“Do not think that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of these answers. They know that their statements are empty and contestable, but it amuses them to make such statements; it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words. They have a right to play. They even like to play with speech because by putting forth ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutor; they are enchanted with their unfairness because for them it is not a question of persuading by good argument but of intimidating or disorienting. If you insist too much, they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed. Not that they are afraid of being convinced: Their only fear is that they will look ridiculous or that their embarrassment will make a bad impression on a third party whom they want to get on their side. Thus if the anti-Semite is impervious, as everyone has been able to observe, to reason and experience, it is not because his conviction is so strong, but rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen to be impervious.”
- Jean-Paul Sartre, “Anti-Semite and Jew”, 1944
A few weeks ago the frequent accounts of Joe Biden’s “handsy” behavior parted way for a more serious accusation. In April 2019, a former staffer for Senator Biden, Tara Reade, accused him of inappropriate touching while she was on his staff in the 1990s but did not describe anything graphic. But in March of this year she approached a journalist and escalated the complaint, saying that in 1993, Joe Biden had pressed her against a wall and penetrated her with his fingers. Only after this did she file a report with Washington, D.C. Police. Reade says she did file a written complaint at the time with the Senate personnel office, but she says she does not have a copy and it has not been found in the Senate records.
The latest developments are that (after cancelling an interview with Fox News) Reade did secure an interview with Megan Kelly on Kelly’s own social media pages, where Reade declared she would take a polygraph if Joe Biden takes one, and escalated further by calling on Biden to suspend his campaign. Not only that, on May 7 Douglas Wigdor, whose firm has represented six victims of convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, has announced he is representing Reade.
While it seems (to ‘conservatives’) that the liberal media were trying to sweep this whole thing under the rug, that is less and less the case.
The goal here is not any old-school journalist sense of both-sides fairness and objectivity, but the media’s need for sensationalism and ratings, and if that means making Discount Caligula more feasible than he would be otherwise, then they’ll do it. Trump has said more than once that the media will save him because he’s great for their numbers. And more than once, I’ve said he may be right.
Because as I’d mentioned a few weeks ago, it’s a bit suspicious that this particular accusation came up at exactly the point that Trump is beset by unfriendly news on all sides and it looks like all Biden has to do to win in November is show up and not die of old age. The same people who fret about balancing “#metoo” with the need to support a liberal over Trump aren’t going to stress how Reade made a story already damaging to Biden that much more of a criminal accusation, or how her anti-Biden efforts increased as she supported Bernie Sanders politically, or how she wrote a 2018 article (since deleted) on the left-wing Medium site waxing rhapsodic about “Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin” and talking about her political evolution “after reading authors like Noam Chomsky, (and) my eyes opened to the great extent of our nation’s hypocrisy and imperialism.” But this is the money quote: “President Putin’s genius is his judo ability to conserve his own energy and let the opponents flail, using up their energy, while he gains position. Currently, President Putin has a higher approval rating in America then the American President, particularly with women. [‘Citation needed‘ – Wikipedia] President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity. It is evident that he loves his country, his people and his job. Although his job may seem like in the words of writer, Elizabeth Gilbert on genius, ‘trying to swallow the sun.’ This is a whole lot to deal with for one mere mortal… President Putin’s obvious reverence for women, children and animals, and his ability with sports is intoxicating to American women. Especially since the bloated, American President is so negative, denigrating and dismissive of anyone but himself as he stumbles even playing golf (which is not a real sport anyway but a past time, sorry golfers). “
(It shouldn’t be a surprise that someone could support Putin while denigrating Trump; after all, most open Trumpniks are more fond of Putin’s approach to government than our nation’s hypocrisy and imperialism.)
A Vox journalist who is personally sympathetic to Reade said, “If Reade had told a consistent story and shared all of her corroborating sources with reporters, if those sources had told a consistent story, if the Union piece had shaken loose other cases like hers, or if there were “smoking gun” evidence in Biden’s papers, her account might have been reported on differently in mainstream media a year ago. It is not fair to an individual survivor that their claims require an extraordinary level of confirmation, but it’s what reporters have found is necessary for their stories to hold up to public scrutiny and successfully hold powerful men accountable. So we are here.”
Which is another reason that news outlets have been leery of getting more involved, because this could all blow up in their faces. But with the involvement of Wigdor, the stakes have been raised, and this campaign is at least less amateur hour than the Party of Pizzagate attempt to smear Anthony Fauci as a sexual assaulter.
The problem being that escalating the stakes to the level of “suspend your campaign or we have a rape investigation” means that someone’s bluff is gonna be called. And lest we assume that having a hot lawyer means that your case is solid, I’m old enough to remember when Michael Avenatti was a hot lawyer. That would make me at least two.
Until this actually does get investigated, this is just the rationalization for some people to say (with a straight face) “I won’t vote for a creepy senile rapist who used his office to get his kid a cushy job.”
Well. Good thing we’ve got TWO parties, so there’s a real CHOICE.
Let us go straight to the worst-case scenario, because let’s face it, this is Trumpworld, and in Trumpworld, the worst-case scenario is the most likely one. The worst-case scenario of course is that Joe Biden actually did rape Tara Reade. That would of course require a serious investigation actually proving the charges, which at this point are no more substantiated – or capable of substantiation – than E. Jean Carroll’s recent charge against Trump, or 22 other separate allegations from individual women over the years, before he ran for president, and are certainly no more grounded than Trump actually confessing on tape that he could “grab ’em by the pussy” or telling Howard Stern that as owner of the Miss Universe pageants he could walk into contestants’ dressing rooms. (The Miss Universe franchise includes Miss Teen USA.)
So for this to get beyond where the Trump accusations have already gone, there would have to be a more developed investigation of Reade’s charges. There’s a recent piece in The Daily Beast, succinctly titled, “Hell No, Joe Biden Shouldn’t Play By Rules That Donald Trump Never Has.”
Yes, I know, it’s Michael Tomasky. But he’s not wrong. In particular, I point out the following:
“I’d like to live in a world where Biden could do the clearly honorable and above-board thing here. But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where the level of morality is defined by the least moral actor. That’s Trump. “
Let me re-emphasize: We live in a world where the level of morality is defined by the least moral actor.
That’s Trump.
When Democrats in 2020 had an amazing surfeit of candidates, and a very strong Bernie Sanders run, and yet Joe Biden attained a strategic victory even before the virus shutdown, that indicates that voters in his party wanted Joe Biden. They may have been thinking strategically, but ultimately, they wanted Joe Biden. When Republicans in 2016 had a surfeit of candidates, most of whom did not have Trump’s vices, his pettiness, his disrespect, and they nominated him anyway, that indicates to me that Republicans, and the others who voted with them that election, wanted Trump, not despite his pettiness and disrespect but actively because of these vices. For Democrats, supporting a potential rapist is a contradiction. For Republicans, it’s the whole point.
If you’re going to say rape is the disqualifier… you’re going to give TRUMP a pass?? You’re so desperate to win that you’ve completely thrown away your Christian ™ morality, but you assume Those People aren’t so desperate to win that they wouldn’t throw away their feminist morality? Why should NotTrumpniks care about their guy committing rape when YOU DON’T??
This is the standard YOU’RE operating on. You don’t get to cry foul when the enemy plays by your rules.
And yes, Trumpniks, I DID tell Clintonoids this four years ago.
If your position is that They’re All Crooked, and They All Suck, you haven’t actually abandoned the responsibility of judgment. You have merely changed the standard of judgment to They’re All Crooked, and They All Suck. In which case, Trump is clearly the superior to both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, but then what is the point of acting like their vices are disqualifying?
This is the problem. Not just that tu quoque works both ways, which was Clinton’s problem facing Trump. The key is the Trumpnik desire to have it both ways. Saying They’re All Crooked and They All Suck is their rationalization for worshiping the most crooked and sucktastic politician of all time, precisely because of his flaws. But it’s also a means of disarming anybody who actually believes in morals and standards. After all, hypocrisy is disloyalty to a standard that one actually believes in, and one cannot be a hypocrite if he has abandoned all standards. The Trumpnik’s only standard is Trump, and if Trump changes his mind whenever he feels like it, so does the Trumpnik.
(This, incidentally, is why Trumpism can’t be considered ‘conservatism’ because conservatism was always based on the idea that there are human standards that should be more durable than one dysfunctional person’s whim. But then, the problems with conservatism in practice help explain how these guys went for Trump.)
There was a recent journalistic effort through the New York Times called The 1619 Project, which was about how the slave economy of colonial America was in fact at the foundation of colonial culture and thus at the foundation of the American republic. Right-wingers (with some reason) have critiqued the articles as an attack on the generally positive message of the American Dream and the premise of freedom. There are in fact a lot of leftists who act as though the whole American project is invalidated “because slavery”, not withstanding the inspiration of the United States as a colonial revolt to people in Haiti, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. But in February, on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah hosted the main writer of 1619, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and among other things she talked about was how her black father was the only person in her Missisippi neighborhood who flew the American flag. And Noah asked her Jones about her thesis that “black people have the job of making it a truth.” And her response (3:39) is, “When Thomas Jefferson writes those famous English words, ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal’, he owns 130 human beings, even some of his own family members. And he understands that one-fifth of the population will enjoy none of these rights and liberties. We are founded on a hypocrisy, a paradox. But black people read those words and said, ‘oh we believe that those words are true and apply to us, and fight.”
As I say: It is possible for two things to be true at the same time. It is a fact that Jefferson was both a slaveowner and a founder of classical liberalism. You can look at the hypocrisy of that and throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater in rejecting the American project over its contradictions, or you can see what is good in the project and work to make it more consistent and apply its rewards to everybody. It is in fact the anti-liberals (not conservatives, but people who hearken back to the age before Jefferson) who insist that freedom is zero-sum and that only some people can have it.
If you’re going to say the two factions of duopoly are both hypocrites, the difference is between the one that might reform towards actual progress and consistency and the one that wants to go in the other direction. If that’s not good enough for you, liberals, well again: THAT’s why I’m a Libertarian. Rationalizing that the corrupt party that might clean up it’s act is actually going to do so is not good enough in the short run, and it’s a large part of why people didn’t trust you guys enough to carry Hillary Clinton in the states where she needed it. Which is why even more than minimum wage or national health care, what this country really needs are election reforms like mail voting and automatic registration (as opposed to making people jump through flaming hoops just to exercise a civil ‘right’) and especially ranked choice voting so there’s MORE than two people to vote for. That might hurt Democrats, which is why they haven’t done it yet. But at this point, it’s a matter of their survival, not just ours.
In point of fact, both major parties ARE crooked, and they DO all suck, but this is my comparison. Democrats are the Mob. Republicans are that scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker sees the mountain of money that the Mob has compiled for him, lights one side on fire, and says “I’m only burning MY half.”
It might be one thing to play “I’m rubber, you’re glue” in a world where the economy is good, and politics is just a game and people take it on the same level as rooting for the Cowboys over the Redskins. (NFL team metaphor being completely intentional.) But now there’s coronavirus, and while Trump is not the direct cause of the actual virus, his policies, or lack of such, have made him the proximate cause of the problem in this country. And for a lot of people, especially those who were already in compromised health, the choice in November is a bet on whether they will be alive next year – assuming that they survive long enough to vote this year.
Not to mention that even Trump, with that walnut between his ears, seems to understand how a truly serious investigation of Biden could backfire on him, just as an investigation of Brett Kavanaugh would have caused real problems if it hadn’t been carefully manicured from beginning to end by the Republicans in control of the confirmation process. Republicans will not be in control of this process. After all, it’s not like someone on the Left couldn’t make a strategically timed accusation against Trump. And if “the liberal media” takes an investigation of Biden seriously without doing a serious investigation of Trump’s “playboy” history, it won’t just be the Right questioning their credibility.
No, however likely it is that Tara Reade is not lying, it is far more likely that the charges she makes against Biden will go the way of all the other charges against Trump: stoked for sensationalism and ratings, but nothing will ever come of them, because taking them seriously would turn over the wrong stones.
So Democrats (and hopefully other non-Trumpniks) will go back to supporting Biden even knowing he had problems with women, which they already did. And Trump will go back to his otherwise successful Karl Rove approach of always accusing the enemy of the thing he’s been doing all along.
So next month, he’s probably going to blame Joe Biden for bankrupting Atlantic City.