A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
Conservative outlets continued to follow various sexual harassment and assault scandals on Monday. In National Review, David French made the case against letting Sen. Al Franken off easy:
Remember, after [accuser Leeann Tweeden] reacted strongly to his unwanted kiss, she claims that she avoided him as much as she could. He responded with “petty insults” and then, ultimately, groped her while she slept. Now, does all that sound like fun-loving Al was just joking around? Or does it seem more like a more-powerful entertainment figure was humiliating and degrading a woman who refused his advances?
Not only does the distinction matter morally, it also matters legally. As I wrote before, when determining whether a person is guilty of sex crimes like sexual battery or forcible touching, intent matters. For example, in New York a person can be guilty of “forcible touching” when they make contact with a person’s “intimate parts” if it’s for the purpose of “degrading or abusing” that person.
At RedState, the blogger known as Streiff wrote a post expressing glee at the allegations revealed against New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush. “Of all the people in the media world this could have happened to, Thrush has to be in the top five of my Dream Team,” it read. “When Thrush was at Politico during the Obama administration he was nothing more than a stenographer for the administration. During the campaign, he wrote whatever the Clinton campaign told him to.”
The Gateway Pundit carried news of the allegations against television host Charlie Rose. “Rumors of Rose’s alleged sexual misconduct have been circulating around the media for years, but were never reported on, in part, because of the power the television host wields,” the Pundit’s Joshua Caplan wrote. “This is a common thread throughout the sexual harassment claims rocking Hollywood and Washington — powerful men preyed on women who were too terrified to speak out.” “It’s not inconceivable that several famous men will be credibly accused of harassment or assault in American newspapers every week for the next year. Remember, reporters haven’t even touched Congress yet,” Hot Air’s Allahpundit added, despite widespread news coverage of the allegations against Sen. Franken. (Monday night, BuzzFeed published a story about allegations against Democratic Rep. John Conyers, as well.)
Hot Air’s John Sexton noted MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski’s criticism of Clinton defenders who have attacked Republican sexual misconduct. “I think Brzezinski is correct about the people who defended Bill Clinton who are also now attacking Roy Moore and Donald Trump,” Sexton wrote. “They’re hypocrites and Hillary is the chief hypocrite because she knows (and knew at the time) the accusations were true.”
In other news:
National Review’s Kevin Williamson addressed the death of Charles Manson, writing, “Just as it is easy to forget how pro-Soviet the American Left was at times, it is easy to forget how pro-Manson American radicals were.” Then, beginning with a quote from former Weather Underground member Bernadine Dohrn reacting to the murders, Williamson recounted a history:
“First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach. Wild!” That was the assessment of Bernardine Dohrn, the champagne radical who, with her husband, Bill Ayers, participated in a campaign of domestic terrorism, including bombings, and later became cozy with Barack Obama, hosting events for the aspiring politician in her home. The “pigs” she referred to included Sharon Tate, an actress who was eight months pregnant at the time. She was murdered and mutilated. The word “PIG” was scrawled on the wall in her blood, and the father of her child, filmmaker Roman Polanski (to this day still on the run for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl), posed in front of that scene for a Life magazine photographer. Dohrn would later join a very prestigious Chicago law firm, Sidley Austin, and later worked as a professor of law at Northwestern University — remarkable accomplishments for a woman without a law license. She passed the bar, and Illinois was willing to overlook her criminal conviction, but she refused to apologize for her role in the terrorist campaign that resulted in several deaths. She and her husband became legal guardians of the child of two of their colleagues, who went to prison on murder charges for their role in a homicidal armored-car robbery carried out by the May the 19th Communist Organization, a clique of New York leftists who named their organization in honor of Ho Chi Minh’s birthday. […]
Of course they fell for it. The idealist con is one of the oldest and most lucrative hustles going. The idiot children of the 1960s talked up Charles Manson for the same reason Langston Hughes wrote paeans to Joseph Stalin, for the same reason American progressives still take the side of the Rosenbergs and still think Alger Hiss was framed. Langston Hughes wasn’t a “liberal in a hurry” — he signed a letter of support for Stalin’s purges. Noam Chomsky spent years denying the holocaust in Cambodia, insisting it was the invention of American propagandists. After Fidel Castro was done murdering and pillaging his way through Cuban history, Barack Obama could only find it in his heart to say: “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.”
