Of Tribal Loyalty and the Corruption of Power.

The Al Gore Scandal continues apace.  Ann Althouse has these observations:

The woman said Gore's "Mr. Smiley Global Warming" persona differed from his actions and made her afraid....


After the alleged incident, the woman said she was dissuaded from contacting the police by liberal friends of hers, whom she refers to as "The Birkenstock Tribe," and of which she counts herself a member.

"It's like being the ultimate traitor," the woman said.

It's painful when your own hero falls. Quite aside from global warming, what about feminism? If the massage therapist's story is true, we are looking at the same problem we saw with Clinton. There are politicians who give the appearance of caring about the equality of women. It's a principle that, conceptually, is a necessary part of a political ideology they need to appear to hold. But maybe they don't really believe it at all. What a dirty secret, thinking that women exist to serve you!

ADDED: What makes a man treat a woman like that? Generally, I think it's because he's done things like that before, many times, and gotten away with it. We're talking about an older man, with a big reputation and a lot to lose. Why would he proceed in such a crude fashion? I would guess that his sensibilities have numbed over the years, as women acceded to his moves. The moves became less and less elaborate.

In some ways it sounds like the classic sexual harassment scenario.  The tribal loyalty acts as grooming, and the experienced harassers are often crass and gross in the way attributed to Gore. 

But this kind of thing doesn't happen in a vacuum.  If Gore did act as crass, gross and corrupt as he's described, then he's been doing it for a long time, and there are people who are going to have suspected that he was "kind of weird."

Oh, that's the reason for Al Gore's curious silence in the face of the sexual assault accusations against him...

...the alleged victim claims to have DNA evidence.

Curious and curiouser.

But fortunately Gore is not a hypocrite about family values, so there is no story here, as there would have been when accusations are made against Republicans.

Feminist Women's Rights Attorney finally comes down against Gore on sex-assault claim.

It takes Wendy Murphy a lot ink to get there - and one suspects it wouldn't have involved such soul-searching if the accused wasn't politically correct - but she gets there eventually, fueled in part by Gore's failure to deny the charges, which Murphy suggests might be backed up by DNA evidence:

Regardless, her story rings true. In more than 70 pages of a transcribed interview with police, her descriptions of the sexual assaults seem credible simply because of the restrained nature of what she accused him of doing. The woman describes Gore moving her hand down toward his penis during an abdominal massage and how he touched her breasts and buttocks, "painfully" squeezed her nipples, and "flipped" her onto the bed, pinning her down and lying on top of her. If she were lying, why not make it juicier?


She even included things about herself that could paint her in a bad light. She told the police that she sat on the bed next to him even after she feared being assaulted and that she didn't leave right away.

Back in 2006, the women told the police, according to the same transcript, that all she wanted was the return of her "pre-assault sense of peace and safety. . . and for this man to be stopped from what he has been doing."

I believe her account.

Murphy's focus is largely on the possibility that Gore might have been buying her silence.

If true, however, this paints Gore as the same kind of opportunistic exploiter of women that we learned Bill Clinton is.  And it makes the amazing non-denial denials issued by Gore about his "friend" Bill Clinton at the height of the accusations of rape against Clinton more creepy.  In "No One Left to Lie to", Christopher Hitchens took Gore to task for his claim that he couldn't say whether he believed Juanita Broadrick's claim that Bill Clinton had raped her because he hadn't seen her televised interview. Hitchens observed that this was very weak stuff and that he would want his friends to stand up and say "No! I know the man and he is just not that kind of person."  Gore, it seems couldn't say that about Clinton, and if Murphy's assessment is correct, then we may be able to see why.