John Conyers is the latest politician to be accused of sexual harassment:

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, moved swiftly on Tuesday against the House’s longest serving lawmaker, calling for the House Ethics Committee to investigate sexual harassment charges against Representative John Conyers Jr., the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

Good for Pelosi. If there’s a credible accusation against a Democrat, it should be investigated. Ditto for Republicans.

But there’s the rub. The charges against Conyers were leaked to Mike Cernovich, a nutcase white nationalist who was a big supporter of the insane Pizzagate conspiracy last year. The partisan motivations here are pretty obvious.

Likewise, after Leeann Tweeden accused Al Franken of improper behavior, a conservative radio host jumped on the bandwagon with a series of absurd allegations. Again, this was obviously a partisan hit.

Meanwhile, Roy Moore and Donald Trump have simply denied all the allegations against them—loudly and threateningly. Earlier today, Trump basically endorsed Moore on this basis. “He totally denies it,” Trump explained.

There’s a partisan issue here, but there’s also, for lack of a better phrase, an assole issue as well. If you’re fundamentally a decent human being, like Franken, you apologize. Then you get investigated. Then you might resign, because lots of your fellow decent human beings think you should.

But if you’re an asshole, not only do you deny the charges, you do your best to smear the accusers. That’s what Moore and Trump have done. This gives your fellow assholes the cover they need to back off while they “wait for more evidence.”

The result is that the more decent you are, the more likely you are to pay the price for sexual misconduct. The more of an asshole you are, the less likely you’ll pay any price.

This is hardly an ironclad rule. Harvey Weinstein is pretty clearly a huge asshole, but the allegations against him are so numerous and so disgusting that nothing he says or does is going to matter much. That said, if we’re going to investigate Al Franken for some fairly minor offenses, let’s also investigate Donald Trump over his far worse and far more numerous offenses. And if we’re going to investigate John Conyers over allegations that were eventually settled by Congress’s Office of Compliance—as we certainly should—let’s not rely solely on partisan leaks. Let’s open the books and take a look at everyone who’s been accused of bad behavior.

The fastest way for this moment in time to be squandered is for it to become a partisan football. If liberals eat their own because they believe sexual abuse is intolerable, but conservatives survive by simply denying and blustering, what do you think will happen? First, conservatives will spot an opportunity: a way of taking advantage of liberal principles that they’ve learned doesn’t apply to them. Second, liberals will probably start to back off. Like it or not, this is just human nature. No group ever remains completely committed to a principled stand if it becomes obvious that it only applies to themselves.

I wish I had an answer to this problem, but I don’t. Nevertheless, it’s worth putting out there. Maybe somebody else has something productive to say about this.

As I wrote on Friday, the craze to refuse to name the names of mass shooters is a grand form of evasion. Unable to address the actual causes of mass gun violence we stumble around for some feel-good nonsense that allows us to pretend we're taking action. But you can see the same drive expanding in other directions as well: even to the level of blaming the victims themselves.

Paul Waldman writes today about how lefty protest groups get treated differently from right-wing protest groups:

The latest, from the New York Times, describes how law enforcement officials around the country went on high alert when the Occupy protests began in 2011, passing information between agencies with an urgency suggesting that at least some people thought that people gathering to oppose Wall Street were about to try to overthrow the U.S. government. And we remember how many of those protests ended, with police moving in with force.

....If you can't recall any Tea Party protests in 2009 and 2010 being broken up by baton-wielding, pepper-spraying cops in riot gear, that's because it didn't happen. Just like the anti-war protesters of the Bush years, the Tea Partiers were unhappy with the government, and saying so loudly. But for some reason, law enforcement didn't view them as a threat.

Maybe this is because lefties don't complain enough. You may remember the hissy fit thrown by Fox News when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report suggesting that the election of a black president might spur recruitment among right-wing extremist groups and "even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past." As it turns out, that was a good call. But the specter of jack-booted Obama thugs smashing down the doors of earnest, heartland Republicans dominated the news cycle long enough for DHS to repudiate the report under pressure and eventually dissolve the team that had produced it.

And the similar report about left-wing extremism that DHS had produced a few months earlier? You don't remember that? I don't suppose you would. That's because it was barely noticed, let alone an object of complaint. And even if lefties had complained, I doubt that anyone would have taken it seriously. There's just no equivalent of Fox News on the left when it comes to turning partisan grievances into mainstream news.

There's probably more to it, though. Mainstream lefties just don't identify with the far left as a key part of their tribe. They'll get a certain amount of support, sure, but they'll also get plenty of mockery and derision, as the Occupy protesters did. On the right, though, extremists are all members of the tribe in good standing as long as they stop short of, say, murdering people. They only have to stop barely short, though. Waving guns around and threatening to kill people is A-OK, as Cliven Bundy and his merry band of armed tax resistors showed.

So when DHS produces a report suggesting that right-wing extremism might turn out to be a growth industry in the Obama era, the ranks of the conservative movement close. An attack on one is an attack on all, and Fox News stands ready and willing to turn the outrage meter to 11. Rinse and repeat.