AP: AL FRANKEN “ASHAMED AMID GROPING CLAIMS…BUT LOOKS FORWARD TO RETURNING TO WORK ON MONDAY AND GRADUALLY REGAINING VOTERS’ TRUST.”

Except Al Franken doesn’t feel shame:

Recall what Franken said in his “Giant of the Senate” book about apologizing about making rape jokes (if you can call them that) about Lesley Stahl. Franken admitted that he faked the apology in order to win election to the Senate. He wrote:

To say I was sorry for writing a joke was to sell out my career, to sell out who I’d been my entire life. And I wasn’t sorry that I had written Porn-o-Rama or pitched that stupid Lesley Stahl joke at 2 in the morning. I was just doing my job.

I learned that campaigns have their own rules, their own laws of physics, and that if I wasn’t willing to accept that, I would never get to be a senator.

How do you suppose Franken really feels about attending the Minnesota State Fair and posing for pictures with the masses, most of whom are not pretty young women? I assume he considers it tacky –“a sell out” of “who he’d been his entire life.”

The butt grab may therefore be Franken’s “f*** you” to the “rules” of campaigns and to ordinary decency. It may be his reassertion of “who he has been his entire life” — not a “giant of the Senate” (as he mockingly described himself), but an unbounded smasher, via pranks, of convention and bourgeois morality.

I don’t mean to drain lechery out of my diagnosis. For many, constraints on sexual predation are the worst part of bourgeois morality. Scratch a slayer of bourgeois convention and you will often find a lecher. And a virulent sexist.

Exit question: Why is No One Talking About the Fact that Al Franken is Married?