Maybe my position is complicated and has a lot of nuance, but I’ve tried to explain it as best I can in several recent posts.
But further, why the hell do you need the videos? Multiple women have spoken up, with very credible (and consistent!) allegations of inappropriate touching by Biden. Unless you’re the type that just naturally disbelieves women (and I don’t think you are, based on past threads on other instances of inappropriate behavior), the videos are entirely unnecessary to your argument. Now I believe the number is 7 – 7 women have come forward with very similar stories about inappropriate touching by Biden. Why not just use those stories to criticize Biden, just on the off chance that there might be a shred of truth to my argument – that perhaps one or two of these other women and girls really don’t want videos of their bodies being touched used as evidence (and more importantly, spread around and duplicated all over the internet) for an argument they aren’t interested in making?
iiandyiiii your posts are generally reasonable. However, stating that video or photographs of people in a place where privacy is not to be expected is violating consent is not true and in any case irrelevant. Creepy Uncle Joe wouldn’t have that nickname if he could keep his fondlers and his sniffer in check.
Your position isn’t all that complicated. We have in this very controversy a woman (Stephanie Carter) decrying her photo with Biden being used as a prop for calling him creepy. There are undoubtedly others in these video compilations that feel the same.
Well okay then, that makes a difference. Last time I checked, Flores was the only woman I was aware of that had come forward, though I heard there’d been a second one, but didn’t know any details about it. And you see what DrDeth said about Flores. So yeah, I felt I needed the pix and videos.
But I agree with you, at this point the stories should more than suffice. I’ll cheerfully concede the point.
I haven’t read the whole thread, but, yes, Biden’s time is over. The creepy Uncle Joe will be the 2020 version of the email server. And, it’ll be just like a killer in a horror movie: every time you think the issue is dead, it’ll resurrect itself. Plus, it gives Trump to do the exact same thing that Bush 2004 did and blame your opponent for your worst flaw.
Politics ain’t beanbags as Biden should know. The Dukakis campaign made the plagiarism story come out in 1988. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out the Sanders and/or another campaign is pushing these stories now to head off a Biden announcement.
Let Biden campaign for the nominee in some of the areas where Obama or a Clinton wouldn’t be as effective.
Ignoring the several rabbit holes this thread has otherwise travelled down, not quite “yeah” but nearly so.
If nominated I think he would likely win and I don’t think his chances of getting the nomination have been dramatically altered by this.
But while he’d be a reasonable candidate, and a likely winning one, and (IMHO) a very good president, we have better choices, and his less than stellar handling of this … event … is merely a reminder of why he’s lost races for the nomination those several times before.
Part of what attracts people to Biden is that he is not a prepared response kind of candidate. He responds honestly and off the cuff with what he really thinks without microanalyzing his words before they come out of his mouth and without thinking about what he will say much in advance. That is “real” and “authentic” … and most commonly likable as well.
And it sometimes makes one cringe and is also what has made his campaigns sputter in the past. Remember his calling Obama the “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”? No edit function may work for Trump but it doesn’t fly as well on the D side.
Voters often like how he wings it, it’s lots of what people like about him and it is who he is … but that same feature has torpedoed him too.
Even without anything else being a factor, he’s 76. The guy’s time and prime is past. He is a 1980s/1990s candidate stuck in a soon-to-be-2020s world. The D’s want young and hot blood.
I’m sure you’re being honest with your views, and I’m sure you don’t see anything problematic with what you’ve written. That doesn’t mean that your arguments aren’t playing into some particularly sexist attitudes and assumptions.
Okay. Here’s where I think you’re making the arguments I alluded to:
“If nobody complained, they must have been okay with it,”
This is exactly the attitude that lets a lot of this sort of misbehavior go unchecked for so long. Obviously, we don’t know the feelings of every individual in that video compilation. We do have one example of woman who was entirely okay with it. And we have more than half a dozen, so far, who were not. Maybe if someone had looked at Biden’s behavior sooner, and said, “This isn’t cool, he needs to knock that shit off” there might have been fewer women in the second group. We can’t do that, however, if attempting to look at his public behavior gets treated like this:
“By raising concerns about this situation being sexist, you’re showing yourself to be the real sexist.”
Someone is concerned that a video shows a politically powerful person behaving inappropriately with women. You cast this concern as sexual in nature, as if the person concerned about Biden’s behavior is receiving some sort of sexual gratification from the videos.
I’ll try and put it differently (this is how CarnalK summed up my position) “We have in this very controversy a woman (Stephanie Carter) decrying her photo with Biden being used as a prop for calling him creepy. There are undoubtedly others in these video compilations that feel the same.”
Further, the videos are entirely unnecessarily to criticize Biden. Seven women (at least – maybe more by now) have now credibly accused Biden of inappropriate touching. There’s no reason at all to refer to videos and images of women and girls who may or may not be embarassed or shamed by these videos being promulgated of their bodies being touched, when we have at least seven first hand accounts of inappropriate touching by Biden.
Also, it’s not JUST a question of how each individual woman felt when the pic or video was taken, it’s that seeing and watching those pics and videos can (and definitely does) call up empathy and memories in the viewer, putting the viewer into the position of “OMG, if/when someone did that to me it would be/was incredibly uncomfortable and squicky and she looks like she feels just the same way, this is awful.” Which puts Biden in the position of creeping out millions of people (sort of a transitive property of squeamishness if you will) rather than only creeping out the specific woman he’s currently being too goddamned handsy with.
Younger women especially have some very distinctly negative feelings about the idea that men are entitled to put hands on them without specific consent and are less inculcated in that “don’t make a scene” behavior than older women are. If Biden runs he’s going to find out that not everyone, and in fact a very huge percentage of the younger voters required to win the election, are not okay with his behavior and will not just stand around smiling uncomfortably and “letting Biden be Biden.” It will not be a fun lesson for him as he loses spectacularly for the third time.
IMHO yes, his campaign is over before it starts. Democrats are fortunate that he hasn’t formally announced yet, so we get to avoid the spectacle of his withdrawing due to this issue. He can instead make some kind of announcement about how he isn’t going to run to make room for the next generation to take over (and yes, I realize that if he put it that way it could be seen as a parting shot at Bernie). Now that I see how well some of the more unknown and younger candidates seem to be attracting a good following, I think the Democrats will be find if Uncle Joe sits this one out. I see several benefits to him sitting it out, and only one potential drawback.
Here’s my list of benefits, by no means exhaustive.
There wouldn’t be any “it’s his turn” party insider candidates running. I think that could only be a good thing this particular cycle. Part of the underlying assumption here is that there are two “lanes” and that in the end it will come down to Bernie vs. whoever emerges from the rest of the pack. If it’s not Biden I think Bernie won’t have the whole party insider thing to use against whoever emerges from the rest of the pack.
The primary season won’t turn into one long ongoing story about Biden’s hands and who he has and hasn’t groped, what evidence there is, is anyone else going to come forward, if Biden can do it then why can’t Trump, etc.
Biden not being involved means that his supporters are going to have to take a closer look at the other candidates, and whoever does end up emerging will have won over those supporters on her or his own merits, rather than getting those voters because Biden endorsed them (assuming he wasn’t going to win anyways).
Drawbacks.
The only one I see is if we actually are at a point where the Democrats have lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and that only someone like Biden can win those voters back. I don’t believe this to be the case, but I could be wrong.
Whoever the Ds select, the campaign will focus on personal attacks against that candidate. This is especially true if Trump is the opponent — the Rs will want to distract from any focus on Trump’s failings.
Bannon, Putin, Hannity and the entire GOP are devoted to using propaganda to undermine American democracy, but there’s usually some foundation behind their successful lies. Hillary really did mistreat her official e-mail. If Warren is the nominee, the campaign will be all about “Pocahontas” … but Warren really did over-emphasize her Native ancestry. If Sanders, the campaign will be all about “socialism” and there will be some fire behind that smoke.
Yes. I like Biden, but there are now several good reasons he shouldn’t run.
Most Americans are not stupid enough to fall for lies that have no basis whatsoever. We elected Obama despite that the liars called him a Muslim born in Kenya. Obama overcame the lies because he was impeccable. We need another impeccable nominee.
How about Cory Booker? Any skeletons in his closet? (I’ve heard that some right-wing haters will call him Gay. Will he need testimony from pretty woman (women?) about how hot he is in bed? :rolleyes: )
Here’s the thing. It’s not that your position is hard to follow, it’s that you’re not seeing the implications of what you’re arguing. For example, this?
All of my objections pertain to this formulation of your argument, as well. There’s no part of this that changes anything I’ve said in my criticism of your posts here.
Yeah, its seven as of today. When this thread started, and when you started attacking other posters for being worried about Biden’s behavior with women, it was still just Flores.
I literally can’t make heads or tails of how those things that I abhor apply to my actual arguments. You don’t even try to explain it in this post. You just assert that it is so.
I never attacked any posters “for being worried about Biden’s behavior with women”. I’m worried about Biden’s behavior with women.
