at the first time that he is back on capitol hill since for women accused him of groping and unwanted sexual contact. he said he is embarrassed and ashamed by his behavior and he has pledged to regain the trust of women in his constituents. we are watching because he will be making some sort of announcement or making a statement i should say at 1:00 p.m. eastern time. we will go to that when it begins. meantime, kennedy, maybe i can go to you. your expectations. here we are returning from the long thanksgiving weekend, members of congress returning to capitol hill to start, clouds still hanging over washington. kennedy: it hasn t been enough because the story continues to grow and i realize that represented of conyers has given up his spot on the judiciary committee. his senior leadership role, and the denial and the rationalizations of the house in particular for a part of that was to position itself as the most pro-women and pro-victim.
this country, and i think we have many, many tens and tens and tens of millions of them, they look at the behavior and they re disgusted by the rationalizations and the conveniences, whether it be on the republican side, whether it be on the democratic side, and, by the way, another part of the american economy, the tech industry, is another place where, if you talk to women executives in these companies, the misogyny they deal with, the unfairness they deal with, it s endemic. but if harvey weinstein was a republican, a well-known republican it would have come out a lot sooner. let me say this, he got what he deserved and the questions raced that the board knew of these things, if there were these settlements, and allegations we ll learn if they re true or not, this should not have gone on as long as it went on and someone has to answer that question. it s hard to say meryl streep should have known this. i don t know what meryl streep
weinstein attacking hillary clinton, and you just had to sit there and who s the president again, madam chair? but there is a, there is an enormous hypocrisy angle to this story, and so when we kind of examine how we got president trump in the first place, we really can, i think, draw a straight line back to 1966 in the vietnam war. the collapse of trust in institutions. the massive hypocrisy, the massive, what about-ism. the rationalizations that take place on behavior that at one point universally people would look at and say, that s wrong. it s disgusting, and it doesn t matter who s committing it, but everything is politicized through the lens of the tribe, and you re seeing that play out. so i think the degree to which we have normal, decent people in
place, and we have somebody with no moral rectitude as commander in chief in the west wing of the white house. but when it comes to people outside the national command authority, outside the decision-making process and the deployment of american troops, this is rather easy. and by the way, to the argument that things could be so much worse, we saw the president of the united states yesterday talked about the good people at a torch-lit nazi parade who were simply there expressing their first amendment rights. how much worse can it get? how much lower can we go? it was a disgusting, shameful, dishonorable display at that news conference yesterday. and all of the justifications and all of the rationalizations that continue in service to this, they certainly don t do it for me and i think they re reprehensible. the photo of that young man there, i believe his name is pete, he s angry. that photo has been shared
but a personal note about what reince priebus life looked like the past six months what his departure means to you. i d love to hear you. well, you know i do think of reince as a friend but the story is tragic. because he made a series of decisions, a series of rationalizations he enabled and empowered donald trump. and even though a lot of us warned him this would end badly. i don t think anybody thought it was going to end in this torrent of profanity, obscenity and humiliation that that we have seen. you know reince says that he is going to try to keep this classy and above board. but the reality is when you watch the trajectory of the first six month of this presidency it s not because reince priebus was a bad chief of staff. it s because you have a dysfunctional president. everything starts and ends with donald trump and despite what a great american general kelly is