Here is why I dislike the American Political Insider Press, and by "dislike," I mean, "want to toss into a vat of shark-infested sulfuric acid." It is because of this class of thing from The Politico.
When Al Franken ran for the Senate last year, the former “Saturday Night Live” star had to reassure skeptics that the fierce partisan attacks he lobbed at Republicans as an author and radio host wouldn’t define his style as a legislator.
But because of one of his first pieces of legislation, Democrats now have their most brazen attack line of the emerging 2010 campaign season: that Republicans are insensitive to rape victims.
The charge stems from a Franken-sponsored amendment that would prohibit the Department of Defense from contracting with companies that require employees to resolve workplace complaints — including complaints of sexual assault — through private arbitration rather than the courts.
Only in the god-blighted shitworld of the horrible fuckassed American Political Insider Press is it possible to even fucking think for a motherfucking minute that it's Playing with Partisan Dynamite to argue that the American government should not negotiate expensive contracts with companies that shield rapists. What the fuck? What the motherfucking fuck?
What the fuck is wrong with these people? What the fuck has even happened to them that they're even talking this shit?
Two paragraphs that are, essentially, notes from a sociopath underground -- or, actually, overground, Lord help us:
“Franken's amendment may make sense for national Democrats in laying down lines of attack heading into the 2010 campaign — but this is not what Franken needs to build a base in Minnesota,” said Larry Jacobs, an expert in state politics at the University of Minnesota. “Being a poster boy of a hard-hitting campaign against the Republican Party is the opposite of what he needs in Minnesota.”
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And,
Privately, GOP sources acknowledge that they failed to anticipate the political consequences of a “no” vote on the amendment. And several aides said that Republicans are engaged in an internal blame game about why they agreed to a roll-call vote on the measure, rather than a simple voice vote that would have allowed the opposing senators to duck criticism.
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For the record, the case that inspired the Franken amendment:
A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.
Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.
"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave. Jones described the container as sparely furnished with a bed, table and lamp.
"It felt like prison," says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming "20/20" investigation. "I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened."
Is trying to make it illegal for the US taxpayer to pay to have women gang raped and locked in tanks a Black Eye, or a Feather in Your Cap?
For the love of FUCK.