…We don’t know if, in 1993, presidential hopeful Joe Biden sexually assaulted a woman named Tara Reade by pressing her up against a wall and digitally penetrating her without her consent. But under Wittes’s standard, it shouldn’t matter. Indeed, that we do not know is all that we need to know. No person in America is accorded a more “immense honor” or more “great power” than the president. Surely, as with Kavanaugh, the existence of the accusation is disqualifying?
Apparently not, for ideals of justice seem to be quite malleable these days. Journalistic norms, too. The same media that relayed every unsubstantiated and tawdry rumor during the Kavanaugh confirmation, and that happily transmitted the Michael Avenatti–produced gang-rape smear, is treating Reade’s story quite differently. Why, we might ask, isn’t Reade receiving the same coverage as E. Jean Carroll, a woman who accused Donald Trump of assaulting her in 1995 or 1996 at a Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan? Virtually every major news organization let Carroll tell her story. Reade has been trying to tell hers for decades. Believe women?
Indeed, to understand how to proceed, the media has only to take the advice of Biden, who two years ago argued that society had an obligation to presume that women who come forward with allegations of sexual assault should be believed irrespective of how flimsy that accusations may be:
For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time.
…Embarrassingly for Biden, he has argued that such questioning is per se inappropriate:
What should happen is the woman should be given the benefit of the doubt and not be, you know, abused again by the system. I hope that they understand what courage it takes for someone to come forward and relive what they believe happened to them and let them state it, but treat her with respect.
If this is what “should happen,” why don’t Democrats practice it — and why doesn’t Biden himself step aside in order to live by the standards he championed only two years ago?
We know why.
Andy D
Article URL : https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/will-biden-live-up-to-his-own-principles/