[quote]
[ul][li]December 1992 — August 1993 — Tara Reade worked as a Senate aide in Joe Biden’s office.[/li][li]2009 — Reade commended Biden for actions he has taken against domestic violence.[/li][li]2017 — Reade repeatedly attacked Putin and Russia on Twitter for election interference and for Russian legislation that legalized domestic violence.[/li][li]2017 — Reade repeatedly praised Joe Biden through tweets, retweets and “likes” on Twitter. On multiple occasions she boosts him for his work on helping end sexual assault.[/li][li]2018 — Reade claims she liked Russia since she left Washington DC (Over a decade ago), and praised Putin and Russia over and over again. She also directly praised Putin for his treatment of women in multiple articles.[/li][li]January of 2019 — Reade first begins talking about her sexual harassment allegations against Joe Biden on Twitter.[/li][li]March, 2019 — Reade continues to praise Putin.[/li][li]April, 2019 — Reade comes forward with her original allegations against Biden, but says his actions were NOT “sexualization,” but rather compared his actions toward her as being demeaning and treating her like a “pretty” lamp that is thrown away when it’s too bright. She also claimed that her story was not “a story about sexual misconduct.”[/li]
[li]September 2019 — Reade calls on Joe Biden to be investigated for his dealings with Ukraine.[/li][li]January, 2020 — Reade continues to praise Vladimir Putin on Twitter.[/li]
[li]March, 2020 — Reade comes forward again, this time claiming that Joe Biden did sexually assault her in 1993.[/li][li]March, 2020 — Reade tells Vox News that she started liking Putin and Russia in 2018 after “watching Noam Chomsky,” but no longer likes Putin after finding out about domestic violence in Russia. (note: in 2018 she claimed to have loved Russia since over a decade ago, and in 2017 she was posting tweets on her account related to Russia’s domestic violence.)[/ul][/li][/quote]
I was very dismayed to watch Biden deliver his official public response to the charges, in which he said, and I quote, “I’m not going to question her motive, I’m not going to attack her, she has a right to say whatever she wants to say.”
Joe, someone is accusing you of sexual assault that you claim to be a lie, on the brink of the presidential election, and you’re NOT going to question her motive? Why not? If someone publicly accused me of ANY crime that I did not commit, I’m sure as fuck going to question their motives and I am going to attack them.
This is exactly the kind of half-assed, equivocating, softpedaling response that will just get his dumb ass deeper into the weeds.
I said from the very beginning that he needs to firmly, even angrily, state, “this charge is a complete fabrication, it’s clearly a last-minute hatchet job, and people are dying right now and we don’t have time for this bullshit.”
I’m also going to say something here, just so I can say you saw it here first:
A time is going to come when the Democrats conclude that the only way to insulate their presidential candidate from sexual misconduct ratfucking, is to finally, decisively, ensure that a woman is the nominee. And by God they will make that happen. The necessary advisors and consultants and insiders will find their woman, and bulldoze a path for her to be the nominee, and she will be the nominee.
And then she will be accused of sexual misconduct.
It could be a straight man accusing her; it could be a gay man accusing her. It could be a lesbian woman, it could be a bisexual woman, it could be a transgender person. Whoever it is, there will be a lurid and highly believable accusation. And you better believe the media will pick it up and run with it like fuckin’ Jerry Rice.
I came here to post the same thing. I thought it extremely odd for him to say that “she has a right” to make the claim. If it is false, then she has absolutely no right to say anything of the sort.
And if I know the allegation is false, then I am going to question her motives for making a false criminal allegation against me. Damn right I would question her motives and sue her for slander.
Is that the result of the #metoo movement? That women have the right to make false allegations of sexual assault?
On the contrary I think he handled that as well as you could hope given the subject.
Tara Reade has backtracked now on the claim she repeatedly made about filing a report. Only after Biden went on national TV to invite a search for any complaint in the Senate records. Maybe he called her bluff? And did it without having to demean her.
Apparently she has previously accused her husband and father of abuse which might well suggest she did really experience something at the hands of someone, in which case Joe Biden publicly question her motive is a bad move. I would be inclined to look at who has been advising her and whether she is being manipulated. For starters a legal mind would have had her stop interacting in back and forths on Twitter when this was first reported.
One of the results is that accusers should be treated with respect and dignity, barring proof of dishonesty. And yes, this is a good thing. I don’t like Biden and I hope he drops out of the race, but at least he handled this part correctly.
But that’s the thing. If this allegation is false, Biden is in the unique position of knowing it is false. He doesn’t have to do this “balancing” because he has proof of her dishonesty: his own mind. If the allegation is false, he should not treat her with “respect and dignity” because she is an out and out liar who is accusing him likely for political reasons and detracting from honest allegations of sexual assault.
Wouldn’t you agree that false allegations hurt those women who are real victims? If so, why not forcefully attack those who make false allegations when you know them to be false as Biden would?
In a fair society, that didn’t treat women and girls like shit (especially when they accuse powerful men), maybe this would be okay. But in this society, in which we treat accusers like garbage, decent people have a responsibility not to denigrate others for speaking out, at least not without proof of dishonesty (IMO). Even if they know, personally, that they are being dishonest.
Yes, obviously so. False allegations are utterly monstrous. It’s a terrible, awful thing to do.
That’s been an effective tactic – Trump and many others have used it successfully over the years. But it also reinforces the terrible treatment of accusers by our society. Until we get that fair society that doesn’t treat such women like garbage, decent folks should, without exception, refrain from denigrating women for speaking out, barring proof of dishonesty.
See here we are debating and legislating this issue, along with the media and everyone else in the country who’s following politics. Debating, legislating, hypothesizing, speculating, you know what all that is? It’s the weeds. Here we all are getting tangled in the weeds. We’re debating the same old he-said she-said scenario when the only debate the country SHOULD be having is “How do we get someone at the helm of the country who can effectively help stop thousands of people from dying of respiratory failure?”
Biden could get us right the fuck out of the “weeds” if HE took command of the narrative in an authoritative way.
Do you remember when Trump was questioned on stuff he didn’t have a good answer to, he’d pivot with saying “right now ISIS is chopping peoples’ heads off”? Remember that? That was the right way to respond.
Biden didn’t punch down. He wielded his knowledge in the most effective way possible. And this has resulted in a kind of vindication that a righteous spit flecked tirade of denial and threat to sue the (now discredited) accuser, as you recommend, cannot be bought for Bloomberg money.
It’s a brilliant move by Biden and his advisers and as an attorney you should recognize and appreciate it more than most.
I think both accusers have incredibly weak cases against the respective accuseds. They could both be guilty, both be innocent, or one guilty and one innocent.
Both waited decades before making the allegations and did so at a point in time right before the individual was on the cusp of high office. Both stories are riddled with inconsistencies. Both accuseds had others come forward after the original accuser describing non-welcome sexual acts. Sure you can distinguish the additional allegations on their facts, but everything can be distinguished on facts.
Very respectfully, I think that anyone who believed Ford but not Raede is a Democratic partisan on this issue. Anyone who believes Raede but not Ford is a Republican partisan. The accusations have such similar corroboration that IMHO one must either believe both or disbelieve both unless they are showing partisanship on this issue.
Despite Reade’s collapsing story, short of a total retraction from her, it’s always going to have a “He Said, She Said” element. And enough women (who were instrumental in the 2018 Democratic wave) have experienced some form of workplace harassment/assault or have friends/family who did that projecting an aura of “Reade needs to shut up” is probably far more detrimental than “Biden didn’t tell Reade to shut up enough”.
I mean, we have threads about that, too. We can have an Elections/Politics forum with more than one thread at a time, though.
Cite, for Biden? There were several accusers of non-sexual touching, for which Biden acknowledged and apologized for having poorly read others’ boundaries, but I’ve not seen a single accusation against Biden that was at all sexual in nature (by the accusers’ own words) aside from Reade. If there are others, could you please enlighten the thread?
The problem is that by embracing the #metoo movement, Democrats simply cannot get out of these weeds. They must “respect and dignify” all allegations, even ones that Biden knows personally is false.
It’s just such a goofy thing to do. If someone accused you of shoplifting from a store, you wouldn’t say that they had the right to say such a thing, you would call them a fucking liar. Biden could easily distinguish his actions in this case. When you are called to evaluate from a neutral position, you respect an accuser and conduct a thorough investigation. But in this case, Biden is not a judge, he knows it is false and can vehemently deny it without playing the “all accusers should be treated fairly” card.
But he still doesn’t do that, and Democrats are now reaping what they’ve sown on this issue. They can’t just say “Why are we talking about this when people are dying from the virus?” because that is the handwaiving away of sexual assault allegations which they have consistently said can never be done.
This is from a GOP source but supposedly Biden did 19 events (COVID live streams/interviews) between Tara Reade making her accusation and him talking about it yesterday.
It’s only correct because of the ridiculous standard that has been adopted by so many in the Democratic Party. In a sane and rational world, it would not be correct at all. But to avoid stirring up a hornet’s nest, he has to say this even though it makes no sense.
What I really wish he could say is “I used to support that ‘believe all women’ line because it was so hard for me to imagine that any woman could ever do something so horrible as to make a false allegation like this. Now I know different!”