Whining about bad PR they so damn well deserve

You may remember, in early October, when Al Franken passed a bill that would withhold government contracts from private defense contractors whose contracts included stipulations that basically prohibited their employees from bring cases of assault, such as rape, to court. Naturally, every single one of those who voted against this bill (and there were 30 of them) was Republican. Yeah, tell us again about how the Republican Party is a bastion of good, family-based morality, when they don’t even care to allow rape victims to have their day in court? That’s what this basically comes down to.

Obviously, this resulted in one heck of a harsh political backlash against the Republicans who voted against the bill – as it damn well should – and now, guess how these scumbags are dealing with this case of bad PR? You guessed it, in that typical Republican manner of dealing with criticism: whining about it as though it wasn’t their fault. You know, for voting against helping rape victims. Leave it to the Rethuglicans to turn rape into a partisan issue. From Crooks and Liars:

It should be tough voting against rape, but thirty Republicans did just that and now they are whining the night away because bloggers and some MSMers have highlighted their atrocity. And in their usual silly reality, they are blaming Sen. Al Franken because they are getting hammered over their malfeasance.

Al Franken fallout has GOP fuming

The Republicans are steamed at Franken because partisans on the left are using a measure he sponsored to paint them as rapist sympathizers — and because Franken isn’t doing much to stop them.

“Trying to tap into the natural sympathy that we have for this victim of this rape —and use that as a justification to frankly misrepresent and embarrass his colleagues, I don’t think it’s a very constructive thing,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in an interview.

“I think it’s going to make a lot of senators leery and start looking at things he’s doing earlier on, because I don’t think it got appropriate attention ahead of time.”

[…]

“I don’t know what his motivation was for taking us on, but I would hope that we won’t see a lot of Daily Kos-inspired amendments in the future coming from him,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, No. 4 in the Senate Republican leadership. “I think hopefully he’ll settle down and do kind of the serious work of legislating that’s important to Minnesota.”

Cornyn should be embarrassed by the Republicans, but instead tries to say they were misrepresented. Really? Did he vote yes or no? That's the only question that should be debated. All the Republicans who voted against Franken's measure have a lot more to answer for. Bad PR is just the beginning.

I would certainly hope so, though it has been a while since the vote and little has happened yet. Frankly, I honestly don’t see how these Rethuglicans would get reprimanded in any real way for their loathsome vote – they’ve gotten away with stuff as bad as this in the past, some of which was arguably worse still.

(By the way, John Cornyn did indeed vote against the bill, as did John Thune. What, with their moaning about being treated as rape apologists for such a thing as voting against letting rape victims have their chance to see their aggressors stand trial, did you really think not?)

If this was an ideal world, every single one of the 30 Republicans who voted against this bill (of all bills to vote against) would be thrown out of the Senate faster than the blink of an eye, and a very decent helping of public shaming would be added to boot. But this is not an ideal world; this is a world ruled by greed, stupidity, incompetence and, as these scumbags have shown, amoral politicians who care for their image and the money they make infinitely more than anyone who gets hurt in the wake of the shitty legislation they pass, or the decent legislation they oppose.

(via Crooks and Liars)
Technorati tags: Republicans · Al Franken · rape · politics · John Cornyn · John Thune