Alec Baldwin and Al Franken

Alec Baldwin has just come out with a statement defending Kathy Griffin.

Al Franken has just canceled his scheduled appearance on the Bill Maher show.

Christ on a crutch - it is a sad day in Liberal Land when Alec Baldwin comes off as a man of principle in contrast to Al Franken, who has revealed himself now to be a pusillanimous pussified dickless ball-less pussy.

If I were Franken I would also cancel. This is not his fight. If he goes on a fucking TV show he has to address what you aptly characterized as an asinine fracas. He's been the most effective senator lately. When he scheduled the appearance he did not do so to get involved in a free speech/racism tussle.

Yeah, what Rick said. I saw Chelsa Handler interview Frankin on her Netflix show and he explained how being a politician cramped his style these days - in a very coherent and articulate manner. Good watch if you have access.

- Or he could have gone on Maher's show and addressed the issue, agreeing beforehand with Maher to only spend, like 2 or 3 minutes on the subject, and then on to actual issues. That would have been the common sense non-pussy thing to do.

But he did not do that.

I think as a liberal he hurt himself with the choice he made. There is a huge swathe of liberals who are not pussified politically-correct nannies/ninnies. Franken is on our shit list now. He did not have to be - he chose to be.

If he can get by with the support of fellow pussies only then more power to him.

Kathy Griffin should calm down and not worry so much. Actual criminal charges against her are going nowhere. She's a publicly-known comedian. Her gesture, however poor in taste, was a feature of this. There's no sane argument to make that she ever had any intentions of doing or of advocating anyone else's doing any harm to the president. Bad taste, yes, perhaps--but comedians live by being outrageous.

None but a kangaroo court could convict her.

> 5

Alec Baldwin's statement was to the point as he cited his own run-in years ago with republicans who alleged his satire constituted an actual physical threat.

As stated before I hated to see Griffin cave. Whatever damage was done to her career prospects was done by herself in her crybaby response to the criticism and not so much by the original performance art.

This whole episode reminds me of the Piss Christ brouhaha back in 1987 - Wiki link below.

If some people are going to get all enraged by some performance art and go nuts then, again, I shit on such people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ

>1 JGL53: >4 JGL53:
Why do you use 'pussy' as an insult? Are you just being a dick?

> 7

I assume "pussy" is just shorthand for "pusillanimous", in addition in some contexts to being shorthand for "pussycat". Am I wrong?

If so it won't be the first time. I am not a trained semanticist or linguist. You, on the other hand, seem a cunning linguist.

Thanks for your help.

>7 Crypto-Willobie: >8 JGL53: At the risk of being castigated for encouraging the banter LOL.

BTW I read that Jerry Seinfeld weighed in on the head stunt and labeled it a bad joke. He said all comedians tell a bad joke at one time or another and that he was surprised at the reaction.

I keep flashing back to Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Wavy Gravy and their contemporaries trying to think of a comparison but it all seems at bit foggy.

>9 DugsBooks: Maybe this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Realist#.22The_Parts_That_Were_Left_Out_of_the...
http://www.ep.tc/realist/74/01.html

At least it was creative.

> 9 "....I keep flashing back to Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Wavy Gravy and their contemporaries trying to think of a comparison but it all seems at bit foggy."

Paul Krassner was in that group too and I think he took the prize for "Most Gross and Grotesque Satire Ever Produced in the Entire Milky Way Galaxy" - and maybe even the entire freaking Universe.

I refer to his infamous article - presented as a straight up and serious news report - that on the night of the JFK assassination, on the plane back from Dallas LBJ sneaked into the area where the body was, jumped up on the casket and had sexual intercourse with the wound in JFK's neck.

Some people actually believed it was a factual story.

I am pretty sure Krassner made it up though.

In any case, Kathy Griffin can't hold a candle, if you know what I mean.

(BTW, there are several books available by Krassner that are compilations of his writings. They may not be to everyone's taste but I liked them.)

>11 JGL53: Now who's blocking whom? :-p

> 10

Jesus H. Christ - I guess great minds do think alike - we posted simultaneously the same thing.

>8 JGL53: You're being disingenuous. Unless you think that by 'dick' I mean to compare you to Richard III...

> 14

Being compared to Richard III would be considered an insult by many people no doubt but is water off a duck's back in my case. Just try to insult me while avoiding libel - I dare you. lol.

I use expressive or metaphorical language a lot because, well, I just like to do so. I also use vulgarisms as the evil spirits move me, as I don't buy into the absurd cliché that use of such indicates lack of either intelligence or imagination. I seem to get by OK on whatever level of intelligence and imagination I inherited from my ancestors and really have no motivation to "do better" to please others, whether they be friends, relatives - or 12 year-old children posing on the internet google machine as grownups, as I suspect some large percentage of the posters on LT actually are, present company excluded.

lol.

>15 JGL53:
I did not compare you to Richard III, nor call you a dick for that matter. If, if, if.

However, your use of 'pussy,' 'pussies,' and 'pussified,' in >1 JGL53: and >4 JGL53: are pretty clearly a case of using synecdoche to portray women as types of weakness and inferiority -- 'dickless, ball-less' as you gloss it -- and hence as insulting comparatives. In the same sentence you use pusillanimous as a parallel pun but I don't believe for a second that you think 'pussy' as an insult or term of humiliation derives from that word.

>16 Crypto-Willobie: Yet there is no denying that you are now calling him a synechdochist.

As someone once said, 'LOL'

> 16

1. At various times I have heard a woman use the word "pussy" to describe the, let's say, lack of initiative on the part of some person, either a man or another women. Could be I just run with a rough crowd, though.

2. Life can sometimes seem like just one insult after another - to some people, apparently. Those who are off-put by the use of the word "pussy" as a metaphor for "female weakness" could probably spend their time more effectively focusing on some other horror of modern life. In other words, suck it up and move on. A cunning linguist such as yourself should have bigger fish to fry - or something.

> 17

As long as he doesn't call me a synecdouche. That would hurt my feelings.

--------

I know I should be more sensitive and show more respect for womanhood, considering that my own mother, my one sister, and my SO are all women, but unfortunately my personal hero is comedian Gilbert Gottfried, so as for language the deal is pretty much queered. As an e.g.,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3jKgYTL46w

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1dqYi3zZGI

I like the drunken farmer joke.

ETA: 'Pussy' is on the way out.

>10 davidgn: >11 JGL53: I actually met Mr. Krassner at a Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in Counter-Culture book signing in a bar. He is pretty streetwise as well as entertaining.

I was sitting at the bar having a beer, drinking away the money I had brought to buy the book when he walked up & said hello. He said he had watched me, noticed the bill {$20 ??} I had used to buy my first beer and told me how much money I had left in my wallet. He said he would sell me his book, autographed and at a discount, for that amount. Impressed by his salesmanship I stood up and waited at his table for a book.

Thinking back it reminds how {after a beer or four as was the case} much better a conversationalist I am if I just nod and smile.

I always thought the Kennedy/Johnson bizzare comment was a metaphor for Johnson's screwing Kennedy's political policies after his death.

To paraphrase the old saw about someone, now deceased, as having been "too good for this world", I would say that it might be best that Christopher Hitchens is now at rest as he was, quite obviously, too intelligent and too well-educated for this world.

E.g., this blast from the past that seems as relevant today as it did in 2006:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/12/eschew_th...

>22 JGL53:

Absurd and sad. Here's Hitchens in his own words:

"If white people call black people niggers, they are doing their very best to hurt and insult them, as well as to remind them that their ancestors used to be property. If black people use the word, they are either uttering an obscenity or trying to detoxify a word and rob it of its power to wound them. Not quite the same thing."

That is racist. That Hitchens doesn't (didn't) recognize it --because he perhaps cannot-- is unfortunate and beside the point. Can a person be racist and unaware of it? Unfortunately, a person can reason so shabbily as to promote racist assumptions and presuppositions. That is what Hitchens is doing here.

To presume that a person's use of "nigger" must be, merely because he is Black, benign or excusable or entirely justified while, on the other hand, another person, White, using the term, also must be using it in his very best (effort) to hurt and insult them (i.e. "Blacks"-- who might or might not be present, but who cares about that aspect?) effort-- that is, even if unwittingly, the stuff of racist assumptions.

Hitchens "too intelligent and too well-educated for this world"? What a crock! I think even that chain-smoking, boozing blow-hard would laugh at the idea. Good fucking riddance to that guy. There are, alas, _plenty_ more like him.

>23 proximity1: Fortunately for us Hitchens understood that an average reader understood what generalizing is and so he needn't have cluttered his writing with shit like 'most of the time', like 'most of the time when white people call black people niggers...'

The quoted paragraph, in others words, is perfectly sound.

> 24

Yes. What RickHarsch said.

Hitchens was obviously referring to a white person calling a particular black person - or black people in general - a nigger, or niggers, in an obviously derogatory way. Use of the word nigger, or nigga, as a self-referencing joke by a professional comedian - one BTW who gave one million dollars to our first black President's election campaign - and a comedian who is well known for dissing actual racists and other bigots - that is an entirely different thing. It does take a certain minimum I.Q. to discern the difference, true.

We have the problem of fake moral outrage and political correctness, blowing up even more out of proportion these last few years, at absolutely nothing. Maher himself has spent a lot of time on his show mocking such bullshit. - See video examples below -

There is no argument - racism is still an inherent problem in the U.S. and must be addressed and those who are actually racists and spout racist bullshit should be called out and made to suffer in any legal way available.

The use of the word nigger by black people - in rap and hip hop recordings, by black comedians, in black culture in general, and especially by under 30 year olds, is a bad idea, I will agree. But I doubt younger black people are going to stop "owning" the word just because some older black folk or any number of honkies think they should stop doing so. They don't mean it in a racist way - uh, duh, - so as a general insult or putdown or just an attempt to "be cool", that is their decision and the rest of us should butt out. Are there not bigger fish to fry than addressing that "problem"?

prox again shows that he knows nothing about nothing, about race questions or any other important issue - he never has anything edifying or positive to add to any serious conversation. That is his history here - and not my subjective opinion - that is a fact - not a donald trump "fact", but an actual fact.

But I would never recommend that we as individual forum participants block him. I think our duty to rational and logical political discourse is to spend some time mocking his extremely mock-worthy effusions. He is an ignorant person who is SO ignorant he doesn't even have a clue as to how ignorant he truly is. He is totally self-unaware. He is only useful in serving as a bad example for other humans - i.e., one NOT to follow - regarding both adults and children. He is sort of Librarything's Pro and Con forum's donald j. trump wannabe.

lol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNJyDyCocGQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFCgPufi30s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCj6YNIpqmA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B1UL0FxYj0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1r9_tgRgRk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFeDFva6tcg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcB-zvsRslY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcB-zvsRslY

LOL!

I had to "counter-flag" >25 JGL53: in the hope that it could be more readily seen and read.

I am blessed in my critics. Their words and their "logic" and "arguments" speak about them--and for me. What fool should want to censor that?

More steam! More steam!

> 26

Ah, yes. prox, the little engine that could...... NOT.

lol.

Long and detailed, including charges, witness statements, etc.
IMHO, we sure could use a voice like Franken's in the Senate these days...

Jane Mayer @JaneMayerNYer | 7:13 AM · Jul 22, 2019:
"Almost NOTHING His Main Accuser Said checks out: the Case of Al Franken"

The Case of Al Franken
Jane Mayer | July 29, 2019

A close look at the accusations against the former senator.

...Senator Gillibrand’s chief of staff called Franken’s to say that Gillibrand was going to demand his resignation. Franken was stung by Gillibrand’s failure to call him personally. They had been friends and squash partners. In a later call, Gillibrand’s chief of staff offered to have Gillibrand speak with Franken, but by that time Franken was frantically conferring with his staff and his family. Franken’s office proposed that Franken’s daughter speak with Gillibrand instead, but Gillibrand declined.

Gillibrand then went on Facebook and posted her demand that Franken resign...

Minutes later, at a previously scheduled press conference, Gillibrand added insult to injury: she reiterated her call for Franken to resign while also trumpeting her sponsorship of a new bill that banned mandatory arbitration of sexual-harassment claims. She didn’t mention that Franken had originated the legislation—and had given it to Gillibrand to sponsor, out of concern that it might be imperilled by his scandal.

I recently asked Gillibrand why she felt that Franken had to go. She said, “We had eight credible allegations, and they had been corroborated, in real time, by the press corps.” She acknowledged that she hadn’t spoken to any accusers, to assess their credibility...She acknowledged that the accusations against Franken “were different” from the kind of rape or molestation charges made against many other #MeToo targets. “But the women who came forward felt it was sexual harassment,” she said. “So it was.”

Gillibrand’s call for Franken’s resignation triggered an immediate backlash. Ricki Seidman, a Democratic communications consultant in Washington, who worked with Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in 1991, immediately posted a scorching response. “As a victim of sexual assault, you are cheapening my experience by leading a call for Senator Franken, who has been a champion for women, to step down based on the flimsy accounts that have come to light to date,” Seidman wrote. “Knowing of far worse behavior in the Senate, and FAR worse behavior among Republicans like Donald Trump and Roy Moore, the fact that you are equating Senator Franken with them, I find abhorrent and INSULTING to women.” Major Democratic donors, including Susie Tompkins Buell, the co-founder of the Esprit and North Face clothing lines, who had backed Gillibrand in the past, also turned against her. Buell told me that Gillibrand’s move was “opportunistic,” adding, “It was like a vigilante thing, it was so fast and so presumptuous. I hope women learn from this. You can’t rush to judgment. You ruin people’s lives.”

Gillibrand told me, “I’d do it again today,” adding, “If a few wealthy donors are angry about that, it’s on them.”

Soon after Gillibrand declared that Franken must resign, Senator Murray, who is in the Democratic leadership, made the same call, sending a signal to colleagues that the push was coming from the top. The Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a friend of Franken’s, recalls being astonished that there had been no emergency meeting of the Democratic caucus. “...

Franken asked to meet with Schumer, who suggested talking at his apartment in downtown D.C., in order to avoid the press. “It was like a scene out of a movie,” Franken recalled. Schumer sat on the edge of his bed while Franken and his wife, who had come to lend moral support, pleaded for more time. According to Franken, Schumer told him to quit by 5 p.m.; otherwise, he would instruct the entire Democratic caucus to demand Franken’s resignation. Schumer’s spokesperson denied that Schumer had threatened to organize the rest of the caucus against Franken. But he confirmed that Schumer told Franken that he needed to announce his resignation by five o’clock. Schumer also said that if Franken stayed he could be censured and stripped of committee assignments.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Franken told me. “I asked him for due process and he said no.”

By the end of the day, thirty-six Democratic senators had publicly demanded Franken’s resignation, including Schumer, who had known Franken since they had overlapped at Harvard...

Franken, his wife, his children, and a group of staff and advisers argued late into the night about what to do. Shaken, Franken had asked his chief of staff, “Do you think I’m this terrible person?” His wife wanted to fight on, but his children worried about his well-being, and everyone’s biggest concern was that, if he remained a pariah, he couldn’t represent Minnesota effectively...But Franken decided he had to resign.

...The next day, Franken gave a short resignation speech. Gillibrand and other Senate colleagues flocked to hug him afterward. But Franken told me, “I’m angry at my colleagues who did this. I think they were just trying to get past one bad news cycle.” For months, he ignored phone calls and cancelled dates with friends. “It got pretty dark,” he said. “I became clinically depressed. I wasn’t a hundred per cent cognitively. I needed medication.”

Franken feels deeply sorry that he made women uncomfortable, and is still trying to understand and learn from what he did wrong. But he told me that “differentiating different kinds of behavior is important.” He also argued, “The idea that anybody who accuses someone of something is always right—that’s not the case. That isn’t reality.”

For some activists in the women’s movement, Franken’s resignation was a welcome milestone...

Other feminists see the episode as a necessary corrective...

The lawyer Debra Katz, who has represented Christine Blasey Ford and other sexual-harassment victims, remains troubled by Franken’s case. She contends, “The allegations levelled against Senator Franken did not warrant his forced expulsion from the Senate, particularly given the context in which most of the behavior occurred, which was in his capacity as a comedian.” She adds, “All offensive behavior should be addressed, but not all offensive behavior warrants the most severe sanction.” Katz sees Franken as a cautionary tale for the #MeToo movement. “To treat all allegations the same is not only inappropriate,” she warns. “It feeds into a backlash narrative that men are vulnerable to even frivolous allegations by women.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/the-case-of-al-franken

_________________________________________________________________________________

OTOH:

In defense of Kirsten Gillibrand: Liberals can quit harassing her over Al Franken now
Amanda Marcotte | March 19, 2019

If Democrats want to beat the groper-in-chief in 2020, they need to stop defending Al Franken's misdeeds...

https://www.salon.com/2019/03/19/in-defense-of-kirsten-gillibrand-liberals-can-q...

So was Al Franken an ass-grabber or not? That seems to be what it comes down to.

Did he have due process?
If an ass-grabber, was punishment appropriate to the crime?

The only incident I know about is when he was photographed PRETENDING to grope someone's breasts, but in fact he never made contact, and there were other people present-- so did that make it slightly less creepy? More like comedian-mugging than any kind of actual assault. Poor judgment, but...

I recall that about as soon as we were able to become comfortable with the fake boob grab suddenly there were three, then six or eight more stories in short order. It was surprising, of course, but then he was gone so quickly it all seemed as if it must have been true. Last autumn I was in St. Paul, Minnesota, the capitol, and I met with a very active migrant feminist, active as in politically knowledgeable and engaged, activist. She seemed unconvinced about the charges and I don't remember quite what her view was, whether she though him innocent or what, but the other man of minn of that moment was Garrison Keillor, whose bookstore I read at, to a crowd of ghosts as the place was being boycotted...Keillor was considered definitely guilty and extra slimy for not going about being discovered in a, let us say, valiant way.

Whatever. Mostly water under the bridge now. In any case Gillibrand has about as much chance being elected POTUS as Marianne Williamson does.

Williamson is running because, well, who can tell whether it was the leprechauns or the flying unicorns who instructed her to throw her tin foil hat into the ring. Gillibrand? Is she being serious or does she have some "problem" similar to Williamson?

I'm boring myself even thinking about either of them. I predict Gillibrand will drop out of the race within the next few months. If not, who cares. ZZZZZZZ.

>33 JGL53: If that's the way you feel about it why inflict the information on those of us who have already shut it out of our minds?
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!!!

> 34

Why ask why?

https://www.google.com/search?q=why+ask+why&tbm=isch&source=hp&sa=X&...

Dems turning Al Franken into collateral damage was D-U-M-B. KG screwed up big time. GOPers stick together and cheat.

> 29

I think Al did have a butt-grabbing problem but it was a very weird one - he only did it in public, with witnesses, and usually in front of a camera. E.g., one woman complained that he groped her rear while they posed together arm in arm for a photo at a county fair with dozens of witnesses, with her husband taking the snap.

I think a harsh reprimand would have sufficed for such but maybe I'm just liberal.

In any case, water under the bridge now - we have bigger fish to fry. And by fish I mean republican scum.

>37 JGL53: From my vantage point at the sidelines, it finally came to me maybe he could not turn off the physical comedy that was a part of his career/livelihood- snapshot of the guy’s wife’s expression at having her bottom patted?

Pure conjecture of course & weird without prior permission from the husband. Other “evidence” before he was elected were obvious physical pratfalls.