The thing for me is that I don't see support of Reade being anything more than politics in the US as usual. None of this brings Biden to a reckoning. Nor does it demonstrate any progress toward addressing sexual assault or harassment.
Weaponizing a woman's trauma is the history of being a woman for, well, forever.
And as far as Biden is concerned, we have all by now seen how well he didn't treat Anita Hill. That, in and of itself, should have been enough for Obama campaign staff to have never let Biden's foot through the door.
But here we are. Biden wasn't a viable presidential candidate in the 1980s, and he isn't now.
I think this whole situation lays bare how little integrity there is in public life in this country. I really, truly believed for a minute during the Kavanaugh hearings that the Democratic Party and Democratic leaning voters mostly had come around and decided that sexual assault is not acceptable for high-powered people in public life.
Instead, the capriciousness of the whole enterprise has been revealed. As soon as the powerful rich guy is on their side politically, it's the same old excuses to discredit and attack, question a victim's credibility, and on and on. Ignore and keep on moving.
Yes, a Biden presidency will be vastly superior to a Trump one policy-wise and it is imperative that Trump lose if anything even remotely resembling democracy is going to endure in the United States, but Reade's allegations have been corroborated by people who were around her at the time. And in Biden's case, at the time of the alleged incident he was not a drunk, predatory, high school kid like Kavanaugh, but instead a sober, sitting United States Senator with 20 years of service under his belt.
It is incumbent on the Democratic Party to either take this allegation seriously and consider another candidate (I would take literally anyone else from the primary pool, except maybe Bloomberg). The party's utter failure to do anything but deny, circle up, and attempt to discredit just proves that they don't care, that they weaponized Blasey Ford's trauma because it was politically expedient, and that nothing has really changed in the wake of Me Too. As a survivor, that's heartbreaking and infuriating.
The thing for me is that I don't see support of Reade being anything more than politics in the US as usual. None of this brings Biden to a reckoning. Nor does it demonstrate any progress toward addressing sexual assault or harassment.
Weaponizing a woman's trauma is the history of being a woman for, well, forever.
And as far as Biden is concerned, we have all by now seen how well he didn't treat Anita Hill. That, in and of itself, should have been enough for Obama campaign staff to have never let Biden's foot through the door.
But here we are. Biden wasn't a viable presidential candidate in the 1980s, and he isn't now.
I think this whole situation lays bare how little integrity there is in public life in this country. I really, truly believed for a minute during the Kavanaugh hearings that the Democratic Party and Democratic leaning voters mostly had come around and decided that sexual assault is not acceptable for high-powered people in public life.
Instead, the capriciousness of the whole enterprise has been revealed. As soon as the powerful rich guy is on their side politically, it's the same old excuses to discredit and attack, question a victim's credibility, and on and on. Ignore and keep on moving.
Yes, a Biden presidency will be vastly superior to a Trump one policy-wise and it is imperative that Trump lose if anything even remotely resembling democracy is going to endure in the United States, but Reade's allegations have been corroborated by people who were around her at the time. And in Biden's case, at the time of the alleged incident he was not a drunk, predatory, high school kid like Kavanaugh, but instead a sober, sitting United States Senator with 20 years of service under his belt.
It is incumbent on the Democratic Party to either take this allegation seriously and consider another candidate (I would take literally anyone else from the primary pool, except maybe Bloomberg). The party's utter failure to do anything but deny, circle up, and attempt to discredit just proves that they don't care, that they weaponized Blasey Ford's trauma because it was politically expedient, and that nothing has really changed in the wake of Me Too. As a survivor, that's heartbreaking and infuriating.