Al Franken is a monster

Al Franken doing that thing with his mouth like Anthony Weiner.

Well, I'm shocked. A little. Al Franken is as bad George H.W. Bush. Two more women say he groped them while posing for photos.

From the Huffington Post:

“I shook his hand, and he put his arm around my waist and held it there,” the second woman said. “Then he moved it lower and cupped my butt.”

“I was completely mortified,” she added.

In order to escape the situation, the woman excused herself to go to the bathroom. At that point, she said, Franken leaned in and suggested that he accompany her. She grabbed her friend and fled to the bathroom without him.

The second woman told several people ― including one of the reporters for this story, Zachary Roth ― about the incident some years ago, but didn’t want it reported then. She said she didn’t tell anyone at the time of the incident because inappropriate behavior from men was not that unusual to her or her friends.

“Sexual harassment happens so often, you have to learn how to move on,” she said, describing her thinking at the time.

Several other factors also left her feeling powerless.

“I felt like I didn’t have a voice,” she said. “This man had all of the power, all of the authority. In addition, he is a white man and I am a woman of color. I was 21 years old. And I was afraid that he would use all of those privileges to discredit me, to make me feel even smaller than I already felt.”

Getting rid of Franken wouldn't be so bad. From counterpunch.com:

Just months ago Franken was one of three co-sponsors of the dangerous  Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2017. This bill looked to increase US interventionist powers. Franken has always been an enemy of the world’s people, even when he wooed liberal appeal at home. In the current political climate, imperialism and sexual harassment seem to be the only things we can count on.

What was glossed over in the extensive coverage of Franken’s harassment was that it occurred while he was performing comedy for the military abroad. Franken performed for the United Service Organization (USO) often. He was all for that stupid Iraq war.  Now might be a good time to talk about how imperialism and patriarchy are related. But we would rather just humiliate and eliminate the individual men who did these crimes than do anything to change our collective culture of violence.

How many people are there walking around groping strangers? Is this a common thing? One time, they showed security video on the news of employees chasing down and tackling a groper in a department store. In the local news, a guy who had the same name as a guy I once worked with was chased down by a university student and arrested for groping a college girl. Later, the student who made the citizen's arrest was arrested for the same thing.

"Do you know who I am?" he told the cops.