The latest #MeToo allegation against Joe Biden is flimsy, even if it is a more serious charge than the ridiculous ones he was slapped with last year. (He touched my forehead!)
But it’s really something to see liberals discover a newfound sense of thoughtfulness and wonderment about the complexities of such accusations.
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote Monday that, as a Democrat, “it would be easier to know what to do” about Tara Reade’s claim that Biden sexually assaulted her nearly 30 years ago, if only her story was “more solid, or if it were less.”
Goldberg’s main hang-up, as she wrote, was that Reade has, on different occasions, varied the account of her experience as a staffer for Biden’s Senate office in the early 1990s. Reade had previously said only that Biden made her uncomfortable, then that she didn’t like the way he treated her professionally. Then, last month, she said that he actually penetrated her vagina with his fingers.
Down the memory hole it went with all those news stories about how sexual assault trauma can force a woman to forget or not fully come to grips with her experience, only to recall it in full later. During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, I remember hearing a lot about how real victims of sexual assault can’t always be expected to come forward immediately with every sordid detail about their incidents. That must not apply for Democratic politicians.
Goldberg allowed in her piece that, sure, all of that might be the case for Reade. In the end, though, she concluded that she’s not very enthusiastic about Biden’s candidacy anyway, and so, “Personally, I’m just left with doubt: doubt about Biden and doubt about the charges against him.”
Oh, and Goldberg finds it suspect that Reade has said positive things about Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Can’t forget about Russia!)
Let’s go back to October 2018, when Goldberg wrote that Senate Republicans should, at the very least, indefinitely delay the confirmation vote for Kavanaugh because polls showed a majority of women in the United States believed the accusation that he had nearly raped a woman at a time and place she couldn’t consistently remember (but it was definitely somewhere in Maryland and sometime during the 1980s). There doesn’t appear to be any poll about whether anyone believes Reade, but even if there were, it would essentially be worthless because almost no one in the media outside of Fox News and a handful of conservative websites is genuinely interested in listening to or covering her claims.
But if a simple poll of women is all that’s needed to bog down a man hoping to work at the highest levels of government, then maybe the New York Times should commission one. Nah! According to the paper’s top editor Dean Baquet, the difference between Kavanaugh and Biden is that Kavanaugh was “a running, hot story.” Biden’s candidacy for president is apparently an event of insignificance.
Sounds about right, actually, but if I were Biden, I’d be offended.
When has any sexual assault claim against President Trump been greeted by the news media with such skepticism? To the contrary, the New York Times keeps a running tally of every woman, no matter how credible, who says Trump touched her. E. Jean Carroll sold a lot of books by claiming to have once been raped by Trump in a department store fitting room. CNN, MSNBC, and nearly every newspaper, magazine, and website couldn’t get enough of her, even though she specified that she didn’t believe she was raped raped — only sort of raped to the point where she couldn’t call it “rape.”
But it’s genuinely amazing to see the national media suddenly develop a new sense of curiosity about whether allegations of sexual misconduct are true or even deserve the benefit of the doubt. It’s suddenly not so black and white. It turns out that maybe we don’t have to believe all women.
It’s no different from when liberals found blame on “both sides” when a Democrat carried a loaded gun to a baseball field with the intent of shooting a bunch of Republicans and almost killing Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise.
It’s no different from how liberals were suddenly struck with nuance when it turned out that the Covington Catholic students were not at fault in taunting a Native American, but were, in fact, the victims of shocking verbal harassment themselves. Didn’t we all bear some responsibility for the hasty judgments on that one? (No!)
It’s funny how deeply cautious liberals suddenly become when held to their own standards.
