Right and Left React to the Accusations Against Al Franken
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/us/politics/right-and-left-al-franken.html Version 0 of 1. The political news cycle is fast, and keeping up can be overwhelming. Trying to find differing perspectives worth your time is even harder. That’s why we have scoured the internet for political writing from the right and left that you might not have seen. Has this series exposed you to new ideas? Tell us how. Email us at ourpicks@nytimes.com. For an archive of all the Partisan Writing Roundups, check out Our Picks. Jonathan V. Last in The Weekly Standard: If it were up to Mr. Last, Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, would have never won his seat to begin with. Using material from books that chronicle Mr. Franken’s time at “Saturday Night Live,” Mr. Last makes the case that, during his career as a comedian, his casual relationship with drugs and penchant for off-color skits ought to have disqualified him from office. Read more » _____ John Ziegler in Mediaite: Mr. Ziegler disagrees with Mr. Franken “on almost every political issue.” However, despite his personal feelings toward the senator, Mr. Ziegler worries that people online and in the news media are too quick to presume guilt. He wonders, for instance, why Mr. Franken’s accuser, Leeann Tweeden, kept an incriminating photograph of Mr. Franken for so long. “Was it because she was told when she woke up that Franken had ‘assaulted’ her and she wanted evidence of this for future use,” he asks, “or, perhaps more likely, did someone send it to her because it was a funny keepsake from their trip which is now being used to create a completely different impression of what happened?” Read more » _____ Kevin D. Williamson in National Review: This week, before the Franken accusations emerged, Democrats and liberals in the news media were beginning to reassess their feelings about former President Bill Clinton. According to Mr. Williamson, the rejection of the Clintons now, years after Mr. Clinton was accused of rape and a year after Hillary Clinton ran for office, are merely a cynical political ploy: “Our progressive friends have discovered their consciences on the Clinton matter at the precise moment the Clintons ceased to be useful instruments of political power.” The same cynicism, he argues, should be applied to liberals who have been swift to condemn Mr. Franken. It costs them nothing, politically, to remove a Democratic senator from a state likely to put another Democrat in his seat. Read more » _____ Alyssa Rosenberg in The Washington Post: No Democratic leader who has committed sexual assault, no matter how effective or charismatic they are, is irreplaceable, Ms. Rosenberg writes. Sometimes, men who publicly work to empower and protect women, can have some very troubling skeletons in their closet. This produces, as Ms. Rosenberg puts it, “a sort of tunnel vision,” which distracts their supporters and “prevents us from pushing other men to step up to the plate.” Read more » _____ Ezra Klein in Vox: Mr. Klein is unequivocal. Mr. Franken should be investigated and held accountable for his actions. But so should President Trump, who faces over a dozen allegations of sexual assault. Read more » _____ Ed Kilgore in New York Magazine: This week, Rebecca Traister, also writing for New York Magazine, warned that there was a national reckoning around sexual harassment coming. Mr. Kilgore sees the beginning of a political reckoning in the accusations against Roy S. Moore, the Republican nominee for a Senate seat in Alabama, and Mr. Franken. Read more » _____ Nicole Hemmer in U.S. News & World Report: Ms. Hemmer published this article about how Democrats must face what she described as the “sins” of party leaders like Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy before the news about Mr. Franken broke. However, as she put it on Twitter, the column was all the more pertinent after revelations about the senator from Minnesota came out. Read more » _____ Damon Linker in The Week: Mr. Linker, who is describes himself as “to the right of the left and the left of the right,” warns his readers that news of sexual harassment by government officials will not end with the accusations leveled against Mr. Franken. He asks his readers to think of “all the pages and interns and young staffers cycling through all of those offices on Capitol Hill, year after year, decade after decade.” Read more » _____ Chris Cillizza on CNN: Mr. Cillizza is not impressed with Mr. Franken’s two efforts at an apology. The first, he writes, was an “instinctual response” that amounted to admitting to a bad joke. It was “tone deaf,” Mr. Cillizza said. The second apology is a “clear cleanup attempt,” on the part of Mr. Franken, who might be hoping that Americans’ short attention span might relieve him of any accountability down the road. Read more » _____ Want the Partisan Writing Roundup in your inbox? Sign up for the Morning Briefing Newsletter or the What We’re Reading Newsletter. Have thoughts about this collection? Email feedback to ourpicks@nytimes.com. |