GOP For Rape
In the continuing Republican saga of “Let’s oppose anything and everything if it’s proposed by any Democrat we don’t like, no matter how stupid it makes us look” (causing the conservatives to cheer the American loss of the 2016 Olympics, and rage in disapproval of a U.S. president winning the Nobel Peace Prize), we now see 30 Republican senators voting against an amendment proposed by Al Franken to refuse federal contracts to any contractor that contractually bans employees from suing coworkers for rape.
This stemmed from a case where a 19-year-old woman was gang-raped by coworkers in Iraq working for KBR, a former Halliburton subsidiary. When she tried to file a complaint, she was ignored, forced to work alongside her rapists, and was not provided appropriate medical treatment. Eventually, when she tried to report the rape, she was locked in a shipping crate to prevent her from doing this.
When she returned to the U.S., she tried to file suit–and then discovered that the fine print in her contract prevented her from publicly suing her rapists.
What’s more, she is not alone–several women have come forth with similar stories.
Franken’s amendment would deny government contracts to any company forcing this clause on their employees, thus giving them no choice but to stop using the clause in contracts.
Thirty Republican senators voted against the amendment, apparently feeling that repeated gang rape was not serious enough of an issue to withhold government funds so as to interfere with legal issues involving government contractors–despite the fact that many of these same Republicans have lobbied to do the exact same thing regarding Acorn.
As usual, the major networks did not cover it quite so well as did Jon Stewart:
Too bad the Pulitzer Prize is not awarded for television journalism–lord knows that he’s done more real reporting than any ten “journalists” on TV today. (Stewart has, however, won two Peabody Awards.)
Jon is my hero
I quite sure I posted at this site, during the long Minnesota recount thingy, that one Franken was worth 2 or 3 garden variety senators and 5 Liebermans.
Well, I’ve been proven wrong. And only, in less than six months on the job.
I underestimated Franken.
None of this happens happens if 500 or so people had voted the opposite way and gone with Coleman instead of Franken.
We are a long way from the Republicans lamenting Minnesota the way we lament Florida in 2000. There seems to be no way to undo all the damage that has been done.
But things are starting to unravel for the Republicans in ways that might make 1930s an era of nostalgia for Republicans.
Initially, all they’ve had to deal with is the polite, overly accommodating, passive aggressive Obama playing ‘good cop’. That was horror enough for them.
Now comes a new wave of Democrat. The bad cop. First Grayson, weilding his hammer, and now Franken, with decades of experience in communicating subtext through humor, delivering bad cop with subtly.
Both these guys are freshmen. But their spine and toughness, especially in Graysons case, is getting them attention and contributions from Democrats nationwide.
The combination of toughness and inherent decency and subtlety of Franken is devistating, politically, to the Republicans. It makes them look small, petty, selfish, corrupt, greedy, evil, banal, and so many other terrible things all at once and makes Franken look grand and important and admirable all at once.
What follows is others seeing this and following Frankens lead.
Americans are inherently decent people. They’ve spent the last decade scared and traumatized by the Republican party, which has taken license from it to do some things and take the country to some horrible places. Franken’s moment here, is a stark illustration of how the Republicans have horribly coopted this country and taken it far from its intrinsically decent moorings. The results that could unfold, as the realization sinks in and spreads, could be massively devistating to the Republican party.
It’s hard to see how anything good could come out of the 2000 election after nearly a decade of offensive war, torture, voodoo economics that have devistated the lives of millions and nearly brought global civilization to destructive meltdown and corrupted a society so much that it allowed defense contractors to put gag orders of victims of rape while under their employment.
But over time. A long time. Something quite good could come from it. But I fear the side after affects of the Neocon Dark age will be with us for some time: Ten years after Wall Street Collapsed in 1929, the Nazi’s invaded Poland. The latter would not have happened if not for the former. By 1941, however, the United States had become, again, an inherently decent society – decent enough to spread decency, peace and prosperity to every where their Armies would end up in by the end of World War II – the parts of Western Europe and East Asia where Roosevelt’s armies would end the war, become, and in many ways are, a paradise modeled on what the New Deal aspired to, even if it didn’t quite achieve that in it’s country of origin (the United States): Peace, prosperity and a massive middle class enjoying peace, prosperity, personal freedom, rights, privileges including health care, and pensions.
Maybe that job will finally be reached and achieved here – and we can get on with spreading the New Deal to the rest of the world.