Summary: there is a Republican conspiracy aimed at two of our giants of Congress, Al Franken and John Conyers. The Republicans, led apparently by that freak Roger Stone, are busily exploiting the moral panic that revelations about allegations of sexual harassment has engendered. The Republicans have weaponized a very real social phenomenon, and are using it to attempt to protect Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore and the harasser-in-chief Donald Trump.
Last week, Al Franken.
This morning, John Conyers.
There appears to be a moral panic developing, centered on allegations of “powerful men” allegedly “harassing,” “disrespecting,” or “victimizing” women. Now, sexual harassment is a real thing, and both women — and men — can be its victims. Nevertheless, the moral panic that is apparently taking shape appears to bear all the hallmarks of an organized Republican effort to weaponize it and to use it against Democrats. The involvement of Republican dirty trickster (and possible Russian asset) Roger Stone ought to tip us off that this moral panic may not be genuine.
The recent allegations of “sexual misconduct” almost uniformly involve Democratic officeholders. It may not be too much to say, though certain Democrats love to pooh-pooh the idea, that there is a real and palpable Republican conspiracy in place, which the evidence available to us suggests may have been orchestrated by that malignant freak Roger Stone.
Why would Republicans be interested in trashing the reputations of Democratic officeholders. Aside from the overall strategic goal of weaponizing normal human behavior for nefarious political purposes, the Republicans have a very clear and obvious tactical goal here.
That goal is to protect the Senate candidacy of quondam Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was suspended from the bench twice for his flagrant defiance of the United States Constitution he swore an oath to protect and uphold.
Thus far, the Russians — er, the Republicans — have done passably well in protecting Roy Moore, the Kremlin’s candidate for Senator from Alabama. In doing so, they have played many Democrats like a Stradivarius. Too many Democrats have responded to the Franken imbroglio like prim, prissy, schoolmarms, rushing into print with cowardly attacks on the Minnesota senator, calling for his resignation and, to all intents and purposes, demanding the man’s head on a pike.
Even worse, the Bernard Sanders-aligned “Justice Democrats” have also begun agitating for Franken’s removal and replacement with Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison. If we didn’t know how poor the Sanders people’s sense of optics was, all we need to point out is that agitation for the removal of a Jewish senator and his replacement by a Muslim congressman bears all the hallmarks of a convenient anti-Semitism which ought to have no place in the ranks of the Democratic Party.
The cowardice of Democrats in this moral panic is by no means surprising. Democrats suffer from two political ailments that they need to purge from their body politic. The first is the tendency, any time someone like Leeann Tweeden comes forward with some “salacious” allegation, no matter how old or stale, to go into a crouch, piss themselves, and engage in theatrical mea culpas while floating away on waves of their own fear pee. Unfortunately, Al Franken lived down to that stereotype, rather than by allowing the situation to develop for a few days before pushing back.
The second political ailment from which Democrats suffer is the one that permits interlopers and fifth columnists like Bernard Sanders and his fifth column closet Trump supporters to attempt a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. Simply put, it’s the unfortunate tendency Democrats have to want to occupy unimpeachable a high moral ground, and to want to be led to that unimpeachable high moral ground by candidates of unimpeachable virtue and purity.
While the Russians — er, Republicans — are content to cast their votes for real, admitted, harassers and victimizers of women, for reasons of partisanship and cynicism, Democrats demand a kind of perfection from their candidates that we should not expect to see in the Calendar of Saints. While the Republicans would give a pass to a man who shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, the Democrats, always prim, proper, dour, sour, and schoolmarmish, would willingly get themselves into a pearl clutching swivet if a Democratic officeholder or political hopeful double parked his car or made an off-color remark to one of the finches in the ficus tree in his front yard.
And because Democrats want to attain utopia in a day, and demand to be led there by candidates of dazzling Simon purity, they are often tragically unready and unprepared when Republican dirty tricksters and ratfuckers like Roger Stone and his ilk set in train the kind of obvious conspiracy that is now being run against Al Franken and John Conyers.
Al Franken and John Conyers are two stalwarts of the Democratic Party. They deserve the full throated and unhesitating protection and support of that selfsame Democratic Party. They do not need to be stabbed in the back by whiny, pearl-clutching so-called liberals who have neither the courage of conviction nor the willingness to push back against dishonorable tactics.
Because Democrats should be pushing back against what is increasingly obviously a Republican/Russian disinformation operation to try to drive Al Franken and John Conyers out of the Congress of the United States. We need at all times, but particularly now during the Trumpoe Vremya, the Trump Time, to be willing to push back, and to push back hard against people, even ostensibly in our own ranks, who try to ratfuck the Democratic Party. Our operating philosophy should be taken from Sean Connery’s unforgettable line in the 1987 remake of The Untouchables: “they pull a knife; you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital; you send one of theirs to the morgue!”
Democrats have been bringing knives to gunfights for too long. Given what we are starting to know about Leeann Tweeden, this case represents the perfect opportunity for Democrats to un-limber much heavier artillery than we have been accustomed to bring to a fight.
They pull a knife; we pull a gun. They send one of ours the hospital, we send one of theirs to the morgue!
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in Rancho Mirage. He is a former member of the Cathedral City city council and a former member of the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee, which he left in disgust because they were more interested in playing nice with the Republicans than in fighting to win. The views set forth herein are his own.
