Bernie, $hillary, and Joining the Increasing Perv Party

So earlier tonight, I was wondering what ol' Bernie was up to lately, since people finally stopped blowing him and came up for air. Er, oh jeez, what's this? Normally when I hear about Bernie I think the general taxpayers are preparing their anuses, but this article sounds like something more personal, and news-worthy.

Shit. Now Bernie and $hillary are being sucked into this 2017 trend of sexual misdeeds too? And I say "misdeeds" because the standards for getting your own article about being the victim of a sex scandal seem to get lower every time. Trust me, it's at the point of not being news-worthy, but that doesn't mean we can't have a gander anyway.

First, Louis CK got into deep shit for apparently jacking off in front of women without their consent, then we get a story about George H.W. Bush groping a girl's ass back in '92, and then we got this.

You'll see what I mean by standards lowering.

"Lilian Adams and Zoey Jordan Salsbury worked on opposite sides of the Democratic presidential primary. But they had similar problems."

Wait, opposite sides? "Opposite sides" means touching dicks on C-SPAN?

"Lilian Adams and Zoey Jordan Salsbury were teenagers when they started working on opposite sides of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. Adams, then 19, joined Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Salsbury, then 18, joined Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign. They were ready to make the world a better place by helping to elect their candidate."

I'm just curious as to how they interpreted Bernie and Hillary fingering each others' prostates on television. Disappointment, or maybe relief that they were on the same side all along?

I'll skip the rest of the filler in the article for ya.

"Adams signed on to the Clinton campaign as an intern at its Brooklyn, New York, headquarters in October 2015. She wore many hats: 'I was on the digital organizer team and an assistant to the digital director, the deputy digital director, the chief digital officer and the [chief technical officer],' she said.

"Seven months later, in May 2016, she relocated to Colorado to work with the state Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign as a paid organizer. Her job connected the two, promoting the former secretary of state and other Democrats on the state’s ballot. It was in the Colorado office that Adams said she faced harassment from a fellow organizer.

"Adams said she dealt with this harassment for months and mentioned it to a superior as early as June. The abuse began as homophobic remarks — Adams felt targeted, she said, because the man knew she was bisexual — and escalated from there. 'He made multiple comments about my body, told people we were dating, would constantly try to get me to drink (I was 19), try to force me into situations where we were alone, encouraged me not to wear bras, etc.,' Adams said."

One of the issues with this article is the fact that there's not enough context. It kind of just expects you to assume the worst. Okay, so homophobic remarks--such as...? I mean, I'm a semi-faggot who's dealt with homophobia a couple times in high school, but are these comments something similar to how my LGBT friends and I greet each other with "Sup, fag?" I know I sound like a dick, but for all we know this might be the case with Adams. Encouraging a woman not to wear bras is definitely creepy, but again, a lot of the other stuff mentioned needs context, otherwise we don't have much of a picture here. Crude remarks don't automatically equal sincere flirting.

"HuffPost reached out for comment from the individual accused of harassment but received no reply. A person Adams confided in at the time, speaking on background, confirmed her account."

There could be a lot of reasons why this isn't the case: maybe he's guilty and ashamed, maybe the accusation's not true and someone wanted a believable story to get attention from and he doesn't want a mob coming after him, there are probably more possibilities.

Here's another question though: if this guy was telling people the two of them were dating, why haven't any of them been coming forward with her and saying, "Yeah, he did that"? Maybe she didn't want to get more people involved in this scandal a high school principal could've dealt with, but still, a little weird.

"By August, Adams said she’d lost hope that the harassment would end or that her harasser would finally back away because she wasn’t interested in him. She again reached out to her superiors and asked them to take action. The campaign fired her harasser shortly thereafter. In text messages between Adams and one of her superiors, which were reviewed by HuffPost, they both expressed relief that the problem was over."

Huh, an awful long time to do something about apparent sexual harassment. I wonder why it took reaching out more than once. Maybe they saw they guy as too much of an asset, or there's some kind of process for investigating stuff like this that isn't resolved immediately. Your guess is as good as mine.

"But even after her abuser was fired, his work with the party — and the campaign — wasn’t over. In October 2016, Adams said she discovered to her astonishment that he had been rehired the previous month to work on the campaign with a different state party. So he was technically fired but still ended up working for Hillary via the [other state] Democratic Party,' said Adams."

Yep, asset. Wait, a shrill cunt using third-wave feminist rhetoric trying to gain power, but letting predatory men help her along the way? Wait, where have I seen this before?

Oh, right.

"It was a disappointing turn of events, and one that left Adams deeply disillusioned. 'You have a lot of young passionate people who want to help change the world through Democratic politics,' she said. 'Older Democratic operatives see this passion and exploit it, putting us in an extremely stressful and unhealthy work environment.'

"Top Clinton campaign aides did not comment in answer to HuffPost’s questions."

You know, as much as I don't think this should be news in the first place since it's common knowledge that politics are corrupt as fuck, I still feel kinda sorry she had to go through this. It's gotta be pretty disheartening to more or less work a job and realize how much the management really doesn't give a damn about you and just cares about shit getting done within the budget.

The thing about the Sanders supporter's story is that it's even more vague, which doesn't help anybody at all.

"In October 2015, Salsbury became president of American University Students for Bernie, a volunteer position. Her main point of contact in the Vermont senator’s campaign was an intern, another college student in Washington, D.C. When he made unwanted advances toward her, Salsbury said she didn’t know where to turn because the campaign had no internal infrastructure to deal with such issues ― at least involving volunteers."

Hey, wait a minute. This policy was first signed off in 2011. I think I smelled a lie somewhere in the article. Why would the policy not involve volunteers?

"The person Salsbury identified as her harasser did not respond to a request for comment. But her account was confirmed by her friend Colin Moir, a fellow member of the American University group. 'He had been harassing her sexually,' said Moir, adding that Salsbury 'was not able to speak to somebody higher up and report it.'

"Like Adams, Salsbury felt helpless to stop the harassment. There was no culture of accountability in the D.C. office of the Sanders campaign, she said, and she didn’t think people would listen to a young volunteer. It was 'a culture that didn’t discuss office policies with volunteers or make it clear that harassment wasn’t tolerated,' said Salsbury."

Again, the questions are "what happened" and "why do you think the environment was too hostile for you to say something." There's already the policy I linked above, so why doesn't this apply? And what's the solution to the crime we don't even know, a sign similar to "Cosplay is not Consent"?

"Salsbury did hear from the Sanders campaign after she posted about the incident this month on social media. A former digital media manager reached out to her this past weekend, she said, and on Monday, a Seattle-based lawyer named Bernice Johnson Blessing called her on behalf of the campaign. 'It firmly felt like the kind of call you make when you’re trying to feel out if someone has the interest and/or standing to bring a lawsuit,' said Salsbury."

It's a lawyer. The guy wants to make money. Why is this shocking? A guy trying to make a living isn't going to do his work for free.

"The conversation with the lawyer made her uncomfortable. 'It felt like I was being blamed,' she said. She suspects that Sanders plans to run for president again in 2020 and 'they’re afraid of me being a roadblock to that.' Blessing did not return a request for comment."

Again, why? There's basically no information with this except "a thing happened." You can't really help someone if you don't know what happened, I'm just saying.

But still, is there a reason why this has to be made news on the mainstream media and not handled privately? If you work in any other industry and grab a girl's ass, you get fired without the media profiting off of it. And don't think Huffington Post cares about the women involved. They're only publishing this because it gets clicks and in the age of the web, clicks equal cash. Their standards might just be lowering more every day, so that's why they're willing to publish a story involving lewd comments. Just curious, since there's this cute army girl who tells me she's gonna grab my dick, can I talk to HuffPo too? I mean, it's consensual, but still. The definition of sexual harassment is clearly being watered down to nothing, and I don't even have to describe what went down. Maybe I can make money off it too. Gotta pay for condoms somehow, right? The standards of today's media are basically lowering to those of The Jerry Springer Show. All Huffington Post has to do is start publishing articles on Cletus' baby momma actually being Billy-Bob's baby momma. Give it time, my friends.