ACCUSATION MEETS INCOMPETENCE: Is Tara Reade a credible person?

FRIDAY, MAY 8, 2020

The Professor Mannes don't know:
Who the Sam Hill is Matt Stieb? We ask for an obvious reason.

Yesterday, Tara Reade did an online interview with Megyn Kelly, late of Fox News and NBC. Excerpts have been posted on Twitter!

In a short post, Stieb reported the session for New York magazine. His short post carries this headline:
Everything We’ve Learned From Tara Reade’s Megyn Kelly Interview
The headline sounds promising. Unfortunately, here's the first thing Stieb chose to report:
STIEB (5/7/20): On her online show, Kelly asked Reade about a Biden statement from 2018 in which he said that accusers should start off with the presumption that they are telling the truth. “Do you think he’s afforded you that presumption?” Kelly asked. “No,” Reade replied, and referred to alleged harassment online, including a death threat, following her decision to come forward. “His campaign is taking this position that they want all women to be able to speak safely. I have not experienced that.”
Kelly asked if Biden is affording Reade the presumption that she's telling the truth!

Since Biden has said that Reade's accusation is false, that was a fairly silly question. Also, under the circumstances, that would be a very strange thing for Biden to do.

Why would Kelly ask such a stupid question? She asked because the question highlights something Biden said two years ago.

In his remark, Biden was playing a modified version of the "Believe Women" card, one of the several extremely dumb memes our own liberal tribe has churned out in recent years.

By some, we're now told that "Believe Women" never meant that people should believe all women. This recalls the high-profile, absurdist joke told by Steven Wright:
I went down to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door.

I said, "Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours." He said, "Yes, but not in a row!"
Wright is a comedian, but so are our human tribes. With that in mind, let's return to what Biden said back in 2018.

Let's use some common sense! Surely, even Biden couldn't have meant that a person being falsely accused by a woman should somehow afford her the presumption that she's telling the truth.

Even Biden isn't that dumb, but our progressive stampedes often are. And this is the nonsense with which Stieb began his review of the session.

How strongly do we sometimes truly believe in our tribe's truest beliefs? So strongly that Stieb's short report already bears a correction of an extremely basic point—a point he apparently misstated when his report first appeared.

Everybody makes mistakes. That said, this particular glaring misstatement tilted the field in Reade's direction. In fairness, this is the story of human behavior all through the annals of time.

Should (female) accusers "start off with the presumption that they are telling the truth?"

We're forced to add the gender qualifier for n obvious reason. In the current standoff, Biden is accusing Reade of saying something that isn't true, and Kelly didn't ask if he should be afforded the presumption that he is telling the truth.

Should women start with that presumption? Yes, they should, if you want to reside in the Eden of dimwitted True Belief.

Is Tara Reade telling the truth? Like you and like Professor Manne, we have no way of knowing. That said, it has turned out, in recent years, that other accusers weren't telling the truth. This brings us back to Emily Bazelon's concerns about Tara Reade.

Last Thursday, over at Slate, Bazelon said that she didn't regard Reade as highly credible. She seemed to suggest that Reade could be lying—or that she might "have problems."

To her credit, Bazelon didn't claim to know whether Reade is telling the truth. She merely said that she had concerns, questions, doubts.

We have concerns and question too. Meanwhile, accusers sometimes do "have problems." The tribal mind discards such facts, but such facts remain true.

We're currently living in the age
of the White House campaign sex claim. Gennifer Flowers threw out the first pitch in early 1992.

In a high-profile New York City press event, Flowers claimed that she'd had a torrid, twelve-year love affair with "my Bill"—with Candidate Bill Clinton. In this way, Flowers inserted herself, and her thrilling claims, into the middle of a major world event.

That said, was it possible that Flowers "had problems?" In Newsweek, Jonathan Alter quickly reported some problems with Flowers' claims:
ALTER (2/3/92): Gennifer Flowers also has credibility problems. Among them...

* Flowers claims she met Clinton at the Excelsior Hotel in 1979 or 1980. The hotel didn't open until late 1982...

* Flowers claims to have taken 50 hours of classes at the University of Arkansas. There is no record of her having attended the school.

* Flowers claims to have been Miss Teen Age America, 1967. She wasn't—that year, or any other.
Oof! The hotel wasn't open yet, and she hadn't been Miss Teen Age America. Meanwhile, Flowers achieved paydays totaling more than $500,000 in return for her thrilling claims. (Previously, she'd been earning $18,000 in an Arkansas state job.)

Did Flowers perhaps "have problems?" We have no ultimate way of knowing, but in 2000, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons wrote The Hunting of the President, a history of the mainstream press corps' endless pursuit of Bill Clinton.

Conason and Lyons are major journalists. They extended the list of Flowers' peculiar past claims:
CONASON/LYONS (page 25): Musicians and club owners who had worked with Flowers described her as manipulative and dishonest. Her resume falsely proclaimed her a graduate of a fashionable Dallas prep school she’d never attended. It also listed a University of Arkansas nursing degree she’d never earned and membership in a sorority that had never heard of her. Her agent told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that contrary to her claims, Flowers had never opened for comedian Rich Little. A brief gig on the Hee Haw television program had come to a bad end, the agent would later confirm, when Flowers simply vanished for a couple of weeks with a man she’d met in a Las Vegas casino—and then concocted a tale about having been kidnapped. She had never been Miss Teenage America. Even her “twin sister Genevieve” turned out to be purely a figment of Flowers’ imagination.
Oof. Meanwhile, was Flowers the sort of person in whom you'd want to place your trust? In 1995, she published her own book, Passion and Betrayal—a book in which she didn't name a single time and place where she and "her Bill" had canoodled together.

On that basis, none of her specific claims could fall apart, as the Excelsior Hotel claim apparently had. She did remember to include this recollection of the time she met Hillary Clinton:
FLOWERS (1995): I was shocked. She looked like a big fat frump with her hair hanging down kind of curly and wavy. She had big, thick glasses; an ugly dress; and a big, fat butt.
It's hard to have sufficient contempt for that bit of prose, but so wrote Gennifer Flowers. Is that the kind of person in whom you'd want to place your trust? Is it possible that Flowers might, in some way, possibly "have problems?"

You've never seen such questions asked because, by 1998, the mainstream press corps had anointed Flowers as a major truth-teller. This was based on a minuscule point of agreement:

By now, Clinton had testified that he'd had, on one occasion, one sexual encounter with Flowers, not involving intercourse. Flowers, of course, was still claiming a twelve-year love affair with her heart, in the end, being broken..

That point of agreement was close enough for mainstream press corps work. Flowers was now paraded around, accompanied by the claim that we now knew that she had been telling the truth all along.

In October 2016, Donald J. Trump threatened to bring her to one of his debates with Hillary Clinton. That same month, the New York Times wrote a ridiculous front-page report in which the rehabilitation of this truth-teller was extended.

In that way, Gennifer Flowers became the era's inaugural sex accuser. In March 1998, along came Kathleen Willey, appearing on Sixty Minutes.

Willey was instantly treated as the world's most credible person. She was upper-middle class in habillement—in fact, she and her husband had been fairly wealthy—and she was conventionally attractive.

Perhaps for those reasons, smitten male journalists stood in line to swear she was telling the truth. She said she'd been semi-attacked by President Clinton, in the Oval, on one occasion.

It would be hard to overstate the extent to which our smitten pundits vouched for the credibility of the fabulous Willey. Later that year, the problems began, with the press corps constantly withholding such facts from public view:

October 1998: In October 1998, Kenneth Starr executed a major "document dump." Included was sworn testimony by Linda Tripp, a friend and associate of Willey.

Under oath, Tripp had testified that Willey had been trying to arrange a tryst with President Clinton. She'd said that Willey had been thrilled by her Oval Office encounter.

This sworn testimony contradicted the story Willey had told. Our major press organs hushed it up—and then, we had the disaster.

May 1999: In May 1999, Willey accused a journalist of threatening her outside her Richmond, Virginia home. She claiemd that the journalist had been acting on behalf of the murderous Clinton. She lodged the claim on the crackpot cable show Hardball, goaded on by a deeply irresponsible Chris Matthews.

Fortunately, the journalist was able to prove that he'd been in California on the date Willey had named. Before he could do so, a person with a history of mental illness appeared at the journalist's home with a gun, apparently planning to shoot him..

Matthews apologized, after which the astonishing incident was never mentioned again. Stampeding tribes take care of their own, as do such guilds as the press corps. Very few people ever heard about this astounding event.

March 2002: In March 2002, Robert Ray, Kenneth Starr's successor, published his final report on the Lewinsky matter. In an appendix to the report, Ray said that Willey had lied to his investigators so often that they had to negotiate two (2) immunity agreements with her.

Willey went on from there to become a crackpot right-wing radio host. We're omitting various aspects of her troubled personal history.

Willey had seemed amazingly credible when she first appeared. But was it possible that she had been lying, or that she might have "had problems?"

Other accusations have been false during this era, although you'll never be able to get the tribal true believers to believe any such thing.

Some accusers have lied, or they've perhaps "had problems." Consider the tragic story of the (false) accuser in the 2006 Duke lacrosse case.

Her name is Crystal Magnum, and she has a tragic history. It's fairly clear that she "had problems," as William Styron's "beaten children of the earth" are known to do.

Mangum's accusation was exciting but it turned out to be false. Her tragic history reads, in part, like this:
Mangum was born and grew up in Durham, North Carolina, the daughter of Travis Mangum, a truck driver, and his wife Mary. She was the youngest of three children. She attended Hillside High School, graduating in 1996.

In 1996 she filed a police report alleging that three years earlier, when she was 14, she had been kidnapped by three assailants, driven to Creedmoor, North Carolina, and raped.
One of those she accused was her boyfriend, who was 21 at the time, which would be statutory rape. She subsequently backed away from the charges, a move relatives claimed was motivated by fear for her life. Mangum's father said he did not believe she was raped or injured, though her mother believed such an incident could have occurred—but not in 1993. She thinks it is more likely to have happened when Crystal was 17 or 18 years old, shortly before she made the police report.

[...]

In 2002, she was arrested on 10 charges after stealing the taxicab of a customer
to whom she had given a lap dance. This prompted a police pursuit at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour, occasionally in the wrong lane. After being stopped, she nearly ran over a police officer, succeeding only in hitting his patrol vehicle. She was found to have a blood alcohol content of just over twice the legal limit. Ultimately, she pleaded guilty on four counts: assault on a government official, larceny, speeding to elude arrest, and driving while impaired, serving three weekends in jail, paying $4,200 in restitution and fees, and being given two years' probation.

[...]

In March 2006, she was hired as a stripper at a party organized by members of the Duke University men's lacrosse team. After arriving in an intoxicated state, having earlier consumed alcohol and cyclobenzaprine, to perform with another stripper at a house rented by three of the team captains, she became involved in an argument with the occupants of the residence and subsequently left. She then became involved in an altercation with her fellow stripper that necessitated police assistance. The officer who arrived on scene took her to a local drug and mental health center, where she was in the process of being involuntarily committed when, after being asked a leading question, she made an allegation that she had been raped at the party...

In 2008, Mangum published a memoir written with Vincent Clark. The book gives her version of events. She continued to insist that she was assaulted at the party and says that the dropping of the case was politically motivated. The book also outlines her earlier life, reasserting her claim that she was raped at the age of 14.
We'd start by noting the appalling lack of adult supervision which allowed that gruesome "party" to take place at all.

That said, a tragic personal history suffuses these events. In April 2007, the Raleigh News-Observer published a long, sympathetic profile of Mangum which included this report:
"The 28-year-old woman has struggled with poverty, alcohol abuse and psychological instability. In recent years she turned to therapists for help with bipolar disorder and other mental problems and took anti-psychotic medication."
The murder arrests came later:
In February 2010, she was arrested on charges of attempted murder of her live-in partner, Milton Walker. She was eventually convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile, injury to personal property and resisting a public officer.

In November 2013, she was found guilty of second-degree murder after she stabbed boyfriend Reginald Daye, who died 10 days after. She argued that she acted in self-defense, fearing that Daye would kill her. She was sentenced to 14 to 18 years in prison.
We're strongly inclined to recommend pity for the many "beaten children of the earth." We do not recommend believing their accusations on the basis of their gender, as large segments of the Duke faculty instantly rushed off to do.

In fairness, they were simply Believing Women, as they'd been told they should do!

Recent history has taught us that some accusations aren't true. That said, nothing will stop the Professor Mannes from urging us to disregard this blindingly obvious fact.

For us over here in the liberal world, the Professor Mannes cast themselves in the role of Our Own Donald Trumps. That said, nothing will ever curtail their true belief, or their impossibly faulty judgment.

Is Tara Reade telling the truth? Like the hapless Professor Manne, we have no way of knowing. But just as no one knew Kathleen Willey when she first appeared, no one knows Reade today. Meanwhile, reports of "corroborating evidence" have been greatly exaggerated, not unlike Mark Train's death.

Why did Emily Bazelon express concern about Reade? To read about the horse rescue allegations, you can just click here.

To puzzle about the ways she has praised Biden in recent years for his work on behalf of women, you can just click this. Or you can peruse Reade's bizarre essay in praise of Putin, who she had been savaging in the preceding years. Her essay includes such wisdom as this:
READE (11/27/18): President Putin’s genius is his judo ability to conserve his own energy and let the opponents flail, using up their energy, while he gains position. Currently, President Putin has a higher approval rating in America then the American President, particularly with women. President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity. It is evident that he loves his country, his people and his job. Although his job may seem like in the words of writer, Elizabeth Gilbert on genius, “ trying to swallow the sun.” This is a whole lot to deal with for one mere mortal… President Putin’s obvious reverence for women, children and animals, and his ability with sports is intoxicating to American women. Especially since the bloated, American President is so negative, denigrating and dismissive of anyone but himself as he stumbles even playing golf (which is not a real sport anyway but a past time, sorry golfers).
Is it possible that something "is wrong" with the person who composed this essay? Since everything has always been possible, that has to be possible too!

It's also possible, as some have suggested and said, not without hints of evidence, that Reade is now on the Russkie payroll. And by the way—it's possible that she's on the Russkie payroll and that she's telling the truth!

No one had ever set eyes on Kathleen Willey when she lodged her exciting accusation on Sixty Minutes. To people who were chasing Clinton, she seemed amazingly credible.

Now we have the Professor Mannes. They're vouching for the credibility of another person no one knows.

Tara Reade may be telling the truth. It also could be that she isn't.

Her claim could be true, and her claim could be false. Above all else, remember this:

The true believers in our deeply flawed tribe have no way to know.

36 comments:

  1. "Since Biden has said that Reade's accusation is false"

    Nah, dear Bob, Rapist Joe didn't say that Reade's accusation is false.

    Rapist Joe did the usual nondenial-denial, saying "this never happened". Which, of course, depends on what the meaning of "this" is.

    Does Rapist Joe's nondenial-denial mean that Rapist Joe indeed raped Tara Reade, but it was at a different location or different time of day than what she described? Who knows, dear Bob.

    But sure, keep squirming, dear Bob. It's hilarious.

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  2. "That said, it has turned out, in recent years, that other accusers weren't telling the truth."

    That said, it has turned out, in recent years, that SOME other accusers weren't telling the truth.

    Somerby would be more convincing if he didn't state his own arguments in such absolutist terms. The reasonable voices ask for investigation, not belief. But in the bad old days, women's accusations were dismissed out of hand, without any investigation, because women were assumed to be incapable of telling the truth. Men who mistreat women certainly have a valid reason to fear being accused, rightly or falsely.

    Somerby's exaggerated concern is that men will be wrongly accused and that everyone will believe the woman and the men won't get their day in court but their lives will be destroyed when they have done nothing wrong. There were a few novels and movies about this exact thing.

    Somerby never wastes a thought on the women who are abused by men and who never get their wrongs redressed because men don't think women's concerns are important enough to take seriously. Believe the women means take the women's stories seriously enough to try to determine what happened. That didn't happen with Kavanaugh. It didn't happen with Anita Hill either. It doesn't happen often enough to allow women to come forward when they have been injured, so Weinstein behaved badly for 30 years.

    Reade is being represented by a Trump donor. Two other women were recruited to tell lies about Fauci and Mueller (again, by Trump supporters). This is a political dirty trick. That needs to be unmasked, but such unmasking doesn't happen without investigation. Democrats ask for investigation -- not blind belief. When Somerby suggests that liberals and Democrats are just urging us to swallow whatever some woman says uncritically, he is wrong. He is distorting Democratic beliefs. He is portraying liberals as idiots.

    And there we reach the purpose of these daily essays. They are to promote Trump's interests by undermining liberals and their issues and their candidate -- Biden, who doesn't deserve to be blindly believed either, but who is the target of a bimbo eruption as surely as Bill Clinton was hounded by sexual accusations originating on the right and funded by Scaife.

    But Somerby wants us to disbelieve all the women. Not just the ones for are political tools. All of them, because women don't tell the truth and the word "some" is not in Somerby's vocabulary.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. TDH writes an entire blog entry on how some accusations are false including the lines "Some accusers have lied, or they've perhaps 'had problems'" and "Recent history has taught us that some accusations aren't true."

      And you conclude that the word some isn't even in TDH's vocabulary.

      You're dumber than a box of ball peen hammers.

      Delete
  3. Here is a history of sex scandals during presidential elections going back a lot further than Gennifer Flowers:

    https://www.npr.org/2018/03/21/595481693/a-brief-history-of-presidential-sex-scandals

    Sometimes accusations are true and sometimes they are not.

    Somerby comes very close to the attitude of the misogynists on the internet who frequent men's rights sites. Women are an emotional mess (with "problems" akin to mental illness) and they tell stories as a result, to try to get men into trouble. Men need to be careful because women are trying to get them and their stuff.

    Somerby has spent more time discussing women's perfidy than on the corona virus or pretty much anything else except Gore (and that is Dowd's perfidy).

    People lie. Women are people. When anyone makes a claim, think about it. Don't automatically dismiss one person's current claim because someone else in the past told a lie.

    Somerby hasn't said much about Megyn Kelly, the person who interviewed Reade. She was a right wing operative on Fox for years before joining the women accusing Roger Ailes. That experience with Ailes doesn't make her a liberal. She is still a conservative and Reade is attacking a Democratic candidate. What are Kelly's loyalties and how might they affect her questioning of Reade?

    Crickets from Somerby.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. Professor, you claim that "Sometimes accusations are true and sometimes they are not." Which is exactly what TDH says.

      But you claim that TDH "comes very close" to misogyny. Since you're both in violent agreement, where does that place you on the misogyny scale?

      Delete
  4. “Even Biden isn't that dumb, but our progressive stampedes often are.”

    Where is the evidence of a progressive stampede? Somerby has cited one, maybe two opinion columns so far that expressed a belief in Reade.

    There was no progressive stampede to believe Gennifer Flowers either; the media promoted her story. Clinton suffered no significant downturn in support from progressives or liberals because of the Flowers stuff.

    So far, the majority of Democratic voters believe Biden, according to a recent Morning Consult poll. So, if there is any stampede forming, it is the media’s doing, and not “progressives.”

    Somerby uses the terms “progressive” and “liberal” almost interchangeably in his posts. They are not really synonymous. “Progressives” often define themselves as true liberals, while “liberal” is often taken as a negative term to mean neoliberal, corporatist, etc.

    He never acknowledges the division that this represents in the Left. Media sites like Jacobin and The Intercept go unmentioned here at TDH. They view the Democratic Party as the enemy. Mainstream media like the AP and the Washington Post refused to publish Reade’s story last year, because they couldn’t corroborate it. This year, after Reade changed her story, Katie Halper and The Intercept gave her a platform, and that has brought her renewed attention.

    Besides, the facts that we know so far about Reade have been published in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

    And Emily Bazelon is a liberal, as far as I know, so she isn’t joining the stampede either.

    Megyn Kelly? Conservative.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. People on the left who consider themselves liberals instead of progressives, do not consider themselves neoliberals or corporatists. We consider ourselves part of a long tradition of working for issues such as civil rights, labor unions and worker's rights, choice, rooting out corruption in government, limiting big business, and enacting legislation for the common good (e.g., supporting libraries, schools, environmentalism, prison reform, etc.). Progressives are more limited to economic issues and income inequality and they don't care about a lot of the other issues that traditional liberals care about (such as what they are now calling identity politics).

      Historically, there was a progressive wing of the Republican party and Progressive Republicans (Teddy Roosevelt for example) and there have also been Progressive party candidates. These are not liberal.

      Like many actual liberals, I despite Bernie and consider his attacks on the DNC and Democratic Party to be destructive to beating Trump and to electing liberal candidates. The idea that supporting capitalism (and not Marxism) makes you a corporatist and supportive of greed is ridiculous, in my opinion. Progressives seem to have no trouble finding common cause with Trump and other destructive forces in our society. That is a key difference, in my opinion.

      If Bernie's folks are supporting Reade in order to sabotage Biden's candidacy, with the idea that the remainder of the left will accept Bernie in Biden's place, they are wrong. I would vote for Hillary, Gore, Warren, any of the remaining candidates, before I would ever vote for Bernie.

      Somerby has said multiple times that he favors Bernie's ideas. That may be why he never talks about efforts to bring unity to the party, to support the Democratic candidate (Biden) and to heal the rift. It isn't in Bernie's interest to do that, and it IS in Bernie's interest to undermine support for Biden. How better to help him do that, than to repeat Reade's accusations day after day, in the guise of media criticism?

      Delete
  5. Is Reade a credible person, Somerby asks. She doesn't have to be, because we do not put the victim on trial in a criminal case. This shibboleth about credibility arises because men insist that assaults are he said/she said, with the strength of someone's word mattering most. That puts women at a disadvantage because historically their word has counted for nothing, and such attitudes linger.

    If women are going to be taken seriously, they need to behave like adults. That means reporting a crime when one has occurred. If it is impossible to determine what happened now, that is not Biden's fault -- it is on Reade. If women think "no one will believe me" at the time, how much less will they be believed later on when there is the added question of motive for coming forward belatedly.

    Nursing a grievance over a lifetime, then coming forward when a woman thinks it will do the most damage, strikes me as unjust. Memory can become warped over time, even when someone doesn't have "problems" (Somerby's euphemism for mental illness aka being female). It is wrong to make such an accusation, and yes, I think that about Blasey-Ford too.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. Impeaching witnesses is not the same as trying them. The defense gets to question the credibility of witnesses in a trial, and the issue is one for the jury to decide.

      TDH’s euphemism for mental distress, “having problems” refers to Flowers’ residence in an alternate reality and Magnum’s entanglement with, among other things, drugs and alcohol.

      And shibboleth doesn’t mean what you think it does.

      Delete
    2. "Is Reade a credible person, Somerby asks. She doesn't have to be, because we do not put the victim on trial in a criminal case."

      True dat.

      In fact, she could be a crack whore, a lawyer, or worse - a liberal. A person with no credibility whatsoever; not even a trace of it.

      And yet, it wouldn't excuse Rapist Joe's raping her, I'm afraid.

      Delete
    3. "I'm afraid."

      Did you slip up, and accidentally tell the truth, comrade?

      Delete
  6. “In his remark, Biden was playing a modified version of the "Believe Women" card, one of the several extremely dumb memes our own liberal tribe has churned out in recent years.”

    The MeToo movement had (has) a laudable goal, to correct a serious problem in our culture. You can’t argue that the problem it highlights isn’t real.

    Unfortunately, unscrupulous people in the media, and now the GOP, intend to use it merely as another political weapon to trap the supposedly “hypocritical” Democrats. I understand the dangers of oversimplified memes such as “believe women”, but I also understand how sociopaths, like the media and the GOP, turn something needed and socially beneficial into something to be mocked and dismissed. That is precisely the way concern for civil rights became an object of scorn and ridicule by being labeled “identity politics.”

    Also, just by the way, Kate Manne doesn’t say in her column that Reade should be believed just because we should “believe women.” She examines the evidence and decides that it is convincing.

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    1. Kate Manne [sic] doesn't say in her column that Reade should be believed just because we should "believe women."

      Neither does TDH. He levels that charge at Duke faculty.

      She [Mannes] examines the evidence and decides that it is convincing.

      Precisely the problem.

      Delete
    2. A problem for whom? Kate Manne? Perhaps she is sincere. I find Reade not credible, but maybe Manne does. Perhaps she is stupid. Perhaps she supported Bernie and wants to slime Biden.

      It might be more useful to wonder why her column was published. Rather than impugning “liberals” or “progressives” or whatever, chastise the media outlet for publishing such a column.

      Here’s an example: Robert F Kennedy Jr is a big anti-vaxxer; he is also a liberal. Do his crackpot views about vaccinations reflect badly on liberalism, or on Robert F Kennedy Jr? There will always be some liberal who may hold a crazy position. I object to Somerby using that to say “liberals hold this crazy position.” It is the way conservatives think about liberals. It is a form of propaganda.

      Delete
  7. Unlike many of these other cases, Reade told many people about the incident contemporaneously. That is a big deal. Any discussion which ignores this point is spin.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. you're full of shit, David.
      I want a DNA sample from Donald J Chickenshit, Acting President.

      Delete
    2. "Reade told many people about the incident contemporaneously."

      Like snowflakes and finger-prints, each of these people got their own unique story of the incident.

      Delete
    3. "That is a big deal."

      Meh. Not for liberal zombies, as you can easily observe.

      They are conditioned to swallow and regurgitate dembottery, and only dembottery.

      Delete
  8. Oh no. Even more contemporaneous evidence.

    Joe Biden clearly raped this woman and this isn't going away.

    A newly emerged court document from 1996 shows Tara Reade's ex-husband was told about "sexual harassment" that took place while she worked in then-Sen. Joe Biden's office, according to a report.


    The San Luis Obispo Tribune obtained a court filing on Thursday from San Luis Obispo County showing Reade's then-husband, Theodore Dronen, referring to her time working for the Delaware senator. The declaration came in response to a restraining order she had filed against him after he filed for divorce.

    The court document, however, did not directly accuse the former vice president and 2020 presidential candidate of sexual harassment or refer to a sexual assault.

    "I met Petitioner in the spring of 1993 while working in Washington D.C. At the early stages of our dating, Petitioner felt comfortable confiding in me as we both worked for members of Congress, and we shared many common interests," the document obtained by the Tribune read. "On several occasions Petitioner related a problem that she was having at work regarding sexual harassment, in U.S. Senator Joe Biden's office. Petitioner told me she struck a deal with the chief of staff of the senator's office and left her position."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, thank you for the exculpatory evidence. Funny that she didn't mention it was the Senator himself, that might have helped her continually evolving story.

      Oh, by the way, why did she claim she was let go as retaliation but her ex says something completely different? Let's ask the chief of staff.

      Delete

  9. Six contemporaneous reports of the rape from her brother and friends and neighbors who were told the details. Plus one call to a Larry King show by her mother and a mention in Reade's ex husband's response to a domestic violence order.

    Most complaints don't come with anywhere near this level of evidence. Which is why as a man I'm relieved the standard of proof is so high. Women will need to be more careful about how they spend their time and making sure their credibility is kept pristine because the burden is on them as accusers, right where it should be.

    ReplyDelete
  10. There are dozens of harassment allegations against Biden. You can throw out half of them if you want, they can't all be fake. They're on video.

    ReplyDelete
  11. “It's also possible, as some have suggested and said, not without hints of evidence, that Reade is now on the Russkie payroll.”

    Interesting coming from Somerby.
    Would he like to contemplate the possibility that our president is on the Russkie payroll? Somerby spent the entire first two years of Trump’s presidency expressing skepticism about that possibility, and mocking the Dems and the media for exploring that possibility.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Russian interference and contemporaneous collusion with the Trump transition team was proven time and time again with documentable evidence as reported by Mueller and Schiff himself uploaded several documents which could be deemed documental evidence. We're talking cold hard facts. Papadopoulos stole data. Don't take my word for it. Read the relevant documents. They've been stored in the cloud. The evidence was provided to various committees and subsequently stored in the cloud. The investigation yielded reams of data of relevant to and supporting the full collusion argument. Photos, documents, MP3.
      Reams of data. All proving without a doubt Trump was complicit in coordinating with Putin help and assistance to further each other's causes and benefit the ramshackle deliberations of the right's assault on the common good.

      Delete
  12. From Political Wire:

    "Asked why Trump didn’t wear a mask while honoring the [World War II] veterans, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “They made the choice to come here.”"

    ReplyDelete
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