By Big Al When The New York Times slaps the Democrats, you know that there is trouble brewing.
Big Al says: “I will now keep reading The New York Times as I think that they got the message”!
Roadkill on Capitol Hill
BY MAUREEN DOWD The New York Times
WASHINGTON
Alan Simpson was appalled by the injustice of it all.
Back in 1991, during the incendiary Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, the salty Republican senator from Wyoming was very concerned at the idea that a woman would wait many years after a disturbing encounter and then “come out of the night like a missile and destroy a man.”
It has been a rough spell for men whose primal fear is women coming out of the night like missiles.
Even though then-Sen. Simpson absurdly claimed during those hearings that it was puzzling that Hill had not come forward sooner given that the nation’s capital was “fertile ground” for a woman with a sexual harassment complaint to be treated fairly, it took 26 more years of rampant sexual harassment – and a fortune in secret settlements on Capitol Hill – before women took to the ramparts.
For all the furor surrounding those hearings, male politicians did not learn anything about sexual harassment. Most of the all-male, all-white members of the Judiciary Committee privately – and mistakenly – assumed that Thomas and Hill had had some sort of work romance that soured. So they just went through the motions of looking into it and then got back to business as usual in the men’s club.
It took far too long, but something finally snapped with women. Why had we allowed ourselves to think of abusive behavior as the norm for so long? Maybe it was this pent-up anger that has given the cascading accusations such a feral edge.
“There’s roadkill, yeah,” conceded one Democratic woman in Congress. “People are being forced to resign whose conduct was not as bad as other people’s.” And she believes that a lot more missile-fearing legislators will quietly slink away, opening up a lot of seats for women and minorities and a younger generation.
There is rough justice in this initial barrage of j’accuses, before people work out a hierarchy of sins and due process. That may stem from the decades when so many women accusers – from Anita Hill to Bill Clinton’s inamorata and prey – were treated as collateral damage, smeared and pushed aside so that the careers of powerful men could be preserved.
For the first time, as they shudder watching the reputations and livelihoods of so many high-profile men disappear in a blink, many men are paying close attention to women’s stories of being manhandled and minimized, out of self-preservation if not sympathy.
The more potent lesson of the Hill-Thomas hearings (echoed in the 2000 Florida recount) was that Democrats often lose out because Republicans play to win, and they play rough.
So Al Franken, who is good on women’s rights, resigns for wet kisses and random squeezes while President Donald Trump, …read more
Source:: The Korelin Economics Report
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