Like Christine Blasey Ford, Reade is telling a story that is certainly believable, and that she appears to have told some of her friends and family at the time.
In both the Kavanaugh nomination, and the Biden nomination, the accusers are bringing forward incidents from the past that are pretty believable, but there’s no way to exonerate them or prove their guilt. I believe that witness testimony is evidence, and that matters. We can argue about whether Christine Blasey Ford’s inability to precisely situate Kavanaugh at a time and place where he assaulted her, or whether or not Biden had opportunity and motive but – now what?
I’ll make no attempt to hide the fact that I think many of the other candidates the democrats were running would have made a better candidate than Biden. The timing of the accusation is so unfortunate that I’m not inclined to believe that that’s an accident any more than I believe the timing of the Kavanaugh accusations was accidental. I’m willing to believe that either one, probably both, of the accusations was promoted strongly by whichever was the other side at the time. So what? Since I loathe both parties, I’m willing to believe either or both is engaging in nasty chicanery at the same time as I am willing to believe that both of the accusers are telling the truth. I’ve been to the kind of drunken parties Kavanaugh attended (and I know what “boofing” meant in the late 70s – it meant throwing up) (In some quarters Animal House was practically a documentary) – there was a lot of binge drinking, groping, and drunken sexual assault going on. And can I believe that a creepy, handsy, guy who understands boundaries all too well might try to take advantage of his position? Of course. What do I mean by that Biden understands boundaries, only this: people like Biden get handsy because it’s a way of showing themselves and others that they have power. It’s not quite the same as O’Brien’s (from 1984) sadism, where he is able to measure his power by making others suffer – but handsy people like Biden do what they do for the same reason that dogs piss on trees; they are exploring and marking the boundaries of their power.
Of course you already know that I think Brett Kavanaugh and Joe Biden are examples of some of the worst sort of people; otherwise they would not want to be politicians and supreme court justices, they’d be content to live quiet, interesting lives, without interfering with the lives, hopes, and dreams of millions.
The democrats have been eerily silent about Tara Reade’s accusation, for all that they trumpeted the accusation against Kavanaugh from the rooftops. It’s not a good look, frankly. I suspect that the Republicans are biding their time and, if Biden wins the nomination, which he almost certainly will, then they’re going to harpoon him from every direction. As he seems to deserve. The democrats are, as usual, setting themselves up for failure by letting Biden downplay the accusation and hide behind the coronavirus – they should be out in front explaining to the public why … Biden is innocent but Kavanaugh was not. Of course the situations are different, but there are disturbing symmetries.
I think Biden’s a horrible candidate and I was steeling myself to vote against Trump no matter who the democrats ran. I did vote for Clinton, who is/was the lesser of two evils. There’s still plenty of time for the dirt to come out on Biden, as expected, and I guess we’ll have to sift through it and see what stinks and what doesn’t. But a big “thanks for nothing, democrats!” for forcing us to have another choice between two weevils.
“Gosh, I wonder if Biden’s creepy habit of sniffing young girls’ heads is going to come back to haunt him?” Yes, yes, it is. The warning signs have always been there. What should the democrats do, now that it’s too late? Have hearings, listen to the witnesses, then declare the entire democratic party caucusing system to be a joke and do a mail/electronic-based special election. That would be so visionary and “free market” and whatnot that they’d get a huge amount of positive media coverage – maybe even drown out the Trumpets for a while. They won’t, though, because they’re stupid – if they weren’t stupid they wouldn’t have picked Biden in the first place.
Nancy Pelosi says that she accepts Biden’s denial of wrongdoing; that’s good enough for her. No hearings. No investigation. I guess “bitches be lyin'” is all you need coming from Biden but it’s not from Kavanaugh. Remind me again why anyone trusts her?
A Warren/Abrams ticket would have also brought with it some protection against accusations of sexual assault. I’m still stunned that democrats preferred Biden to Warren, but that’s what it seems is the case. I was stunned to realize that almost half of the voters preferred Trump to a sump-hole full of manure runoff but now I have to discover that, of the remainder who did not, a majority appear to think a wax effigy of Joe Biden is better than just about any of the other candidates who were running for the democratic nomination. Of all of the candidates on the field, Trump and Biden are the worst, in my opinion. What a shit show.
I despise politicians, generally, as it appears to me that they’re mostly power-hungry sociopaths. So, to be clear, if someone accused Biden of being a master vampire, a cannibal, or someone who fucks dead pigs in order to join a fraternity, I wouldn’t be surprised. I wouldn’t trust any of them farther than I could comfortably spit a live rat, which is to say, not very far at all. Why anyone would want to work with such people, or follow their leadership, utterly baffles me.
Mitch McConnell is accusing the media of having a double standard regarding the Biden/Kavanaugh accusations. Damn you, media and democrats, for making McConnell right about something!
Edit:
From Mother Jones [mj]
LaCasse told Insider that in 1995 or 1996, Reade told her she had been assaulted by Biden. “I remember her saying, here was this person that she was working for and she idolized him,” LaCasse said. “And he kind of put her up against a wall. And he put his hand up her skirt and he put his fingers inside her. She felt like she was assaulted, and she really didn’t feel there was anything she could do.”
A couple days ago, over at Pharyngula, some of the commenters appeared to think the accusations against Biden are merely that he was grabby. It’s much worse.
My hope in this situation is that Biden chooses a woman for VP (which he has said he is going to do), and that this festering pustule breaks before the convention. And then the delegates really have no choice but to nominate that woman (I prefer Warren, but don’t insist) for president. But if anybody is going to be the least bit consistent, how can they get upset about Kavanaugh but ignore Biden (as you noted)?
But of course, we plebes have no say in the matter.
ahcuah@#1:
My hope in this situation is that Biden chooses a woman for VP (which he has said he is going to do), and that this festering pustule breaks before the convention. And then the delegates really have no choice but to nominate that woman (I prefer Warren, but don’t insist) for president.
That would be amazing, but I think that it’s 2020 and we’re not going to be so fortunate. Instead we’ll see two demented geriatric crotch-grabbing douchebros running for president. They’ll be fist-bumping and bragging about who boofed harder, backstage.
At least the DNC nomination didn’t go to Bloomberg?…
I think that’s about as close to a positive statement about him that I can manage…
Honestly, “nothing” sounds like it could be a pretty refreshing change of pace at the moment. Shouldn’t they get thanks for “worse than nothing” instead? (Oh, right … no they shouldn’t. Never mind.)
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like you’re also pretty tired of the “lesser of two evils” stuff. (Or at least you don’t exactly seem enthusiastic.) We should expect some kind of an argument about which one is (likely to be) less evil, instead of just a bare assertion to that effect. But the discussion (when people are even willing to have it) is often so narrowly focused on who sits in the oval office next that other important consequences tend to be ignored.
I mean, one way of looking at it is that “we” (or more like centrist/conservative Dems) are just digging ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole. The sage advice is usually to stop digging. It’s not too easy to see how we’re doing anything like that, with every concession we’re “supposed to” make in order to hand power over to another round of neoliberal assholes. (In the end, Biden himself may just be a puppet, assuming he even won the election, but he’d still be the decrepit old puppet of that brand of asshole.)
So … does this mean we’re headed for more of the same shit for the rest of my fucking life? If that’s a real possibility, that seems like kind of a big deal to me. But maybe it isn’t actually important, if what matters is just “Trump bad, Trump very bad, Trump more bad, etc.”
In any case, it doesn’t seem all that simple to support the claim that you’ll get less evil this way, when you consider the short or the medium or the long term. The distinctions between conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans are already pretty meaningless in many respects. But if this will make it even harder to tell the difference for the foreseeable future and it more or less guarantees no major party will be doing anything significant to oppose that, then I think they need to make a fairly compelling case that most ordinary people will actually benefit somehow from the deal anyway. Maybe they will…. But that’s not just going to happen by magic or with enough wishful thinking, and it doesn’t just go without saying that it’ll all work itself out in the end.
This “biding their time” business makes me suspect that you haven’t been to the Fox News website recently. Yesterday, the first 7 (7!) articles that appeared there were about Miss Reade. (Coronavirus? What coronavirus?) On MSNBC, on the other hand, I could find precisely 0.
There seems to be enough corroboration of her story to be sure that Biden did _something_ to her. However, her timing shoots her personal credibility for me, and also puts her in a separate category from the Kavanaugh accusers. If she simply wanted to do Joe Biden the maximum amount of damage possible, she could have come out with her story at any time between his announcement of candidacy and Iowa. Heck, any time before Super Tuesday would have been good. Even if it hadn’t sunk him, at least his voters would have known exactly who they were voting for. OTOH, her stated reason for coming out was to protect others. Well, she could have waited until after November for that.
Basically, if she’d calculated the timing of her accusations in order to give the maximum benefit to Donald Trump, she could not have timed it any better. So I’m assuming she’s either a Trump supporter, or has been influenced by a Trump supporter, and that doesn’t do much for her credibility in my book. The only alternative is that she’s unbelievably politically naive, and I don’t think she could have become a Senator’s aide with that level of naivete.
Don’t give me any “Assault survivors need to figure out on their own when they’re ready to come forward.” It’s been 27 years. She knew exactly what she was doing.
Even if it’s a given that she’s a Trump supporter, though — yeah, odds are she’s probably telling the truth and Biden is slime. The best case would be if someone prevails upon him to drop out. That puts us into uncharted territory as to who the nominee would be, though. The one thing we can be sure of is that the voters wouldn’t get any say.
brucegee1962:
Huh? She did go public about it last year, but what happened is that none of the major news outlets wanted to touch the story (or for that matter any of the other women making accusations about Biden). That’s on them, not on her.
And your “reasoning” about her personal credibility has to to do with her not fully maximizing the amount of damage it does to Biden? Why? I have no clue what not being a minmaxer has to do with it. Newsflash: those people are raped too, just like any other kind of person is.
And by that you mean a rapist, not “who” as in Joseph R. Biden.
Because they already knew (or should have known) that he’s the guy who was supporting segregationist policies way back in the day, who was on the wrong side about women’s rights and gay rights for just as long, who liked expanding the death penalty and cutting welfare programs, who was the leading Dem enabler of the Iraq war, who can’t stop lying about his shitty past except perhaps when he can’t even remember it anymore, and so forth and so on, etc.
Oh, and they also presumably knew he’s been accused by multiple other women. That’s who we’re talking about. But they just wouldn’t know exactly who he was, without this particular detail….
First, why do you even care about when? You have no idea how hard it can be for people talk about these things. I’ve never talked about what happened to me to my friends, family, partners, etc., but there’s not even a media spotlight on me and the shitheads responsible have no power whatsoever.
Also, after November, it’s possible Biden would be the fucking president. What the fuck would be better about that kind of timing?
But to go back to the first question, why do you even care? Imagine there’s no connection to politics, so you don’t have to worry about what it means for your voting or any of that. This is a person trying to tell people what happened to her, while most either ignore it or look for ways to retaliate against her. Can you honestly tell yourself that you’d be saying the same type of shit as you are now?
FFS, in order to “maximize” the effect, you just said that she should’ve timed things earlier in the primary campaign, which in fact she did. But then on other hand it was after November — it seems like you can’t decide which sort of timing is “good” or which is “bad,” but you do apparently think that it matters somehow and if you try very hard that something can be read into it.
Also, if her story is true and nothing is wrong with her credibility, there’s no fucking reason at all for her to be a Biden supporter or to do anything in particular that Biden supporters would do. That looks just like a Trump supporter at this dipshit level of analysis. Meaning that no matter what, she just can’t win playing this game, because you’re not really being open the possibility that she’s telling the truth.
Even if your punditry here were coherent — it’s not — you also believe it’s unlikely that a no-name aide of a politician wouldn’t have been hired in the first place (decades ago), if you consider their behavior (now) to be “naive.” How incompetent do politicians themselves need to be, before you’ll understand that intelligence and merit and so forth are not typically (much less always) what lands you a job in Washington DC?
Fact: The US voting system is first-past-the-post. Which means that if the unholy love child of Adolph Hitler and Caligula manages to get more votes than any of the competition, that unholy love child is the one who gets installed in office.
That’s fact. That’s what we have to acknowledge and deal with right now. It’s also what we really need to work on changing for future elections, cuz first-past-the-post has been proven to encourage two-party systems, with all the downstream consequences thereby entailed..
Fact: Right now, the Angry Cheeto has the votes of something like 30% of the voting public. So if we want the Cheeto out of office, a necessary precondition is that the Cheeto be opposed by someone who can get at least 30% of the voting public. Which is, again, a necessary consequence of the US’s FPTP voting system, and we really ought to work to change that, but there’s no way in hell that we can change it between now and November, so yeah.
So maybe Biden is every bit the rapey bastard the Cheeto is. Could be. But he does appear to be the only candidate who has a decent chance of out-FPTPing the Cheeto. So for anyone who wonders whether they ought to vote for a rapey bastard, the question is, do you think Biden will govern as badly as the Cheeto does and has done?
We know that the Cheeto nominates unqualified hacks to the judiciary whose only virtue is their slavish adherence Der Leader’s political party. We know that the Cheeto has been doing that, and continues to do that.
Do you think Biden would do that?
We know that the Cheeto treats the office of the Presidency like a profit center in his org chart. We know that the Cheeto has been doing that, and continues to do that.
Do you think Biden would do that?
We know that the Cheeto destroys environmental regulations at pretty much every opportunity. We know that the Cheeto has been doing that, and continues to do that.
Do you think Biden would do that?
We know that the Cheeto makes a point of going out of his way to shit on, and if possible destroy, any positive/progressive thing that Obama may have managed to accomplish. We know that the Cheeto has been doing that, and continues to do that.
Do you think Biden would do that?
We know that the Cheeto fires people who tell him he’s wrong, and promotes blatant sycophants. We know that the Cheeto has been doing that, and continues to do that.
Do you think Biden would do that?
We know that the Cheeto makes a point of rolling back any and all progressive achievements that have been put in place by previous administrations. We know that the Cheeto has been doing that, and continues to do that.
Do you think Biden would do that?
—————————————
Back in 1991, the electorate of Louisiana was faced with an unappetizing choice for their Governor: either Edwin Edwards, a thoroughly corrupt politician in all the worst senses of the word… or else David Duke. The general sentiment among the voters may have been captured by this bumper sticker: “Vote for the crook. It’s important.” In the end, Edwards got 61% of the vote, as compared to Duke’s 39%.
Perhaps the US is faced with a “vote for the crook”-type scenario?
consciousness razor @6
Do you have any corroboration for that? It’s not what I heard. This is what I found from NPR (https://www.npr.org/2020/04/19/837966525/on-the-record-a-former-biden-staffers-sexual-assault-allegation):
Late. March. Now, if you want to argue that touching someone’s shoulder and neck (which he has admitted to doing) are exactly the same as pushing someone against a wall and sticking fingers in her vagina, then I see where you’re coming from.
I heard plenty from the media about multiple women complaining of him pawing them (only a tenth of what Fox viewers heard, of course), but people voted for him anyway. I certainly didn’t, but many others did.
Yeah, I hope they knew about all that stuff too. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe they wouldn’t have cared even if Reade had come forward with her full story. Who knows? She couldn’t have known either what would have happened if she’d told everything.
Unfortunately, having to choose between two horrible humans because most people in this country are either poorly educated or also horrible is one of the prices we have to pay for living in a Democracy rather than, say, a consciousness razor-ocracy. Pity, that. I’m sure a razor-ocracy would be a much nicer place, and I say that sincerely.
I don’t understand your question. I can imagine anything I want — I can imagine she’s the reincarnation of Betty Grable and he’s Cary Grant. Sure, given a completely different set of circumstances I’d be more sympathetic, but wtf difference does that imaginary world make?
This is a woman who woke up one morning in late March and said, “Now’s the right time to tell my full story. Being a non-idiot, I’m aware of the fact that doing so at this particular point in time may well help facilitate the re-election of the single greatest threat to the health and safety of every single American and other humans since the founding of this country. But who cares? My ability to personally handle my own trauma on my own timeline is more important than any of that.” And you want me to feel sympathy towards her?
Or to give another counter-factual — if this was something that happened to her last year, then sure, I could believe that it took her this long before she was able to face the cameras and tell the whole story. But to sit on it for 27 years, then decide she’s finally ready to tell the story in March that she wasn’t able to tell in January? Give me a break.
I did say that it seems likely her story was true. And I absolutely wouldn’t expect her to be a Biden supporter. That’s exactly why her timing seems so fishy. If she carried that big a grudge against him, why not drop the bombshell at a time it would do the most damage to him, personally — that is, any time BEFORE the week when he sews up the nomination — rather than after, when the entire Democratic Party that he is now leading is also collateral damage? Wouldn’t she have figured it’d be easier to knock him out of politics for good back when he was just one of twenty candidates, instead of now when the party is stuck with him and there’s no good way to break free, and there’s a better-than-even chance (according to the polls) he’ll end up as president?
I was trying to say that she must be either a Trump supporter or an idiot (not that those categories are mutually exclusive), and giving her the benefit of the doubt for not being an idiot. You seem to wish to argue for her idiocy, though, and I won’t stand in your way.
One more word about where I’m coming from here. Yeah, I can believe that Biden is a shitty human being and likely guilty of sexual assault. The country has survived having a great number of shitty human beings as president, from slave owners to Kennedy to Clinton, but it’s survived. I also think I’ve got a pretty good idea of what Biden will actually DO if president — probably the same kind of stuff that his good buddy Obama did, which is to say, some things I like, some things I don’t like, and a few genuinely awful things. Hopefully he’ll pick a good party leader as VP and get out after one term. The country will get by.
Trump is in a whole different category — not just from contemporary politicians, but also from all the other presidents we’ve had. No other president has been as dedicated to making America an enemy to the rest of the world. No other president has based his entire campaign around setting Americans against one another. No other president has worked so hard to aid and abet domestic terrorists. (OK, maybe Coolidge.) No other president has done more to promote policies that may bring about THE END OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION, IF NOT ALL MAMMALIAN LIFE.
And that’s not even getting into the fact that he seems to be entering early-stage dementia before our eyes, and his followers don’t care.
Sorry, I get worked up. The guy gives me nightmares. Where I’m coming from, a vote for Trump (or half a vote for him, which is to say abstaining or voting for a third party) is a vote for a near-fascist Supreme Court for the remainder of my lifetime, the possibility of the breakup of this country and/or a second civil war, millions of avoidable worldwide deaths due to global warming and unnecessary geopolitical idiocy, and other stuff that we can’t even anticipate. When I vote for Biden in November (assuming he hasn’t dropped out) I won’t think of it as a vote for a shitty guy — I’ll think of it as a vote against the Apocalypse in human form.
brucegee1962 #8
That’s a lot of words to say, ‘Yes, I’m voting for a sex offender, but I sleep better at night knowing there’s a (D) in the White House, instead of an (R)’.
polishsalami, but not each non-vote for that particular sex offender means the other sex offender gets one net vote ahead.
To echo you: that’s a lot of words to say, ‘Yes, I’m not voting for either sex offender, but I sleep better at night knowing I didn’t vote for the sex offender in power’.
(As usual, the caveat applies that your vote matters fuck-all; the actual voting is done by the Electoral College anyway)
The Biden accusation is becoming an interesting political litmus test. Stacey Abrams (who wants to be Biden’s VP) Back in 2018 she called it “shameful” that Kavanaugh’s promotion to the Supreme Court was allowed to continue, after a cursory investigation by the FBI.
CNN [cnn]
Ok, the New York Times is way more qualified to investigate these things? Why didn’t they have The Daily Show investigate? But only because the Muppets are busy.
consciousness razor@#4:
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like you’re also pretty tired of the “lesser of two evils” stuff.
I’m really tired of it.
I’m also tired of people telling me that if I don’t get out and vote against Trump, I’m voting for him. Yes, that’s the way that the system is set up, but I don’t owe the system anything, so long as the premise is that I’m being allowed to pretend that this is a democracy.
The whole set-up is corrupt and corrupting and it’s acceptable to refuse to play. The 2-party system is going to promote whichever rapist it wants; it’s just asking for our opinion as a sort of pro forma gesture.
Well, the Democrats have really painted themselves into a corner with this, ironically because the largest number favored the candidate who was supposed to be “electable”.
Do you think Biden would do that?
If Biden chooses someone like Stacey Abrams as a running mate, I’d vote for him only so that I could wish he would die.
That’s how excited I am about american democracy.
I’d like to hear a solid reason why Ryan Grim and Katie Halper aren’t considered credible sources. The only argument I’ve seen is that they’re lefties… and so they’re implied to be at best not objective, and at worst actively lying to help their preferred candidate. Simultaneously we’re supposed to be running with the idea that the NYT is objective and not presenting information from its own ideological viewpoint? That it doesn’t have a preferred candidate? And that it hasn’t knowingly buried sexual assault allegations against powerful men in the past? Give me a break.
There is pretty strong corroborating evidence that Reade told people close to her what happened at the time of the incident, which is about as good as it gets in these cases. There’s now audio of what appears to be Reade’s mother calling in to the Larry King show and asking what a woman like her daughter is supposed to do in a situation like this. I also listened to Tara’s interview. I believe her too.
I am furious and disgusted at a Democratic party and a media who seemed to have done their best to force me to choose between the least evil of two conservative rapists so they can preserve the comfortable status quo for their owners.
Thank you Marcus, for posting this. “My side’s” responses to Reade’s accusation have generally been very, very depressing. Go ahead and vote for the less evil conservative rapist, there are good arguments for doing so. But at least be clear eyed about that being what you’re doing.
plenty of reason to not believe her https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/29/1941307/-The-evidence-you-need-to-see-regarding-Reade-and-Biden
daverytier@#16:
plenty of reason to not believe her
Then I expect that she’d be taken apart in the hearings, which … um… they aren’t having. For example, if she told her friend in 1995 that Biden sniffed her shampoo, and now she’s claiming he fingered her, that’d be pretty damning, wouldn’t it? A bit more investigation than just “The New York Times checked it out.” seems reasonable, regarding such serious accusations.
We’ve just been through a round of big posturing about listening to victims and taking them seriously, and I think that dismissing them outright is not the way to go. Especially if she’s lying.
By the way, if I had some accusation to make about a person, of course I’d make it when they became a candidate for high office. Because I’d want it to have impact and get a hearing. I’d also expect my accusation to be examined more critically than otherwise and would be less likely to make it unless I could support it well. I never understood why anyone thinks that “she’s just saying that because he’s running for ${whatever}” does anything other than support the accusation.
The easiest way to put the whole thing away would be for there to be hearings. Immediately and openly. Take her apart, or take Biden apart, get it over with and move on.
I agree with Marcus. I find Tara’s accusation credible, and I’m disappointed in the democratic establishment for choosing another weak candidate. I held my nose, I voted for Hillary, but I’m done. I could find myself voting for Biden, if he does something to earn my vote. I’ll knowingly vote for a sexual predator if I see evidence that we will get velocity moving in the right direction. I’m done voting for slowing down the damage this country inflicts on itself.
@14. Marcus Ranum :
To be brutally honest I’m really hoping for a trifecta of deaths here – Trump, Pence & Biden with the first two putting Nancy Pelosi into office and the latter ensuring that Biden doesn’t then replace her. I’d rather see amuch younger and more progressive Democratic party member in power and Biden would be second last as my choice out of all the Democratic contenders.
No idea what the protocol would be if Pelosi does become POTUS that way before the election – whether she would then become the nomineee or could replace him and stay on as POTUS with Democratic party agreement or quite what? Pence seems to be helping by not wearing makss anyhow – now if he can just infect Trump and Trump then infects Biden and they all die pretty close together ..Hmm?
I also believe Tara Reade just as I believe Christine Blasey-Ford and also believe Trump’s more numerous accusers including his first wife. If I was an American or somehow able to vote in their 2020 US Presidrntial election I would unhesitatingly vote for Biden anyhow since the alternative is Trump and for the world’s sake as well as the USA’s Trump needs to be removed ASAP. Think SCOTUS, envuironmental implications, etc ..
PS. For clarity my last few lines apply regardless of Biden’s VP although I am hoping it will be Elizabeth Warren, Stacey Abrams or Kamala Harris. Mainly preferably someone progressive and younger. I think that choice will be a key factor as this article notes :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-16/biden-vp-picks-to-take-on-trump-us-election/12149592
I hope Biden chooses wisely. (Yeah for once!)
Beating only Bloomberg as the very worst possible choice of this rounds contenders – agree with #3 lochaber there. For whatever very little it’s worth, my initial first choice was Kamala Harris then Elizabeth Warren then Bernie Sanders.
Apologies for all my typos.