On Friday, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle lamented Democrats making Al Franken into a “sacrificial lamb.”
Ruhle’s lamentation was preceded by a remark from New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, who said:
Because there’s hypocrisy on the Democratic side, it creates a kind of leverage, right? Here are the set of norms that we espouse and the values that we say that we hold. If people aren’t living up to them, as they haven’t lived up to them, you can call them out for it. The Republican Party by contrast, you know, doesn’t really even purport to hold women in equal esteem.
Ruhle replied:
But isn’t that disgusting then? … That makes Al Franken a sacrificial lamb here. If what this does is give Democrats political leverage to say: “We’ve cleaned house, shouldn’t you have?” Margaret Carlson wrote a piece in The Daily Beast today where she says Democrats may have moved too quickly, they may have fallen into a Roger Stone trap. Roger Stone gave a heads up on Twitter about Al Franken’s accuser twelve hours before it happened. The Ethics Committee never got to do their job. So, Democrats in this political maneuver may have just gotten outmaneuvered themselves.