_____

John Ziegler in Mediaite:

“This story, as it currently stands, is not fair journalism and my fellow conservatives would be screaming bloody murder if the target was a Republican they liked, rather than a Democrat they hate.”

Mr. Ziegler disagrees with Mr. Franken “on almost every political issue.” However, despite his personal feelings toward the senator, Mr. Ziegler worries that people online and in the news media are too quick to presume guilt. He wonders, for instance, why Mr. Franken’s accuser, Leeann Tweeden, kept an incriminating photograph of Mr. Franken for so long. “Was it because she was told when she woke up that Franken had ‘assaulted’ her and she wanted evidence of this for future use,” he asks, “or, perhaps more likely, did someone send it to her because it was a funny keepsake from their trip which is now being used to create a completely different impression of what happened?” Read more »

_____

Kevin D. Williamson in National Review:

“Just don’t let them fool you into believing that this is moral calculus. It’s political calculus — today, just like it was in 1998.”

This week, before the Franken accusations emerged, Democrats and liberals in the news media were beginning to reassess their feelings about former President Bill Clinton. According to Mr. Williamson, the rejection of the Clintons now, years after Mr. Clinton was accused of rape and a year after Hillary Clinton ran for office, are merely a cynical political ploy: “Our progressive friends have discovered their consciences on the Clinton matter at the precise moment the Clintons ceased to be useful instruments of political power.” The same cynicism, he argues, should be applied to liberals who have been swift to condemn Mr. Franken. It costs them nothing, politically, to remove a Democratic senator from a state likely to put another Democrat in his seat. Read more »

_____

From the Left