Watching Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) announce his intention to resign from the U.S. Senate was a riveting spectacle last month. But Franken didn’t just slip quietly into the night. He protested that his downfall was ironic because “a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office.”
By that tape, he was referring to Donald Trump’s vulgar conversation with NBC journalist Billy Bush, captured on a hot mic in 2005 but not broadcast until 11 years later. It was so crude and offensive that even Mike Pence condemned his comments.
The most outrageous comment, the one most cited by Democrats, involved grabbing women by their private parts. Trump apologized, but said it was just “locker room talk,” male banter, and that Bill Clinton had made worse comments to him on the golf course.
Without exaggeration, I would estimate that I listened to the Billy Bush tape at least 60 or 70 times last year, thanks mostly to MSNBC. This week I pulled up the Youtube to listen again, to be sure of my recollection. I would encourage you to do the same.
The fact is that Trump never bragged in that tape that he had grabbed women by their private parts. He didn’t joke that he had done so, either. What he said was that celebrities could grab women by their private parts with impunity.
Until very recently, that was mostly a true statement. Democrat celebrities like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey and Matt Lauer have groped their way through a couple of generations of ambitious, vulnerable interns, actresses, campaign volunteers, television producers and at least one 14-year-old boy. They were excused and accommodated by enablers like Hillary Clinton, Katie Couric, Vernon Jordan and James Carville. Chickens are coming home to roost now, but in 2005, and in 2016, they were getting away with it.
Franken claimed his forced resignation was ironic also because of Republicans’ “full support” for the Senate campaign of “a man who repeatedly preyed on young girls.” He was referring to Roy Moore, 70, of Alabama. Moore was recently accused of pursuing sexual relationships with teenagers when he was in his early thirties.
Senate (Republican) Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for Moore to “step aside” after he won the Republican primary, and said he is “obviously not fit to be in the United States Senate.” If that’s what Al Franken considers the “full support” of Republicans, I’d hate to see them oppose anybody.
Franken’s claim of a paradox is also based on the assumption that the accusations against Moore are true. It is an assumption. I believe that the accusations should be taken seriously, and that there should be no smear campaign against Moore’s accusers. But he has denied the accusations, and he is entitled to confront the evidence against him.
Ivanka Trump believes there should be a presumption of Moore’s guilt. “I have no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts,” she said last month. Enough Alabamans agreed with her Dec. 12 that Moore lost the Senate seat to a pro-abortion, pro-transsexual Democrat.
I have a Christian relative who told me that, “as a MeToo woman,” she believed the women. “MeToo” means that she was sexually harassed or victimized at some point in her life. It appears that widespread sexual victimization of women has flipped the presumption of innocence for men accused of similar offenses.
My relative is a highly educated Christian woman, and ordinarily a careful, critical thinker. But the feverish contagion of comeuppance for abusive and hypocritical men has convinced her to believe or disbelieve fellow humans based on their body parts.
The willingness to denounce, discredit or punish strangers for something that somebody else has done to you is part of a well-known psychological phenomenon called “projection,” called that because you project your anger or sense of betrayal from your previous experience onto a person who was not involved in that experience, and is usually unaware of it.
A presumption of innocence would have put the burden of proof on accusers. The presumption of innocence also puts a premium on evidence. I wasn’t there, my relative wasn’t there, and so – even though this isn’t a criminal proceeding – we ought to base our opinions about Moore’s guilt or innocence on evidence.
One piece of evidence that Democrats and swamp Republicans found persuasive was an accuser’s 40-year-old high school yearbook, with a complimentary inscription that she said Moore had written. There was nothing salacious in the inscription, but in any case Moore denied writing it.
That accuser’s attorney, Gloria Allred, is a California Democrat who served as a Hillary Clinton delegate to the Democratic National Convention. She displayed the yearbook, opened to the inscription, at a press conference last month. After Moore denied writing in the yearbook, and said he doesn’t even remember the restaurant where his accuser said he signed it, journalists questioned the attorney about it.
Allred told them she had never asked her client if she actually saw Moore sign the yearbook. She said her client would be willing to produce the yearbook for expert testing and analysis.
But she never handed the yearbook over to a third-party custodian to supervise independent expert analysis. She just hired her own expert, and reported his opinion to the press. That’s obviously not an acceptable substitute, and it suggests that the attorney is worried about her client’s evidence.
Last Friday, several weeks after vouching for the inscription in its entirety, Allred called another press conference to admit that part of it was added by her client as a notation of its date and location. This was important because the numerals in the inscription don’t match other samples of Moore’s 1977 handwriting. The accuser said she added “D.A.” after the signature, as a note to remind herself who Moore was (district attorney).
She needed a good explanation for this because skeptics had pointed out how implausible it was that Moore would have signed anything that way. He was an assistant district attorney at the time, and it would have been grandiose and obviously false for him to call himself the district attorney.
Moore’s attorney suggested that his accuser got the “D.A.” nomenclature from her own divorce document issued decades later by Moore, as a judge. It appeared after his signature on that document because “D.A.” were the initials of his assistant who stamped the judge’s signature. Although the alleged victim never appeared in court before Moore, she certainly was provided with the document dismissing her divorce action.
If the accuser’s account of Moore’s sexual aggression in 1977 were true, you would expect that she would have asked for his recusal from her 1999 divorce case. She and her attorney could have asked to have it heard by a different judge. But she didn’t. That suggests that her accusation against the judge is more recent than the dismissed 1999 divorce case.
The accuser told reporters that she recounted Moore’s 1977 assault to her most recent husband before they married. But her adult stepson has undermined that claim.
“If she told him, you would think that somewhere along the conversations of talking to his son and talking to his family that he would have mentioned something like that,” the Georgia man said. “That’s something you don’t hide from anybody.”
He said he couldn’t rule out the possibility that she is being paid to ruin Moore’s Senate election attempt.
I was in Alaska when swamp Republicans successfully defeated TEA Party Republican Joe Miller, who had beaten their incumbent in the primary. One scandal that discredited Miller was when one of his security personnel roughed up a reporter at a rally. Later, after Miller was defeated in the general election, the security guy boasted that he had infiltrated the campaign with the intention of sabotaging Miller’s chances.
Perhaps Ivanka has no reason to doubt the accounts of the accusers. But I have. You can only ignore the timing of these accusations with steely determination. Moore has been a contentious, controversial candidate in four statewide elections in Alabama. How could he be in the fight this long without true victims ever telling their story to his rivals, to women’s groups or to the media?
There was a very important election at stake. Moore led in the polls until these accusations crashed over his bow. Democrats and swamp Republicans were united.
Would they lie to win? Would they persuade others to do their lying for them? They might. It wouldn’t be the first time. Honest skepticism is not a vice. Let the accusers prove their cases.
Letter to the Editor provided by Bart Stinson
