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.