National Archives Refute Biden’s Statement
So what does this mean? Does this mean there are more extensive records? I thought Bidens records were sealed until 2 years after he retires. I have no idea what to believe anymore, I hope we get a real investigation into all this. Good or bad, people should know whats going on. I mean Plouffe said nothing came up in the 2008 vetting. But then again, Trump’s access hollywood video or Obama’s pastor weren’t issues until well into the race.
The University of Delaware records are the ones not being released until two years after he retires but they don’t contain personnel files. Biden said the personnel records would be kept at the archives but it sounds as though some offices have merged or changed since then. Biden, in his request to have his personnel records examined, said:
Biden seems interested in having the records located (although, at this point, we know they’re not going to say Reade was assaulted as she claimed) and the “story” here is just that no one seems entirely sure where the Senate is keeping their thirty year old personnel files. Note that the Archives says that the records would be with Congress, not that Biden would have them.
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Of course I do. See the Pulp Fiction Foot Massage bit. Biden doesn’t kiss guys. It is an inherently sexual thing, but even if it is not, as I said above, it is a familiarity thing that Biden believes it is proper to engage in close touching.
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This use of the word “consent” is not the traditional English usage at all. If a picture is published of your father kissing you as a young child in public, for a news or political reason, that has always been fair game. You then shift gears and complain, not about the photograph, but of the scandalous accusation that your father touches children inappropriately. Your complaint is with that falsehood, not the photograph. Again, nobody has ever needed consent to publish something seen in the public sphere. I understand that well, but it seems you do not.
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You’ve said Biden sucks because you preferred Bernie. You have not made the sorts of statements that you did against Kavanaugh. Would you be willing to state the following: A credible allegation of sexual assault has been made against Joe Biden. For that reason, he should resign the Presidential race and, if not, the DNC should refuse to nominate him. ? And if you are willing to say it, then why are we fighting?
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You have not said that your standard is “guilty until proven innocent” but your criteria (except for Joe Biden) makes it effectively so.
If this was Kavanaugh, or any Republican, the canned response would be “Of course he wants a search of the records because he knows that his friends would never have filed that complaint in the records, but simply destroyed it.”
And this whole she filed a complaint and now she says she didn’t file one, again, if applied to Kavanaugh or any Republican, would be dismissed as the fragile memory of a brave sexual assault survivor. Perhaps she had written out a complaint, but never filed it. How can you expect a brave survivor to remember every little detail from 27 years ago?
Again, I don’t believe her. But this handwaiving would not be applied, nor would it work, for a Republican.
Glad to see you backing off on your absurd “hugs and kisses are always sexual” position.
My complaint is for anyone using photographs of people for lurid sexual purposes without their consent. That is disgusting, whether it’s for pornography or for political attacks.
That it may not be illegal doesn’t make it any less morally disgusting.
Biden sucks for many reasons, including years of boundary and personal space violations.
What statements are you referring to?
How many times do I have to say “Biden should drop out”? I’ve said it multiple times, in this thread and others. I’ve been saying so for months.
This is a baseless, cite-free, nonsense claim. If I posted something you disagreed with, I’ll invite you to be specific.
Or maybe it would be that unicorns ate it, so long as we’re just making up any hypothetical “Well, if it was [this] then…” we want to support our agenda.
I know this was aimed in the general direction of unnamed posters to this thread, but I just want to speak up for the left leaning posters in the thread who’ve expressed dismay at how some other left leaning posters to this thread react in ways which tend to blur the distinctions between alleged incidents and tend to hold everyone accountable to currently agreed upon standards of behavior no matter the time or place or subtleties of any particular incident and no matter how malleable said standards of behavior have been shown to be.
If we want to promote healthy change toward a more just, mature and gender equitable culture, maybe we should attend at least as strongly to the second half of the “Truth and Reconciliation” formula.
We should be able to own up to the awful ubiquity of sexual mistreatment women have endured and continue to encounter in our American culture without requiring automatic indictment in the court of public opinion for each accused person followed by default conviction absent proof of innocence.
Yeah, candidacies and court nominations are not trials, and yes, it’s nigh impossible to legally convict an abuser on a foundation of “he said she said” so there’s some scale balancing provided by the public accounting. But not every accusation and accounting is a “win” for women’s rights and not every degradation of suspected abusers is a step toward societal healing.
Everyone who grew up in these United States, even those just coming to adulthood, grew up inside a culture of institutional racism and economic classism, rampant sexism and our peculiar and unsupportable national insistence on ‘American exceptionalism.’ We cannot own and correct those wrongs by holding only select individuals accountable for the damage we’ve sustained as a group. Nor do we promote justice by shunning and prohibiting those who’ve been wrong in the past from participating in the change we desire.
I wholeheartedly endorse this idea, and in fact I’ve specifically endorsed it on this forum:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=890721
Hadn’t seen that ‘andy’; I’ll read through your thread. It looks like a thoughtful and useful one.
I don’t know why this particular untruth permeates the discussion on this issue. I can give you the names of 20 guys that I have met personally who are serving effective life sentences because of allegations with no corroborating evidence other than “he said she said.”
As I said earlier, juries may give some deference to people that they can otherwise relate to, but if you are poor (white or black) and someone makes a sexual assault allegation against you, it is up to you to prove your innocence. If you cannot do so, you had better look good in prison orange.
Thanks. And that thread isn’t that old, so if you see something you want to respond to, please feel free. I think it’s still a valid and current discussion.
A reasonable estimate is that every week in the United States, police receive over 100 allegations of rape that are false, reputation-destroying calumnies. *Every week. * And those are generally not even high profile politicians that Vladimir Putin has made a point of trying to destroy.
Irrelevant, because the serial liar Tara Reid has now admitted that oopsie, maybe she didn’t file a report of sexual harassment after all. :dubious:
Biden’s language, “she has a right to say whatever she says,” is clearly NOT a reference to the truth or falsity of the accusation. I have difficulty believing that anyone arguing in good faith could assert that it is.
Does a woman in North Korea have “a right” to accuse the North Korean leader, whoever that may be at the moment, of committing sexual assault? No, plainly she does not, and it’s likely that this is a matter covered in whatever passes for the legal code in DPRK. Does a woman in Russia have “a right” to accuse Putin of committing sexual assault? Almost certainly the answer is “no” there, too, though it may not be codified in law.
Although I’m not suggesting that Biden was intending to make specific reference to any other particular nations, I am suggesting that it’s implicit in his answer that here–in the USA–she has a right to say what she wants to say (absent the usual caveats such as 'shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater). The accused, then, has the right to bring suit for slander. That’s how we do it, here.
The attempt to make ‘she has a right to say it’ equivalent to ‘I’m not opposing her claim’ is cynical and propagandistic.
There are reasons for refraining from attributing motives to the actions of others. One is the suspicion that the person making the accusation could be mentally ill. Making a false accusation is not always a consciously-dishonest act. Sometimes it’s the act of a person who is confused for reasons that may include brain damage or other psychiatric issues.
Refraining from attributing motive is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of having the strength and patience to await the results of further investigation.
No. But of course the right will ceaselessly make the false claim that this is the case.
Citation?
(my emphasis)
“False” accusations like the one against Marie Adler? That you still trust that the system mostly gets this stuff accurate just demonstrates how little you understand about #MeToo and the present moment.
Someone said this is the 4th time she has changed her story. Any timelines to verify that?
Scottsboro boys, Duke Lacrosse team, Tucker Carlson, Emma Sulkowicz, etc.
Ignoring victims is not good, neither is threatening them. But the reality is women are people and some people are fucked up. People making false claims of child abuse and child molestation are not unheard of in divorce court either.
Some of you are getting very close to calling other posters liars and personalizing the issue.
Let’s all just take a deep breath and consider our words as we type them.
I hope that’s clear.
Um, I’ll respond in more depth in that other thread, but I should have made clear that I don’t recommend an actual T&R Committee, just that we who want to make societal change should -informally and with no power of the law- try and make that process part of the #MeToo approach to change. One of the problems I’m seeing is indiscriminate retribution and shunning of public figures who have been accused of past behaviors that have been historically ignored or glossed over but are now thankfully being given serious scrutiny and opprobrium.
An actual empowered national committee, even ignoring the logistics of soliciting, collating and adjudicating cases of abuse over even the last 20 years, much less living history, is not just a far-fetched idea but a dangerous one as well, for reasons well articulated by others in your thread.
I’ll try and order my thoughts for that one, but as to the subject of this thread, my point is that maybe calling for the withdrawal of the presumptive 2020 Democratic nominee for President, a career advocate for women’s rights and the main sponsor of all of the iterations of the Violence Against Women Act, over a dubious accusation and a history of overfriendly physicality typical for some politicians of his age is counterproductive to the movement. I’m seeing no consideration by most MeToo advocates of a reconciliation process, of a way forward using restorative justice where appropriate. Retribution and removal from public positions is also appropriate sometimes of course, but if that’s a universally applied consequence of “credible accusations” I fear we’re not going to be moving forward.
Did you think this was some amazing gotcha? Maybe next time read your own cites before posting them:
And: