I'm confused by this statement
"the closest thing to the "right" side is falling over what amounts to a load of nonsense in the grand scheme"
What is this "load of nonsense"?
Is the suggestion here that Franken should have carried on?
That his actions were not serious enough to warrant a resignation?
I'm getting that the underlying argument is not about what he has been accused of doing but about how his continuing in the job would have been perceived.
The Trump era is one of deep and open immorality in politics. Moore is merely one example.........men who proclaim their allegiance to the Christian faith while acting in openly hateful, duplicitous, and plainly murderous ways. In response to this unbearable spectacle, the roughly half of Americans who are actually deeply invested in thinking of themselves as good people are trying to claim a moral high ground. The urge to do so by policing sex is not surprising. As Susan Sontag pointed out more than half a century ago, Christianity has “concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue” and, consequently, “everything pertaining to sex has been a ‘special case’ in our culture.”
The case of Franken makes it all that much more clear that this conversation is, in fact, about sex, not about power, violence, or illegal acts. The accusations against him, which involve groping and forcible kissing, arguably fall into the emergent, undefined, and most likely undefinable category of “sexual misconduct.” Put more simply, Franken stands accused of acting repeatedly like a jerk, and he denies that he acted this way. The entire sequence of events, from the initial accusations to Franken’s resignation, is based on the premise that Americans, as a society, or at least half of a society, should be policing non-criminal behavior related to sex.
I said in the Trump thread when this story broke
" It has turned into mob rule and the only people who will survive it are men like Trump and Moore who know no shame, lie as a matter of course and honestly believe that they can abuse, harass and grope whomever they please.
Franken will have his own day of reckoning - he's admitted what he did, he will pay the price."
(Except he went on to deny further accusations and didn't apologise)
So currently the choice is to lie, deny and carry on or as Trump did, or as Franken did when enough Dems turned on him, resign.
For the moment there is no middle ground and it's difficult to see how there can be given the individual set of circumstances in every case.
Fear not though, over the coming months and years men who see how "successful" Trump is will be in the ascendency.
Firstly because the majority don't really see groping women as being "all that bad" (hell just walk into a crowded bar in a tight pair of jeans if you want proof, or a crowded Italian bus), and secondly they don't trust women.
In relation to the relative seriousness of groping, as I said on a previous page:
"When people talk about a sliding scale consider that the acts that are being classified all involve the infliction of physical or emotional pain, most times both, these acts then provoke feelings of fear, hurt, humiliation, shame, doubt, revulsion and loathing in the person on the receiving end."
