who ya got?

[TDub]

You really believe Biden is a sexual assaulter?

Well, Tara Reade and (12? Is that what i read now?) others would say so

Sexual assault? Source?

I know there are a lot of charges of what now constitutes (rightfully so) sexual harassment, at most. But I'm not familiar with other assault claims

When it is alleged that fingers went where they were unwanted I would classify that as assault.

Im not saying it happened. Im saying thats whats been alleged. My thing is I am fine listening to both sides and understanding there are different versions and interpretations. Investigation, if done, could reveal the reality. The same is not the same depending on what "team" you're on. (I dont believe that this is about "teams" but the almighty TwoCoach said it and so it must be.

[Mjl]

I wouldn't know Tara Reade from a hole in the wall. But I hope for everyone's sake that she wasn't assaulted.

It's impossible to judge guilt or innocence based on the "kind of guy" he "seems" to be.

That said, Joe Biden is not Bill Clinton. He is not Donald Trump. He is not Bob Packwood. He is not Chris Dodd or Ted Kennedy. He does not "seem" like he would sexually assault a woman, for whatever that's worth.

There's that.

But also the predictably that this would happen. After the Kavanaugh thing, I'm not sure there's going to be a presidential candidate for a while that doesn't have some kind of sexual deviance or assault claim against them.

Ah...well then this was the slow game. I mean, the mother calling in to Larry king was almost 30 years ago.

I wonder what evidence is being planted today to sabotage a candidate in the 2048 elections.

I tend to think the frequency of accusations has more to do with the kind of ego it takes to run for office overlapping with the kind of ego that thinks you're immune to trouble coinciding with a culture that is less tolerant of sexual assault and has encouraged outing past indiscretions.

This is not to say all accusations are necessarily true.

The Larry King thing didn't mention Reade, Biden, or any kind of sexual assault or anything close to it.

[PhDhawk]

There's that.

But also the predictably that this would happen. After the Kavanaugh thing, I'm not sure there's going to be a presidential candidate for a while that doesn't have some kind of sexual deviance or assault claim against them.

Ah...well then this was the slow game. I mean, the mother calling in to Larry king was almost 30 years ago.

I wonder what evidence is being planted today to sabotage a candidate in the 2048 elections.

I tend to think the frequency of accusations has more to do with the kind of ego it takes to run for office overlapping with the kind of ego that thinks you're immune to trouble coinciding with a culture that is less tolerant of sexual assault and has encouraged outing past indiscretions.

This is not to say all accusations are necessarily true.

The Larry King thing didn't mention Reade, Biden, or any kind of sexual assault or anything close to it.

Reade claims it was her mother. The caller was from the town Reade's mother lived in, and the time of the call matches up.

[ousdahl]

maybe we should elect more female leaders?

[ousdahl]

just a friendly word of caution that this article might make certain posters’ heads explode...

[Deleted User 310]

maybe we should elect more female leaders?

I think we should simply elect the best candidates regardless of race and gender.

[ousdahl]

It’s kinda funny that the folks loosing their minds and trying to call me a hypocrite because Biden are also the ones who have shrugged off the dozens of Trump allegations among his other faults, because, at least he wasn’t Cankles!

[Shirley]

I Believe Tara Reade. I’m Voting for Joe Biden Anyway.
The importance of owning an ugly moral choice.

Let’s be clear: I believe Tara Reade. I believed Anita Hill, too. Remember the buttons? I wore one. What’s the constant here? Joe Biden, then the bumbling head of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Long before Ms. Reade, before the reports of the rubbing and the sniffing, I interviewed an adviser to Ms. Hill, who said she’d tried to warn Mr. Biden of what was happening in the Thomas hearings — how unchecked Republicans were smearing an upright woman’s character. But “the United States Senate was still very much a boys’ club” back then, the adviser told me, and there was no getting through to him. Democratic primary voters knew all about Mr. Biden’s membership in that boys’ club when there was still time to pick someone else. Alas.

So what’s a girl to do now? Discounting Ms. Reade’s accusation and, one after another, denigrating her corroborating witnesses, calling for endless new evidence, avowing that you “hear” her, is nonsense. We are now up to four corroborating witnesses — including one contemporary corroborating witness, unearthed by Rich McHugh, who was Ronan Farrow’s producer at NBC News during the Harvey Weinstein #MeToo reporting — and one “Larry King Live” tape.

So stop playing gotcha with the female supporters of Mr. Biden or the #MeToo movement, making them lie to the camera — or perhaps to themselves — about doubting her to justify their votes.

I’ll take one for the team. I believe Ms. Reade, and I’ll vote for Mr. Biden this fall.

I won’t say it will be easy. I have been writing on and agitating for women’s equality since “The Feminine Mystique” came out in 1963. I know how supposedly “liberal” men abused the sexual revolution in every imaginable way. I am unimpressed by their lip service to feminism, their Harvard degrees or their donations to feminist causes.

In 1998, I was one of a few establishment feminists to argue on behalf of Monica Lewinsky, when the unofficial representative of the movement, Gloria Steinem, threw her under the bus in the pages of The New York Times to protect Bill Clinton. I maintained my position until, two decades and a #MeToo movement later, Ms. Steinem issued a non-apology for the essay. So I hate, hate, hate to say the following.

Suck it up and make the utilitarian bargain.

All major Democratic Party figures have indicated they’re not budging on the presumptive nominee, and the transaction costs of replacing him would be suicidal. Barring some miracle, it’s going to be Mr. Biden.

So what is the greatest good or the greatest harm? Mr. Biden, and the Democrats he may carry with him into government, are likely to do more good for women and the nation than his competition, the worst president in the history of the Republic. Compared with the good Mr. Biden can do, the cost of dismissing Tara Reade — and, worse, weakening the voices of future survivors — is worth it. And don’t call me an amoral realist. Utilitarianism is not a moral abdication; it is a moral stance.

Utilitarianism arose from the Industrial Revolution, a time of terrible economic inequality and abuse. It was intended to make a moral claim for the equality of all creatures who can feel pain and experience pleasure.

Weigh it: Don’t a few extra cents for each worker matter more than the marginal dollar for the boss? Weigh it: Won’t the good for all the Americans who will benefit from replacing Donald Trump with Joe Biden, including the masses of women who will get some crumbs, count for more than the harm done to the victims of abuse?

Utilitarian morality requires that I turn my face away from the people I propose to sell out: Monica Lewinsky, Tara Reade. This is agonizingly hard for me to do. Pretending not to believe the complainants — which is what is taking place with Ms. Reade — or that they’re loose nobodies, which is what much of the media did to Ms. Lewinsky, is just an escape from the hard work of moral analysis.

And it adds to the harm. How is feminism advanced by casting a reasonably credible complainant as a liar? Better to just own up to what you are doing: sacrificing Ms. Reade for the good of the many.

Contemplating the act makes me feel a little like Gloria Steinem, circa 1998. I was so sure I’d never do what she did, and I still think saving Mr. Clinton for two years at the cost to Ms. Lewinsky was a terrible move. Denigrating Ms. Lewinsky denied all women’s vulnerability to powerful men, and replacing Mr. Clinton with another Democratic centrist, Al Gore, would have been a perfectly acceptable outcome. But it also makes me remember why Ms. Steinem did it.

The other side at the time, embodied by the special counsel Kenneth Starr, was so awful. Mr. Starr’s censorious Republican Party seemed to pose much more of a threat to women’s interests than Mr. Clinton’s libertinism did.

Today, the Trump-Pence ticket looks even worse. Mr. Trump, credibly accused of rape and a confessed grabber of women’s genitalia, and Mr. Pence, who will not dine alone with a woman other than his wife (whom he calls “Mother”), combine both Mr. Starr’s and Mr. Clinton’s belief systems, offering voters in one ticket the full spectrum of misogyny. Mr. Biden, that relic of the good-old-boy Senate years, seems positively benign by comparison.

But even that probably would not be enough to make me abandon the claims of justice and vote for him in face of credible accusations of sexual assault. Fortunately for my sanity, there’s more.

Once again, philosophy offers an answer to my quest for justice. Philosophers for at least three centuries have known that there can be no call to justice in a situation of extreme scarcity. David Hume, who originated the analysis, suggested that nobody can be expected to behave justly when trying to survive a shipwreck. The great modern philosopher John Rawls called moderate scarcity, or the absence of extreme scarcity, one of the “circumstances of justice.”

The Trump administration, and the Republican Party that he represents, are unassailably the political equivalent of Hume’s shipwreck. Offering only hatred, rejecting facts, refusing accountability, they represent the wreckage of the American ship of state. We knew that before 70,000 Americans died of Covid-19 in a spectacle of villainy and incompetence, but when you are faced with a distasteful moral choice, it can be useful to be reminded of the immensity of the stakes in making that choice.

It may not be just, but I’m swimming away from Mr. Trump’s sinking ship as hard as I can. If I have to, I’ll vote for Mr. Biden. I hope I’m not going to drown anyway.

[Mjl]

I find that absurd. If you believe Biden's a sexual assaulter, you should be supporting a different candidate.

[Deleted User 289]

What if a/the different candidate/s have also been accused of sexual assault - and you believe he/she is guilty of it? Then you have to decide which is the lesser of two (or more) evils?
Or you just don't vote because you don't want to "support" any candidate who has been ACCUSED of sexual assault?

[TDub]

It’s kinda funny that the folks loosing their minds and trying to call me a hypocrite because Biden are also the ones who have shrugged off the dozens of Trump allegations among his other faults, because, at least he wasn’t Cankles!

Who? Who are you referring to with this paragraph?


Remember, you voted for trump.

[TDub]

What if a/the different candidate/s have also been accused of sexual assault - and you believe he/she is guilty of it? Then you have to decide which is the lesser of two (or more) evils?
Or you just don't vote because you don't want to "support" any candidate who has been ACCUSED of sexual assault?

There are other options. Other parties. Eventually perhaps the two big psrties will be so awful that it forces voters to look elsewhere and it would be a long term benefit to society.

[twocoach]

I find that absurd. If you believe Biden's a sexual assaulter, you should be supporting a different candidate.

Wouldn't it be great if that was an option?

Normally, I would simply sit out this election. I don't particularly like Biden and I do not feel he represents a large chunk if what I was looking for with my vote. But the alternative is simply not an option. I feel that the harm being done to the nation by Trump is so bad that I cannot simply sit this one out.

There is not one moral or political issue I have with Biden that is better with Trump. None.

It feels like people who sat out the election or chose to throw away their vote on a nonsense choice is a big reason why Donald Trump is our President right now. I am not going to be part of the reason he gets reelected.

Do my personal morals like this choice no? But allowing Trump to continue to rape the nation would be a larger stain on my soul than voting for Biden so I'll take the smaller stain and move forward.

[Mjl]

What if a/the different candidate/s have also been accused of sexual assault - and you believe he/she is guilty of it? Then you have to decide which is the lesser of two (or more) evils?
Or you just don't vote because you don't want to "support" any candidate who has been ACCUSED of sexual assault?

Most candidates going forward, I posit, will face accusations. It's up to you to determine how credible you think it is

[HouseDivided]

It’s kinda funny that the folks loosing their minds and trying to call me a hypocrite because Biden are also the ones who have shrugged off the dozens of Trump allegations among his other faults, because, at least he wasn’t Cankles!

I’m not loosing my mind, but I do find the level of hypocrisy demonstrated by the Lib cognoscenti around here absolutely hilarious, although not unexpected.

[Deleted User 289]

What if a/the different candidate/s have also been accused of sexual assault - and you believe he/she is guilty of it? Then you have to decide which is the lesser of two (or more) evils?
Or you just don't vote because you don't want to "support" any candidate who has been ACCUSED of sexual assault?

There are other options. Other parties. Eventually perhaps the two big psrties will be so awful that it forces voters to look elsewhere and it would be a long term benefit to society.

BINGO! As an "independent" voter I will vote for who I feel is the best candidate regardless of their political party affiliation.
I doubt it happens in my lifetime but I have little doubt that some day we will have a President who doesn't identify as a Republican or Democrat.

[Deleted User 289]

It’s kinda funny that the folks loosing their minds and trying to call me a hypocrite because Biden are also the ones who have shrugged off the dozens of Trump allegations among his other faults, because, at least he wasn’t Cankles!

I’m not loosing my mind, but I do find the level of hypocrisy demonstrated by the Lib cognoscenti around here absolutely hilarious, although not unexpected.

'What's not so "hilarious" is that I don't see too many Libs on here ignoring the accusation against Biden nearly to the degree Trump supporters (not necessarily on here - but in general) ignore/d the actuations against Trump.

On another note, I happen to see/believe there are more positive differences in regards to Joe Biden than Donald Trump. Do I want Biden to be my President? Probably not but I know I don't want Donald Trump to be my President.
Like I said, do I vote for the lesser of two evils or do I vote for neither of them? Time will tell.

[HouseDivided]

It’s kinda funny that the folks loosing their minds and trying to call me a hypocrite because Biden are also the ones who have shrugged off the dozens of Trump allegations among his other faults, because, at least he wasn’t Cankles!

I’m not loosing my mind, but I do find the level of hypocrisy demonstrated by the Lib cognoscenti around here absolutely hilarious, although not unexpected.

'What's not so "hilarious" is that I don't see too many Libs on here ignoring the accusation against Biden nearly to the degree Trump supporters (not necessarily on here - but in general) ignore/d the actuations against Trump.

On another note, I happen to see/believe there are more positive differences in regards to Joe Biden than Donald Trump. Do I want Biden to be my President? Probably not but I know I don't want Donald Trump to be my President.
Like I said, do I vote for the lesser of two evils or do I vote for neither of them? Time will tell.

Yet another double standard. When I said I voted for DJT as the lesser of two evils over Dowdy, I was roundly vilified and ridiculed. You say the same about Dementia Joe and it is perfectly reasonable.

[DCHawk1]

Who? Who are you referring to with this paragraph?

That's a good question.

[Deleted User 289]

I’m not loosing my mind, but I do find the level of hypocrisy demonstrated by the Lib cognoscenti around here absolutely hilarious, although not unexpected.

'What's not so "hilarious" is that I don't see too many Libs on here ignoring the accusation against Biden nearly to the degree Trump supporters (not necessarily on here - but in general) ignore/d the actuations against Trump.

On another note, I happen to see/believe there are more positive differences in regards to Joe Biden than Donald Trump. Do I want Biden to be my President? Probably not but I know I don't want Donald Trump to be my President.
Like I said, do I vote for the lesser of two evils or do I vote for neither of them? Time will tell.

Yet another double standard. When I said I voted for DJT as the lesser of two evils over Dowdy, I was roundly vilified and ridiculed. You say the same about Dementia Joe and it is perfectly reasonable.

Not sure if I was one of those who vilified and ridiculed you but I do know I felt the same way in the last election - in terms of the choices being "two evils". As much as I didn't want Donald Trump to be my President, I exercised my right - and chose to "abstain" in 2016.
In terms of what I say about Joe, that's simply how I feel - right now. "Reasonable" or not.