Richard Painter on Al Franken: We need more facts but much of this fits an old GOP playbook
Richard Painter: We need more facts but much of this fits an old GOP playbookThe article attached is not written by Painter.
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With all of the sleazy, disgusting and lurid sexual problems that seem to be a part of the Republican official’s way of life, it was only a matter of time before there was a lash back against a Democrat. This is not to say that there aren’t any liberals that are never part of this mix, it’s just that the overtly religious doctrine that conservatives follow does lend to repressed sexual conditions.
So in scanning any Democrat that maintained both logic and a powerful presence as well as one that is knee-deep in calling out those Republicans involved in lying and RussiaGate, there was one name that is both popular and had the potential to be taken down: Al Franken. And so, a woman named Leeann Tweeden has come forward to accuse Al Franken of sexual assault during a USO tour in which they performed together in Afghanistan in 2006. Conservatives know the liberal market and also understand that if they throw out a piece of red meat that accuses a well-respected Democrat of having bad behavior, liberals will climb all over each other to rip him or her apart; and that is exactly what happened as many liberals called for Franken to step down, refused to believe or look at any of the logic behind the accusation and proceeded to argue with each other under the defense that “we are better than them”.
Everyone is familiar with Franken’s background as a comedian and his celebrity on the comedy show Saturday Night Live. Having attended many shows at the Los Angeles famed “Comedy Store” in the 80’s, I am also well-aware that the skits that were performed away from the camera were often saucy and bawdy. This made Franken’s past a hot potential to find at least one or two questionable situations and when you added in his work with the USO tours, it was a formula for success for conservatives.
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But as a drooling media grabs onto this accusatory story and runs with it in their typical non-journalistic way to get improved ratings, they are missing some very important pieces of the puzzle. Examining Franken’s history and combining it with Tweeden’s, there is a very strong smell of a rat, and the “rat” has the name of Fox and conservatives all over it.
More: https://democracyguardian.com/al-franken-the-obvious-setup-and-liberals-took-the-bait-5f3515d379a0
= new reply since forum marked as read
All I'm seeing on DU is complete support for Al Franken.
Anybody on DU who wants Franken to resign should be banned from DU. They don't belong here. We fight for the good guys, and Franken is one of the good guys. It's also an evil & obvious setup by the right-wing idiots like Steve Bannon.
They were probably already written before the shit hit the fan.
What has Bannon been doing since he left the White House?
Working on this kind of stuff.
"Dirty tricks" meet "obscene campaign contributions."
Republicans favored Franken’s resignation over Democrats, but not by much: 56 percent to 49 percent. A total of 49 percent of independent voters also thought Franken should resign. Men and women were about equally divided: 51 percent of men thought he should resign, as did 49 percent of women.
Almost as many Democrat voters want him to resign as Republican voters. In fact, from that poll, it looks like 44 % of Republicans don't even think he should resign. But 49% of Democrats do.
Democrat voters take cues from leaders, like Pelosi, Schumer, and others. And when they don't come out in full attack mode against an obvious set up, but instead let it fester in fear of the PC police within their own party, this is what happens.
Van Jones had to resign from Obama's administration because he called Republicans 'assholes'. Pretty much immediately. We don't waste time stumbling over ourselves proving how puritanical we can be. For what? I'll bet if Van Jones had stayed on, in two weeks no one would have even cared. And that was just a 'bad' word. My gawd, anything sexual, even PRETEND sexual like Franken was involved in on the tour, can be used against us to weed out our most productive politicians.
I pray on my knees that Franken holds in there. I know he can weather this especially as more information comes out about these charlatans.
Response to The Velveteen Ocelot (Reply #39)
tour because. (As someone who used to get National Lampoon as a subscription, as a female, I found nothing alarming about the pic, seen much worse in the magazine 
)
Their responses were right inline as to why comedians no longer college tours any longer - no sense of perspective or a sense of humor on the audience's part. Comedy is supposed to make you uncomfortable, not kill the messenger.
And, yeah, those who wanted to throw him under the bus immediately. It was hard to decide if they were trolls or not, English was spot on.
And Happy Thanksgiving!
I hesitated when I saw the source for this story. KABC-AM (talk radio station here in L.A. that slants hard right) - which has NEVER been the dateline of ANY news story, EVER. I know because I used to work at their FM sister station which was literally across the hall. We shared the same little newsroom where the teletype machines were. They never broke news, because they never had an emphasis on a big full-service format with a vibrant, well-staffed news department. It was a talk format then and still is, now.
There was a two-host team in the morning, two men. One was a modified yuck-it-up type - who usually handled the kicker stories (lighter people-related news stories that tend to air at the end of the newscast), and his partner was an older man who was the guy who read the headlines at the top and bottom of the hour and any breaking news that might come up. At which time the next guy up would spend his whole time slot talking about whatever breaking news had come up, complete with lots of guests lined up on the phone from all over the nation (and the world), and listener calls, too. TERRIBLE signal strength, and lousy penetration in SoCal, and there were parts of the city of Los Angeles in which you couldn't even hear them! IN L.A.!
One Christmas, I was slated to work on the FM to fill in for one of the Monday-through-Friday people who did news in drivetime. I had the morning shift because the FM news director had Christmas week off. I took in a big platter of chocolate chip cookies I'd made. During a commercial break over on the AM, I went into their control room with the cookies. From the on-air both, they saw me in the control room standing next to the engineer, and motioned for me to come in. Which I did. With the cookies. And they put me on the air to chit-chat for a few minutes, introduced me by name, and as one of the FM folks from across the hall, and immediately started making jokes about my cookies - and what might be cooked into them (since you could regularly smell pot smoke in the hallways because the ventilation system went everywhere). 
As it happens, I did NOT bake anything into them. Just to be safe. Besides, I'd only been there a few months. And who knows who would grab a cookie from farther up the hall where the executive-types and sales department and upper management all had their offices.
They weren't as hard-right back then. They slid downward that way over the years. They became the "poor second place" option you might have switched to if the BIG talk station across town, that carried limbaugh, was in a commercial break or something, and they had the ratings to prove it (or lack thereof). And they NEVER made any news or broke any stories or did any special reports or investigative reports or ANYTHING like that. Forty years in the L.A. market, more than half of it on the air, and I NEVER EVER saw KABC-AM step to the front as far as distinguishing itself as having an active, viable news department or break ANY big stories (or small stories, either). They were never the station you'd turn to for breaking news anyway, especially since L.A. for several decades had two VERY viable, very well-established, award-winning all-news AM stations. They didn't even have regular traffic reports except in drivetime.
I don't think Painter will ever be one of us, but he's (I guess) a moderate and sensible Republican, if there is such a thing.
What's cool is that he's willing to speak up in the national media to throw this evil in their faces. That takes balls and most of the "moderate" Republicans are too chicken to do it. Maybe he's trying to redeem himself from the Bush 2 bullshit that he participated in, back in the day.
But anyway it's a very good thing that he's speaking up now.
His background in law, ethics, and being around GOP politicians gives him more credibility than almost anybody IMO in the realm of unprovable, he-said-she-said, sexual harassment claims. It seems especially difficult in the case of a former professional comedian to discern what may have constituted groping vs. what may have been just good-natured goofing around for a laugh vs. not happening at all.
...so no, I can't say that I remember the crazy story about Nancy Pelosi. None of it surprises me though.
The rightwingers want to burn Al Franken because of Jeff Sessions, their poster boy. Remember the confirmation hearing for Sessions when Franken got him to say under oath, on TV, that he never met with the Russians or had any communication with them during the campaign? It was perjury - Sessions lied under oath.
Al Franken has been very effective at the Senate hearings and he's done some excellent interviews on MSNBC and other news outlets. It would be safe to say the rightwingers really hate him and will do just about anything to burn him.
Also they need a deflection to get the Democrats off of serial-pedophile Roy Moore's back, just long enough to get him elected. It's as simple as that.
