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Ebony Edwards-Ellis
@Eedwardsellis
, 30 tweets, 5 min read Read on Twitter
Just finished my (2nd) re-read of the New Yorker piece on Al Franken. If anything, the piece only solidified my skepticism of the whole "Al Franken got a raw deal" take that many people on the Left are (still) using...
Early in the piece, the article quotes Franken as saying that passers-by tell him that he shouldn't have resigned and that he agrees with them.
???
This indicates that Franken was fully aware that NOT resigning, pending an investigation, was an actual option...
So why didn't he stick it out?
After all, the piece did a masterful job of picking apart Tweedon's accusation, finding several people who corroborated Franken's side of the story...
Why didn't Franken insist that those people be allowed to give exculpatory testimony in a hearing? Yes, Schumer threatened to kick him out of the caucus and strip him of committee assignments, etc...But if Schumer could take them away, he could restore them, too...
Especially after getting the whole story....
And the piece dropped clues that Franken wasn't exactly cognizant of other's need for personal space AND that he had the habit of inappropriately kissing women on the lips...
Really? Did someone HAVE to tell him that wasn't okay? At HIS age? My dad is only a few years younger than Franken and he never kissed anyone but my mom on the lips the entire time I've been alive. And none of the other 60+ men I know kiss female acquaintances on the lips...
The piece dropped other clues...
Intentionally or not, the New Yorker piece depicts Franken as someone who could very easily "go too far" when "goofing around."
Even still, I'm not satisfied with the explanation given for Franken's decision NOT to resign. Franken KNEW that he could hang around until the investigation concluded--committee assignments be damned...
He also knew how investigations in the Senate went down...
He could have fought. And he chose not to.
I admit, my own biases are definitely influencing my perceptions...
I'm a black woman. And I've learned that people will (1) accuse me of things I haven't done WITHOUT evidence and (2) often REFUSE to believe me, even if I can prove my evidence....I've also learned that's not an excuse for at least trying to defend myself...
And I don't have white male privilege, wealth, fame, or political power. I also don't work in an environment where the investgative protocol is skewed in my favor...
That said, I would never simply resign over a possibly career-ending accusation--especially if I am in a position to produce exculpatory evidence...
That's why I'm not buying into the "Al Franken got railroaded" argument. He had too much working in his favor...
I'm also not buying into the "political opportunism" argument, either...
Truth is, Franken (despite his roasting of Jeff Seesions and Betsy DeVos) WASN'T the most reliably anti-Trump voice in the US Senate...
It was actually (surprise, surprise!) Kirsten Gillibrand...During 2017, Franken voted for 4X as many Trump cabinet picks as Gillibrand. (Gillibrand only voted to confirm 2, one of whom was a holdover from the Obama administration.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…
And Franken voted along with Trump twice as often as Franken did...
And Gillibrand only voted with Trump about 11% of the time, twice as often as Franken did...

projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump…
If Gillibrand was trying to take out a political opponent in her quest for the Oval Office, Franken posed the least threat to her. She had already established herself as a reliable anti-Trump politician and her fellow members of the "Hell No Caucus" (Booker, Sanders, and Harris)
Would be much stronger competitors. And that's assuming Franken even planned a presidential run. Did he?
I think many of these pro-Franken anti-Gillibrand takes are the result of misogyny--internalized and external. All too often we like to blame women for the shitty behavior of men, especially if the woman in question is viewed as "ambitious" or "strident."
The truth of the matter is that only one person denied Al Franken due process-Al Franken.
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More from @Eedwardsellis see all

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Ebony Edwards-Ellis
@Eedwardsellis
Gonna tell you a story, Steve. In his memoir, "The Ragman's Son," Kirk Douglas recounted a trip that he took to Germany a few years after the end of WWII...
Douglas was there to shoot a film but decided to spend his off hours interviewing former supporters of Adolf Hitler. Douglas wasn't angry or seeking revenge (Douglas is of Russian Jewish descent) . He simply wanted to understand how Hitler had convinced so many ppl to go along...
Not a single one of the (many) Germans Douglas spoke to would admit to having supported Hitler. Every single one of them knew another German--a coworker, a neighbor, a classmate, even family members--who had. But they NEVER implicated themselves...
Read 12 tweets
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Ebony Edwards-Ellis
@Eedwardsellis
You appear to be a real person, rather than a bot. So I will school you, rather than block you...
White men who owned, traded in, and supervised the work of enslaved black women often raped them--if they weren't looking the other way when other white men did it....
Consequently, many blacks can trace descent from slaves AND slaveholders. In fact, many historically significant black people descended from slaveholders...
Read 16 tweets
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Ebony Edwards-Ellis
@Eedwardsellis
This already happened in the US. What a lot of ppl don't know is that the same second-wave feminists who were pushing for legal abortion were also fighting against involuntary sterilization...
Involuntary sterilization was a thing well into the 20th century with the state of NC not shutting their program down until the 1970's...
The great Fannie Lou Hamer was subjected to what many black women referred to as "Mississippi apendectomy". And this happened without her knowledge shortly after she gave birth to her youngest child...
Read 8 tweets

Related threads

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southpaw
@nycsouthpaw
Al Franken could have had his Senate Ethics Committee hearing, had he wanted to, but I think today’s New Yorker piece shows that even now he doesn’t really know what his defense would have been.
”He sees it differently than his accusers, where he remembers what happened at all, and some but definitely not all of them are his political opponents” pretty obviously isn’t enough.
“This conduct, even if true, doesn’t rise to the level of a great senator’s resignation,” could conceivably have more weight, but it’s a value judgment outside the purview of a fact-finding hearing. That’s a case he could’ve made to his caucus, but it seems like p long odds.
Read 3 tweets
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Esoteric Jeff
@EsotericCD
Hard not to note the irony of Jane Mayer of all ppl writing a long defense of Al Franken, arguing he was unfairly forced to resign for an act of sexual harrassment that was actually *caught on film* plus other unverified accusations. She lacks shame. newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…
With Franken, it's all about 'context' and the politics of his accusers, and the opportunism of Republicans at the time, blah blah blah.

This is the woman who wrote the "Brett Kavanaugh may have flashed me in my sleep, I'm not sure but let's go with it" to tank his nomination.
The irony here is that I actually think (and have always thought) that Franken got a raw deal. But if there's any one person with absolutely no standing to write the case defending him and lamenting his unseemly political knifing, it's Jane f***in' Mayer.
Read 13 tweets
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Jed Shugerman
@jedshug
1. The Trump/Alfa Bank server connection during the campaign wasn't random.
2. Trump and the GOP just appointed Brian Benczkowski, a lawyer who worked for Alfa Bank, to lead the DOJ's criminal division, and he refuses to recuse himself.
What the hell is going on here?
3. Must-read Filkins's New Yorker piece linked above. The Trump/Russia link is striking, and DeVos and Erik Prince are also implicated.
“And we thought, Why the hell is a Russian bank communicating with a server that belongs to the Trump Organization, and at such a rate?”...
4. Also a damning indictment of the @nytimes for running the headline "Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia” on eve of election, downplaying Alfa Bank links.
Lichtblau: “We were saying that the investigation was basically over—and it was just beginning,”
Read 9 tweets
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Connor Ratliff
@connorratliff
45 Days Of @ElvisCostello: a twitter megathread in anticipation of the Oct 12 release date of LOOK NOW, the new LP by Elvis Costello & The Imposters

This is either a bright idea or a brilliant mistake, but this is only, this is only, this is only the beginning...
I did something similar to this 5 years ago, in anticipation of EC & @theroots' Wise Up Ghost LP, on tumblr.

(You can still find all those posts if you look, although a lot of the YouTube links etc are now dead ends. It was 40 Days Of EC then, so for 2018 I'm upping it to 45.)
Mostly I will be going chronologically from the early years right up to the present, but it feels right to start out with Costello's 2002 song, "45."

Music Video directed by @jessebdylan


(There's an alternate "diner" version I can't find anywhere online)
Read 2378 tweets
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Elad Nehorai
@PopChassid
People hate being called racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, xenophobic etc. Not just because they’re afraid of being labeled that way, but because they truly don’t want to think they are.

That means they’ll do anything to hide those feelings from themselves.
This is why our discourse around hate is so confused.

We think people *must* be consciously aware of their racism *and* open about it to be racist.
But most people are neither. Not just that, they’re horrified that they might be, especially since there’s probably a part of them whispering that they might be.

Most people who defended things like segregation and who support the Muslim ban refused to believe they were racist.
Read 17 tweets

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