Time Off for Good Behavior: How to Respond to Tara Reade's Complaint Against J. B.

I have to be honest: I do not like Joe Biden's campaign for President.  Given that only a few voters think like me, or have the values that I have, I have to reluctantly consider Joe Biden to be the default nominee for the Democrat Party, since this is the democratic choice of the party (small 'd').  (Sometimes the Party gets hijacked, as happened in 2016 to the Republicans; when the party beats the bushes for all the support it can get, you end up with very strange people, and it was these denizens of the Republican Woodwork that elected Trump, not what we could call the nucleus of the party.  But then, the Republicans were never about finding a nice gentleman to be president; they were about electing conservative judges, reducing taxes, controlling what they considered to be the power-hungry among women, and the de-criminalization of abortion---which many of them still hate with a passion---and clamping down on the runaway success of marriage rights for gays.  They don't want decency if it means decency for everybody.  They don't even want the right for everybody to be able to jog through a white neighborhood, and they're willing to kill to hold it down.)

Unfortunately, I find it quite easy to believe that Joe Biden's affection might have been focused on an unwelcome target, namely Tara Reade.  I find it just as easy to believe that Joe may have groped the poor woman, and then forgotten about it.  This sort of harassment is going to be an ongoing thing all through the next few decades, until the coded messages that men and women exchange about their willingness to participate in intimate behavior becomes clearer and clearer, and finally unambiguous.


The Senate is a disgusting place.  If young ladies are expected to run errands which place them within the range of the eager paws of oversexed senators, and the young ladies have no option but to go, putting their reputations at risk, we must do something about that.  It may have been OK at one time, but it is no longer OK for the Senate to establish rules that coerce unchaperoned intermingling of senators with their young defenseless staff in this day and age.  Men are going to continue to blame the women for putting themselves in awkward positions, but we have to find ways of making it easier for the women to say 'no'.

From the political point of view, I wonder whether it might be enough for Joe Biden to confess that he might have been too affectionate with this young staffer.  I doubt it; all of Joe's friends and his advisors would have told him:  Be absolutely sure.  Deny everything.  You don't even know her.  You've never even seen her.  The great diversity of characters who usually vote Democrat, including the registered Democrats, are too titchy on these matters; they could all run and vote for Trump, for whom molesting women is part of his platform.  As a nation, we're far too immature to be able to deal with something uncertain like I can't remember.

What a mess.  Only those who have led faultless lives, like Obama and Bernie Sanders need apply to be the Democrat candidate.  The Republican candidate is a whole different thing; they're a very forgiving crowd.  Let's face it: The Democrats look at all their candidates through a very suspicious microscope.  This desire for perfection is what might hand the election to Trump.

Having written that, this piece by Chris Hayes of MSNBC clarifies the issues far more than I have.

Perhaps deservedly, Democrats have taken up the cause of the Me Too movement, and the Believe Women slogan, and plunged headlong into this battle, without worrying about the nuances.  Without considering that largely decent people often have, in the past, behaved in ways that do not satisfy the criteria that we have set up for behavior in the last few decades; and without considering that the recollections, and the perceptions of both men and women about emotional and frightening encounters of the past may be imperfect, even if they are partially, even largely, true; we have set up our guidelines for what we will accept or not accept in our leaders in stark black and white, binary terms.

These stark, dualistic judgements are needed, because our propaganda has been handed over to the media machines, which find it difficult to present anything except unnuanced, bold facts on TV without confusing the least sophisticated viewers among us.  Any vagueness is carefully amplified by conservative pundits, and even liberal pundits, though I believe that the latter are usually a little more forgiving.  But The Rules we set up now are awkward when they're applied in retrospect, to conduct of forty or fifty years ago.

As Chris Hayes points out, the Democrats were a little too picky about whom they believe could win the votes of the most moderate among them (which is why South Carolina chose to go with Joe Biden; it was a sort of cowardice that decided that Southern Democrats could not be persuaded to vote for a woman, or a gay man, or a minority candidate).  If they had given their support to Elizabeth Warren, for instance, we would not be having to defend her against charges of sexual harassment.  Or was it that old black men were fearful about what Elizabeth Warren would have done in a debate, with the incumbent prowling around behind her podium, blowing hostility at her while she spoke?  And now it seems as though there is not going to be any sort of in-person debate at all.  Surely our Incumbent applicant for his second term could not have confounded the Democrat party any worse if he had controlled the circumstances himself.

I firmly believe that this election is theirs for the Democrats to lose in so many ways.

1. Almost any Democrat president could have managed the virus epidemic of 2020 far, far better than it has been managed so far.  This is what we sincerely believe, but who knows?  This virus defeats conventional wisdom, even if the GOP has hardly an atom of it.

2. The economic depression caused by our response to the virus, and the unemployment caused by the depression, and the loss of health insurance caused by everything else as well as the unemployment, all underscore the fact that this is a multi-dimensional disaster that the Republicans are completely unequipped to handle, either philosophically or policy-wise.  Suddenly, Bernie Sanders's policies make sense; Elizabeth Warren's ideas no longer seem so radical.  And once the dust settles down, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's fury will be difficult to bear, whether she keeps her seat or not.  Democrats who have thus far been annoyed with her rhetoric will now begin to see what drives it: the poverty and the powerlessness of those in the poorer precincts of NYC.

3.  One of the most infuriating matters we have before us is the destruction of the Department of Justice.  We must hope that it can be restored to something like its former functioning ability.  The kidnapping of the Senate, as part of the process of electing political ideologues as judges is despicable.  But the destruction of the Department of Justice is unforgivable, and will not be forgiven.

But the Democrats seem to be successful in taking steps to lose the election anyway.  Joe Biden could not have known, in the nineties, that being over-affectionate with his female assistants could be an obstacle to his path to the white house; after all, many former presidents have been known for harassing women.  But, as Bob Dylan famously said in the sixties: The old road is rapidly fading; so get out of the new one, if you can't lend a hand.  This is an old song that our young people ought to be singing.

Here is a version rewritten for our present circumstances:


(It's Jimmy Fallon.)

I still think Bob Dylan's original song will still be relevant for a long time.

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