For mid-summer we’re looking at a busy week, scandal and resistance-wise. Robert Mueller testifies tomorrow. (I couldn’t have lower expectations. Bill Barr has ordered him not to say a word beyond his report, so even if by now Mueller knows he’s being played, he’ll do what his superiors tell him to do.)

Then next week the Democrats go at it again, this time Detroit. (WWP Democratic Power Rankings to publish soon.)

And right now we’ve got the reevaluation of Al Franken and them that done him in. With Jane Mayer’s storytelling in The New Yorker, we get a reiteration (with considerably more depth) on the hit job that took out Franken, (and to which he acceded). It was, as we already knew, the rawest of political calculations.

Franken the Accused had to go — and chop, chop — because Democrats had to present a face of unimpeachable #MeToo purity at that precise moment, since Alabama was in the process of deciding whether to send an accused child molester to the Senate. Whether the business with his USO pal Leeann Tweeden was true or yet another episode of classic Roger Stone ratfcking (to borrow from Charlie Pierce) did not matter a whit. Nor did whether there was really anything to the other accusations of butt-grabbing and groping served up by various women, including the one who said Franken pawed her at the State Fair while her family was taking their picture together. (Whaaaaa … ?)

Because everyone who follows The Game must offer a hot take in moments like this, otherwise liberal (to hyper-liberal) pundits having been feverishly feeding the furnace of opinion.

Over at the well-empowered gals website Jezebel, Esther Wang writes, “If Me Too has shed a light on the spectrum of abuse that women have been systematically subjected to, then it has also served to flatten a wide variety of experiences under one imperfect and unwieldy umbrella, giving those who would already tend to dismiss women’s claims or are uneasy at the idea of a ‘good’ man committing gross acts an easy way to defend their positions. ‘This isn’t Kavanaugh. It isn’t Roy Moore’, the comedian Sarah Silverman pointed out in the piece.”

Likewise, at Vox Matt Yglesias, lays out the basics of the political pageant, the need to appear fully supportive of every claim of sexual harrassment in the Roy Moore moment and the not-inconsequential certainty that Minnesota would appoint another liberal Democrat as Franken’s replacement.

But Yglesias then concludes by saying, “Yet the facts of the case are simple — his conduct was wrong, and it came to light under a series of circumstances when the best option for the causes Franken believes in was to step down, and so he stepped down. It’s true that he could have fought on, and perhaps from a purely self-interested perspective, he should have. But politicians aren’t supposed to be purely self-interested. At a critical moment, Franken actually did something selfless and correct. He deserves to be congratulated for it, but instead, he’s chosen to trash the potentially redemptive thread in the story and make things worse. “

But here’s “the thing” for me, and maybe for you. How do we know, and how can we judge, if what Franken did — whatever it was — was actually “wrong”? Everyone can interpret and surmise. But what really happened? What is true? Who among these folks has made an attempt to find out?

Unlike Roy Moore and Brett Kavanaugh and Harvey Weinstein and Les Moonves and Charlie Rose and on and on, there has never been as far as I can tell any kind of serious investigation, official or journalistic, of the accusations made against him.

Even worse, and a very good reason for Franken to consent to a long interview with one the country’s most credible investigative joyrnalists, is that very few of his colleagues cared … at that moment. The corpse of his career on a public funeral pyre was the image the party decided it needed at that moment, (and could accept with Tina Smith in the wings). Nothing less was going to send a grander message to anyone undecided about whether to vote for Roy Moore or Doug Jones.

Out on the broader canvas the issue remains whether the Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer but catalyzed by an extraordinarily ambitious Kirsten Gillibrand, were played by fairly recognizable right-wing characters and tactics.

Again, we don’t know if they were. But the likelihood that Democrats sacrificed Franken — a truly aggravating thorn to Republicans — in hasty reaction to a political con is at least as plausible as Franken grabbing constituent butts in public and in front of their families.

None of this will change the fundamental of the story. Franken’s out and he won’t be back in that job.

But Jane Mayer’s story — by far the most fully told story of the episode — has to serve as an admonishment the next time the skittery herd feels pressure from such a remarkably loose collection of accusations.