A third woman accusing Andrew Cuomo of unwanted advances, this one with photographic evidence, has come forward, and yet, the first female vice president remains mum on the mounting evidence that the New York governor is a serial creep.
Despite multiple New York Democrats calling for Cuomo’s resignation or impeachment, White House press secretary Jen Psaki merely hedged when asked about Kamala Harris’s stance on the matter. The most Psaki could say is that Harris and President Biden believe women should be “heard” and “treated with respect.”
Anyone surprised by Harris’s silence hasn’t been paying attention. With respect to harassment and unwanted advances toward women in the workplace, Harris’s feminism is purely transactional. One only need look at how she treated her current boss on the campaign trail to understand it.
Back in early 2019, when the presidential primary field included a plethora of shiny, intersectional candidates, the media tried to trump up a narrative that Biden was somehow a serial predator. Harris was happy to go along with it then. Biden’s memeable penchant for back rubs and bear hugs was contorted into a sexually lecherous predation. Biden’s “tactile politics,” the New York Times decided, were “no longer a laughing matter in the era of #MeToo.” And how did Harris, then the media’s favorite candidate, respond to this notion that Biden, then the media’s least favorite, was guilty of, among other things, hugging a woman “just a bit too long” and sniffing a woman’s hair?
“I believe them, and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it,” Harris said of the accusers. When asked if she believed Biden should bow out of the race, Harris merely winked and nodded.
“He’s going to have to make that decision for himself,” the then-California senator said. “I wouldn’t tell him what to do.”
But that was then, when Biden stood in the way of her endless ambition. She reacted quite differently in the summer of 2020, when Biden was accused of a penetrative sexual assault by Tara Reade, who had multiple contemporaneous corroborating witnesses. Then, when Biden was the only person capable of making her the first female vice president, Harris dismissed Reade’s allegation entirely.
“I’ve fought for children and survivors of sexual assault,” Harris said in defense of Biden after Reade came forward. “I know a predator when I see one.”
Reade was the only woman to make such a serious allegation against Biden. Harris would not have been wrong to argue that most predators who commit such a serious assault are usually serial offenders. She could have claimed that Reade’s allegation, although better corroborated than most, cannot be trusted on its own unless other accusers come forward.
But that would have contradicted her treatment of Brett Kavanaugh as a predator. The only allegation levied against the now-Supreme Court justice that didn’t immediately fall apart was that of Christine Blasey Ford, and even that one was completely uncorroborated, with a lot of additional evidence appearing to clear Kavanaugh’s name. In that incident, Harris invoked a standard of an allegation as evidence unto itself. For Reade’s allegation against a man who could help her ambition, Harris adopted a far more exacting standard. And when Biden stood in her way, she was suddenly willing to believe anything, treating allegations of hair-sniffing and back rubs as tantamount to rape.
The media built Cuomo up into a coronavirus champion. In fact, as Cuomo and other blue-state governors keep botching the pandemic, the Biden administration is still attempting to hold them up as foils to GOP bogeymen such as Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott.
In any sane world, Cuomo’s obstruction of then-President Donald Trump’s Justice Department’s investigation into his disastrous handling of the nursing homes would be sufficient grounds for a bipartisan push for his ouster. But Cuomo survived that, and Harris clearly believes that he can survive this, too. His accusers will get the Tara Reade treatment from the White House.
Time’s up, I guess, for predators with the right letter next to their name.
