Republicans do not care about the woman who claims Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 when she worked for him as a Senate aide, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said Friday.
More specifically, the cable host added, leaning hard on her lifetime credential as a former George W. Bush White House staffer, all the GOP’s talk about the alleged victim, Tara Reade, is part of a targeted “smear campaign” of the former vice president.
On Friday, Biden responded for the first time to Reade’s charge. The presumptive 2020 Democratic candidate claimed unequivocally during an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that what his former aide alleges “did not happen.”
Biden is “trying to walk” a fine line, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell said later as she attempted to spin the former vice president’s efforts to have it both ways. Biden, you may recall, claimed during the battle over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court that we ought to presume a woman is telling the truth when she alleges assault. The former vice president obviously believes differently now, if he ever even believed in that presumption of truth nonsense in the first place.
Mitchell then spent the remainder of her speaking time going over the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against President Trump.
“Andrea, to your point,” Wallace said after Mitchell had finished, “I think that this is a year without campaigns. Without a campaign trail, without a campaign press corps, and the silver lining, if you will, is that voters are going to have to watch that interview this morning and make their own judgments. There are no more arbiters. There are no more poohbahs in either party.”
She added, “Let me just say this too, having once been a part of the Republican Party: The Right is not running an intellectually honest operation to get to the bottom of whether Tara Reade was victimized. The Right is running a smear campaign against Joe Biden.”
Like Mitchell, Wallace also seemed more interested in the allegations against Trump.
“The Right wants to create some sort of equal playing field on which Donald Trump’s more than, or nearly two dozen accusers sort of have some company on the other side,” the MSNBC host said. “The Right is not running the same operation that the Democrats are running, which is to … have some consistency around statements that I think just about every elected Democrat has made about women in the context of the #MeToo movement.”
For the record, the difference between how Democratic officials treated the allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh and how they are treating the allegations against a member of their own team has been the difference between night and day. There has been zero consistency. None whatsoever. And even if Democrats were treating the matter at hand with some ounce of moral consistency, as Wallace laughably suggests, is it really a “smear campaign” if Republicans note accurately that Biden’s position regarding the treatment of allegations of sexual misconduct has been, shall we say, inconsistent? Is it still dirty pool to note that the former vice president has failed to hold himself to his own standards, including the one he promoted when he participated in the attempt to destroy Brett Kavanaugh?
Apparently so, according to Wallace.
“So,” she concluded Friday, “everyone should proceed with caution about statements made around this on the Right.”
The patron saint of mediocrity strikes again.
