One of the best pieces of investigative journalism I’ve seen from Politico.
That Politico story might just be the worst piece of “investigative journalism” that I have ever seen.
They found some of Tara Reade’s former landlords, who say she didn’t always pay her rent.
They discovered that Tara is her middle name, and she sometimes used her first name.
They discovered that she sometimes used her married name just after she got divorced.
They discovered that she claimed to be a victim of domestic violence in her marriage, but her husband denied it.
Apparently she didn’t tell everyone she met she was raped, which even this article briefly points out is standard for rape victims.
I suppose this is meant to bring her credibility into question, as if Biden isn’t a pathological liar. It’s an utter fiasco. A smear job designed to support Biden against one of the highly credible accusations against him.
Please keep these two links handy for anyone who suspects that Tara Reade might not be a liar:
Stay away from the brown acid.
One reason for frequent name changes is debt and another is to avoid skip tracing.
Also a frequent tactic of con artists. I had a grandmother like that: her name and background changed to fit whichever story was most beneficial to her at the time.
An interesting point came out in my online political chat groups. Many of the diehard #IBelieveTara types were harassing the media about their lack of coverage. And many of them weren’t being polite about it.
Now, they may be getting their coverage of the Tara story but they won’t like it.
Was this the same Politico story the rest of us read? If so, your attempt to summarize it was … peculiar. Let me mention some parts you missed:
So some of the people behind Reade have tried to organize minors to defend her. Minors!!!
https://twitter.com/nomiblocksjerks/status/1259818156715053056?s=21
Indeed. It’s real funny (and by “funny”, I mean “sad”) how privileged liberals - rightfully, for a change - were all #WeBelieveSurvivors about ol’ Kavanaugh, but once a survivor comes out talking turkey about Sloppy Joe… out comes a mixture of radio silence, excuses, and straight-up attacks on the survivor.
“Ooh, she missed rent payments!” Yeah… common for people who struggle with the absurd amounts landlords tend to want. So?
The name thing? So many people use their middle names, or don’t even use their given names at all… so?
“Her husband denied it.” So? What do these guffgibbons expect, the average abuser to just outright admit to it?
It’s nothing but straw-grasping, and it’s shameful. These people are just as in denial as the average MAGAt - unwilling to connect the easy-ass dots from “someone who does this kind of perverted mess” to “rapist”.
Thanks to the pandemic of sociopathy in this country, which unfortunately reflects most of the world these days, any candidate that even hinted at wanting to start chipping away at the “my privileged, arbitrary squad over everything” mentality that permeates this land, and indeed has caused the ostracism of those considered “universal outsiders” like myself, got hosed down.
The result? We have sexual predators in both “major” 2020 presidential candidates. Lovely. I, myself, am gonna skip the “‘pool of piss’ or ‘pool of shit’?” choice this year and opt for some nice, fresh H’20 instead. I do not do “lesser evils”, and if (when) the Day-Glo Dotard gets a second term, I’ll have morals and Godliness intact while sipping a nice graveyard to the second round of liberal “however did this happen?!?!?!?!” meltdowns. 
There is help available. 1-800-you’re in cult you dumb fuck.
There is no help for idiot asswipes.
Those parts:
One of her former landlords insulted her.
She tried to stop her car being repossessed.
She didn’t pay a bill from a vet.
Another of her landlords says she damaged the floors of the premises she rented.
I suppose that all amount to her being a lying whore who couldn’t have been raped. I mean you can’t rape someone who has dirty floors, that’s just common sense, right?
Yeah, that’s probably painting a picture of a coughcoughCONcough
What were you expecting? A Breitbart fluffpiece?
(Yeah, I know - those bothersome facts.)
Nope.
Biden might be a bumbling gaffe-meister, but the pathologiocal liar territory has been staked out with a much larger claim by Tara Reade.
I’ll easily (as you should) give the credibilty nod to Ford over Reade on that one, thanks.
No, not shameful - it’s called building a credible case to establish Reade’s lack of credibilty. How many more perfectly legitimate pile-ons of her weaselry would it take for you and blindboyard to be maybe convinced that Tara Reade’s rep is just so absolutely going down the hallowed shitter?
Yeah? Creepy-feely old uncle shit that Biden has been advised to tone down (and probably will, safe to say?) is tantamount to “rapist”, then, huh? Nah, I’d say President Tennis Ass might have more rapey kinda inclinations, if you’re gonna try to go down that road. If you’re even hinting at the worry of JB of having been or becoming a rapist…yeah - a just a bit more denial on the MAGAT side, perhaps.
Wow. Lofty. Quite the high-falutin’ pandemic you got going there, but nah Gabbard’s not chipping away at fucking anything, thanks. And Gravel devolving into libertarian - meh. Oh the osctracism permeating thls land to hose you down.
A false equivalence that doesn’t need to be mentioned twice in the same post.
Oh, so I guess you’ve never voted before, Trump enabler.
Well bless your heart you particularly douchebaggish schandenfreude-y (to reiterate) Trump enabler.
Some actual legitimate ones would suffice. The contents of that Politico article either amounts to so little it would drown in my cat’s water dishes, or reeks of liberal manufactales. The section featuring the “real estate investor” is especially priceless - a trashy, morals-bereft occupation for trashy, morals-bereft people; no decent person reads that and feels even a pang of sympathy for someone as Hellbound as a damn “real estate investor”.
I vote in every election I’m eligible for, actually. I research as much as possible. I vote for candidates that pass the character test. But, this is America, so I do have to make heavy use of that write-in box (and leave a lotta races blank). A “lesser evil” is still evil, and cozying up to evil in any form, including voting for it (except for some light heightening of them contradictions from time to time :)), is an affront to God and Nature (barring extreme circumstances, and no, a false choice like Trump vs Biden doesn’t count), so I refuse to do so.
Claims are great, but how about some facts or just shut the fuck up, then?
Has absolutely nothing to do with the topic.
In other words, stupid and proud of it.
Hey fill your boots in normalizing shitty behaviour all you want - you do you.
WTF? Do you always sound like a Russian shill?
Oh good - a dougiemonty sock. (at least, please - that second quote has to goofy hyperbole.
In which you’re doing a spotty job of it in this thread.
oooooooo, so deep, man.
Uh yeah, my point still obviously stands - I’m surprised that you ever vote in the first place with such goofy metrics. Not every politician is a stellar outlier like Barack Obama, so if you can’t accept the painfully-obvious-as-fuck inevitabilty of having to pick between the lesser of two evils, then feel free to wallow in, yeah, your Trump enabling.
Sounds like a Russian shill, but probably not a Russian shill. Just someone who believes that has, for all practical purposes, rejected the idea that his country is a democracy. His contempt for everyone else’s votes is so great that he votes for write ins out of spite, knowing damn well that there’s actually a difference between Biden and Trump but is so disgusted with the moderate left that he refuses to participate in a system that allows the lesser of two evils to compete against each other in the final contest (he said it himself).
He thinks he’s making a statement and expressing an inspired love of democracy, but he’s not; it’s actually democracy debased. He would rather do something that will help the guy who is openly flouting democratic norms instead of the guy who, in his mind, is a democrat but won’t promise to reform boldly or quickly enough.
As I have said, this November’s election isn’t just a referendum on Trump; it’s a referendum on our own democratic political traditions. I think we know where doggy-d stands.
There are a bunch of really important issues that have emerged during the whole Reade/Biden debate, but this post is complete dumbfuckery.
Firstly, I think that, when Reade’s accusations against Biden first became public, there were a lot of people who did not exactly cover themselves in glory. There were individuals and organizations who, after allegations of sexual misconduct emerged about people like Brett Kavanaugh, jumped straight on the “guilty until proven innocent” bandwagon, ridiculing any notion of evidence or due process. But when someone on their own side of the political fence was accused, they suddenly developed a commitment to investigations and hard evidence and research and due process. It was a pretty bad look, and will remain bad whether it turns out that Reade is a lunatic attention-seeker, or whether her accusations are completely accurate.
When Reade’s accusations first emerged, I was completely willing to believe that they might be true, despite the fact that I generally like Biden and would certainly prefer him over the toxic-orange nincompoop currently in the White House. My basic position was that her accusations should be taken seriously (NOT believed without question; that’s not the same thing), and that, if she made the allegations to law enforcement, then they should investigate as required by law. I also expected and hoped that investigative reporters would look into the allegations to determine whether or not they were credible. And that is, over time, what has happened.
Having kept up with the reporting, I am finding Reade less credible as time goes on. The fact that none of the stuff in the Politico article is specifically about assault or sexual harassment doesn’t change the fact that the investigation calls her general credibility and reliability into question. The contortions that you and blindboyard have engaged in to misrepresent the article are quite something to behold. It’s not just that “she missed rent payments”—I think most people here would say that simply missing payments doesn’t call her credibility into question at all—it’s that she engaged in a variety of behaviors that were clearly dishonest. It’s not just that she “used her middle name”; it’s that she appears to have used multiple names in ways designed to cover her past behaviors. Every person I know who uses his or her middle name does so habitually and indeed does it all the time. I don’t know anyone who switches back and forth on a regular basis, although I concede that some people might do this. She didn’t just not pay a vet bill; she skipped out and left it to be paid by the person who owned the property.
None of this, taken as a whole, means that Biden didn’t assault her, or that she is lying about that one specific thing. Even habitual liars tell the truth about some things. Much (all?) of it would also most likely be inadmissible if Biden were put on trial for sexual assault. But in the public sphere, broad credibility is an issue when we evaluate the claims that people are making, and when you combine the credibility issues with the lack of evidence, it’s going to be hard for her to make a credible case, either legally or in the court of public opinion.
Nor does the fact that Biden does some creepy shit mean that he’s a rapist, or that we should simply be willing to “connect the easy-ass dots” to draw such a conclusion, as you so stupidly assert. As I said earlier, if further investigation does show that her claims against Biden are credible, I won’t be at all surprised, mainly because I’m not particularly surprised anymore when ANY politician or other powerful person turns out to have a history of sexual misconduct. But right now, her accusations are a bit difficult to credit.
Nope. I’m a religious communist, and proud of it.
“moderate left”. :rolleyes:
Look at where Biden is on this. The fact that someone as far right as Biden is considered “moderate left” in this country is just… wowza. :eek:
This is me. A “lite” version of me would be roughly between a 2/-2 and a 6/-6 on the left side of that compass on on both axes - that’s a moderate leftist. Biden ain’t nowhere close to that.
Biden is Trump lite. Sorry, Charlie, but that’s just how things be. It’s a microcosm of the fact that there’s no fundamental difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. Keep in mind, I don’t particularly even like Bernie, Tulsi, or Gravel, but at least their hearts are in the right places, even though - and refer to the chart above again - they are barely even left-wing, themselves and could (and should) be further in.
Well, shit, if a little internet toy whose creators refuse to say who they are and refuse to say how they score stuff say so, I guess it must be gospel.