Setting High Standards

For John, BLUF:  These accusations against former Senator Joe Biden are old, but they are old and ignored.  This is an area where the Republicans need to tread carefully, but, so too do the Democrats.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Grabby Joe Biden’s Achilles Hand

From The American Conservative, by Columnist Rod Dreher, 29 April 2020.

Here is the lede plus three:

Damon Linker says that there’s more confirmable substance to Tara Reade’s accusations against Joe Biden than Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh — and that’s very bad news for the presumptive Democratic nominee.  Linker says that Biden can probably still have the nomination if he wants it, because even if these allegations are true, he’s still going to have the support of the party’s base.  But it will be a great gift to Team Trump.  Linker writes:

On substance, Trump will have zero moral ground to stand on.  But he won’t be taking a stand in the name of treating women with respect.  Neither will he be accusing Biden of being a sexual predator.  Instead, he and the entire Republican noise machine will constantly, relentlessly hammer Biden, leading Democrats, and the media for flagrant hypocrisy and double standards.  The moral content of the issue won’t matter one bit.  What will matter is that Biden has set himself up as a moral arbiter on issues of sexual harassment and violence, insisting we must “believe all women,” and that in the fall of 2018 he and many other members of his party sought to destroy the reputation of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh for allegations of sexual assault that were less convincingly corroborated than those Reade has lodged against Biden.

The Democratic nominee for president and his party are ruthless political operators who seek above all else to destroy their enemies and help themselves, all the while setting themselves up as impartial moral authorities.  This will be the message, driven home over and over again: that claims of purity and impartiality are pretense, transparent fakes.  Democrats might posture like they’re better than Republicans, including the president, but they aren’t.  They’re every bit as bad.  They’re just more dishonest about it.

Read the whole thing. Linker mentions Tara Reade’s mother calling Larry King, and he mentions her friend (a self-described “strong Democrat”) going public to say that Tara told her about Biden’s alleged sexual assault at the time.  I had heard about those, but until seeing Linker’s column, I had not heard about the 2008 Alexander Cockburn column in the left-wing web journal CounterPunch mentioning Biden’s reputation.

The Democrats have run up a box canyon with their mantra of "Believe all women" and with their condemnation of the antics of Candidate Trump.  They set a pretty high standard and now it appears they can't meet it themselves.

In defense of then Senator Joe Biden, in late 1980s by Cousin, an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel stationed in the Pentagon, told me her female Air Force contacts on the Hill told her there were three Senators to not get into an Elevator with alone.  None of the three was Senator Biden.  That is not direct evidence, but it might be an escape.

On the other hand, there is more information than we got during the Kavanaugh hearings.  More believable information.

Here is how Columnist Dreher points his examination:

So, let me throw it to the room:  if Biden is persuaded to step down before the Democratic convention, who should replace him? Who will replace him?

From a strictly strategic point of view, I think Andrew Cuomo should replace him, and probably will, as long as he chooses Elizabeth Warren as his veep.

Pretty insightful.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff