This responsibility goes far beyond someone’s own interests.
Except that the German Constitution says exactly that, were the newly elected Bundestag unable to agree on a new coalition or a Chancellor. However, the elites Know Better, and they insist that the people—the voters, Germany’s citizens—can’t be trusted with governance. After all, they screwed up their just concluded chance, right?
Hmm….