RNC Finance Chair Resigns After Accusations of Decades of Sexual Misconduct

Trump and buddy Steve Wynn - two sexual predators?

With the dust not even settled over the Donald Trump/porn star affair - -one rumor even had Melania Trump moving out of the White House - the Republican Party has had yet another reminder that it has become the party of sexual impropriety even as the shrills among the Christofascists lecture others of how to live their lives even as their own and those of their "dear leader" are a train wreck by standards of normal decency.  In the latest example of Republican hypocrisy, involves now former RNC finance chair Steve Wynn who has resigned his post after a lengthy Wall Street Journal piece that details decades of sexual misconduct that rivals that of Harvey Weinstein.  While Republicans called upon Democrats to return contributions they received from Weinstein, the revelations about Wynn - a "friend" of Der Trumpenführer who seems to have emulated Trump's misconduct - , have been met with utter silence.   A piece in New York Magazine looks at the all to common GOP hypocrisy.  Here are excerpts:

When Harvey Weinstein was accused of decades of sexual misconduct in October, Republicans gleefully went on the attack. Weinstein was a prominent Democratic donor. How, they wondered, in high moral dudgeon, could liberal lawmakers live with themselves knowing that they’d profited from such ill-gotten gains?

Considering Weinstein’s limited role in Democratic politics — plus the inconvenient fact that a confessed sexual harasser of the Republican persuasion currently sits in the Oval Office — this was a transparently bad-faith argument from the beginning. But the GOP, as is its wont, pushed it vigorously enough to entice the usual doltish members of the mainstream media to take notice. And Democrats eventually did, too; many returned their donations from Weinstein.

Flash forward to Friday. In a long and thorough investigative piece, The Wall Street Journal reported that Las Vegas casino magnate and finance chair of the Republican National Committee, Steve Wynn, has been accused of sexual misconduct by many employees over the course of decades. The allegations are Weinstein-esque: They include Wynn forcing a manicurist to have sex with him, requesting sexual contact during massage sessions, and more.

The Republican response so far: almost total radio silence. Wynn did step down from his finance-chair position on Saturday afternoon, but under unclear circumstances.

Wynn, unlike Weinstein, is a serious power player on the political stage. . . . he has exerted considerable influence over Republican state-level races and national politics alike. . . . He has donated more than $2.5 million to the Republican Governors Association since 2012 and more than $200,000 to Republicans in 2017 alone. Just last week, as Democrats are happy to point out, Wynn and RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel hosted a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago to celebrate the one-year anniversary of President Trump’s inauguration.

Will Republicans who demanded Democrats give back all of Harvey Weinstein’s money follow their own advice when it comes to actual insider Steve Wynn? The party’s silence on the story a full day after it broke is an indication that nobody should be holding their breath.

The entire story illustrates, once again, that warfare between the parties is asymmetric. Because the Democratic Party positions itself as an entity trying, however haltingly, to do the right thing, it is held to reasonably high standards by both its voters and society at large. Republicans, meanwhile, have waltzed so far down the path of moral degradation in recent years that they are no longer expected to maintain the appearance of propriety. Democrats (rightly) feel pressure to clean their house of sullied lawmakers from John Conyers to Al Franken; Republicans can grudgingly come to terms with the idea of an accused child molester in the Senate.

Because the GOP has adopted a mantra of shamelessness, it can continue to claim the virtuous high ground while simultaneously contradicting its own words at every turn.

[A]s Steve Wynn and his millions of dollars show, the [Democrat] party should reform itself on its own terms, not because Republicans pressure them to. The GOP forfeited that privilege a long time ago.