| | | You support hypocrisy and hypocrites...what a guy your Biden is and what hypocrites all the DNC leadership is!
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Boston Globe
Monday, May 11, 2020
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The #MeToo double standard didn't start with Biden
Like Captain Renault in “Casablanca,” I would be putting on an act if I claimed to be shocked — shocked! — to find that liberal Democrats, who emphatically supported Christine Blasey Ford in 2018 when she accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of having sexually assaulted her when they were teens, now brush off Tara Reade’s sexual-assault allegation against Joe Biden, and emphatically endorse the former vice president’s character and integrity.
To be sure, the reek of hypocrisy is overpowering, especially the stench coming off prominent Democratic women in Congress, including:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In 2018, she took to social media to proclaim, “Dr. Blasey Ford, we are with you. #BelieveSurvivors”. Yet now she declares that she supports Biden and is “satisfied with how he has responded,” extolling him as “the personification for [sic] hope and optimism in our country.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand . Two years ago, the New York Democrat, a fierce #MeToo advocate, delivered a scathing speech attacking Kavanaugh’s defenders. Anyone raising doubts about Blasey Ford’s allegation, she said, is “telling survivors everywhere that your experiences don’t count, they’re not important and they are not to be believed. . . . that women are worth less than a man’s promotion.” Today? Gillibrand has no interest in Reade’s experiences. “I stand by Vice President Biden. . . . he has vehemently denied this allegation.”- Senator Kamala Harris . Even before Blasey Ford appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Harris (a committee member) announced: “I believe her.” She called Kavanaugh’s confirmation a “sham,” a “disgrace,” and “a denial of justice for the women of this country.” But today she supports Biden for president, and would “be honored” to be his running mate. Reade’s claim of being assaulted by Biden doesn’t trouble Harris. “The Joe Biden I know,” she says, has “been a lifelong fighter, in terms of stopping violence against women.”
- Senator Dianne Feinstein . California’s other Democratic senator publicly declared in 2018 that “every single piece of information from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford [is] eminently credible, sincere, and believable,” and warned that “confirming Brett Kavanaugh in the face of credible allegations of sexual assault” would erode the credibility of the Supreme Court. Yet for Reade she has only contempt: “I don’t know this person at all who has made the allegations. She came out of nowhere. Where has she been all these years?” Reade’s “attack” on Biden, Feinstein told CNN, “is absolutely ridiculous.”
- Senator Elizabeth Warren . The senator from Massachusetts, like all her Democratic colleagues, vigorously proclaimed her faith in the truth of Blasey Ford’s allegations, which she said were “credible and compelling” — especially since she made them “for no personal gain whatsoever.” But now it is Biden’s denial that Warren claims to find persuasive. “I appreciate that the vice president took a lot of questions, tough questions. And he answered them directly and respectfully,” Warren told an interviewer. “The vice president’s answers were credible and convincing.”
This clanging double standard isn’t limited to Democratic women in Congress, of course. In 2018, a great chorus of liberal editorial pages and television commentators — to say nothing of “women’s rights” organizations — trumpeted their unquestioning belief in the truth of Blasey Ford’s charges, which to this day remain wholly uncorroborated by any witness or document. Some rushed to promote even more incendiary accusations by other women, such as Julie Swetnick’s claim of attending parties at which Kavanaugh participated in gang rapes. Many demanded, with Senate Democrats, that the FBI reopen its exhaustive background check of Kavanaugh, and investigate the new charges — then amplified Democratic cries of “sham!” and “coverup!” when the reopened investigation didn’t generate the findings they wanted.
This time around, by contrast, Reade’s allegations were ignored by most of the media for weeks. No Democrats, and no Democratic allies in the media, are insisting that Biden testify under oath or calling for the accusation against him to be investigated by the FBI. Two years ago, a great upwelling of #MeToo and #BelieveWomen outrage extolled Blasey Ford as a heroine and turned Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings into a grotesque spectacle. There has been no such upwelling in support of Reade, despite the fact that at least five witnesses have publicly confirmed that Reade spoke to them at the time about Biden’s alleged assault at the time she says it happened.
The double standard could hardly be more egregious, but shocking? Hardly. For anyone who follows American politics, the pattern is all too familiar.
Bill Clinton was credibly accused of sexually molesting multiple women, but liberals, feminists, and Democrats didn’t turn Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, or Juanita Broaddrick into #MeToo icons. For the most part they ignored those women. When they couldn’t ignore them, they disparaged them — Democratic guru James Carville notoriously sneered, in reference to Jones, that when “you drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.” Or they declared that Clinton’s offenses mattered less than his support for the feminist agenda.
This political hypocrisy when it comes to crude behavior toward women, and the willingness of supposed feminist champions to look the other way when the miscreant is a powerful Democrat is an old story. When Republican Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon was compelled to resign from the Senate 25 years ago after being accused of sexually harassing and assaulting female staffers and lobbyists, another senator, Alan Simpson of Wyoming, remarked bitterly: “I looked around that room, and saw people who had done things much worse.”
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Indeed. Back in 1993, before I had grown jaded about how two-faced politicians could be, I wrote a column for the Boston Herald expressing my astonishment that five female Democratic senators would headline a fundraising rally for Senator Edward Kennedy, who at the time was arguably the most notorious womanizer in American politics.
Kennedy’s “attitudes and behavior toward women represent just about everything a real feminist — or a real gentleman — finds revolting,” I wrote.
So why on earth would the five Democratic women in the US Senate fly into Boston, as they did Monday, to lead a fundraising rally for Ted Kennedy? Why would they hail him as a champion of — no, not Democrats, or liberals, or Irishmen — but women?
Explain it, please, Senator Patty Murray of Washington. You ran for Congress because, you said, you were outraged at the grilling Anita Hill endured when she accused Judge Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. You authored your state senate's sexual-harassment code. Your predecessor, Brock Adams, was forced out of the Senate after several women charged that he had sexually assaulted them. “And it's not just Brock,” you insisted during your campaign. “It's the whole US Senate.”
Actually, Sen. Murray, it's not the whole U.S. Senate. Some senators behave with full respect toward women. For example, John Glenn (D-Ohio), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), or Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) — such men are about as likely to get embroiled in sex scandals, or to turn into loud, horny drunks, as they are to bungee-jump off the Capitol dome.
But the same certainly can't be said of Ted Kennedy.
“A former mid-level Kennedy staffer, bitterly disillusioned” — this is from political writer Michael Kelly's long February 1990 article on Kennedy's boorish lifestyle — “ recalls with disgust one (now ex-) high-ranking aide as ‘a pimp . . . whose real position was to procure women for Kennedy.’ The fellow did have a legitimate job, she says, but also openly bragged of his prowess at getting attractive and beddable dates for his boss.”
Patty Murray wasn't the only one infuriated by the Hill-Thomas affair. Senator Barbara Boxer of California, then a representative, led six other congresswomen on an electrifying protest march from the House to the Senate side of the Capitol. She made senatorial disrespect for women a key issue, repeating: “If there had been only one woman on the Judiciary Committee, things would have been different.” It was time, she said, to “shake up” the Senate.
By re-electing Ted Kennedy?
“In [Ted Kennedy's] world” — so wrote Anne Taylor Fleming for the New York Times Magazine in 1979, voicing an insight that still rings true — “there is not much room for women. He hires them but rarely for key positions; some of them leave quite embittered. Kennedy does support women's issues . . . but staff women, professional women who work for him, make him nervous, make him look away.”
Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois was the very symbol of aroused political feminism in 1992. Her campaign for the Senate surged on waves of men-just-don't-get-it passion. It galvanized Democratic women nationwide. Who among her supporters didn't snort with derision as Kennedy — paralyzed by his history of mauling waitresses, propositioning blonde teenagers, rutting on restaurant floors — sat virtually mute during the Thomas/Hill hearings?
Yet there she was, telling 1,200 women at the Park Plaza on Monday that Kennedy has been “a beacon of light and hope for all of us all these years.”
“[Kennedy's] behavior” — so Suzannah Lessard wrote in her famous essay, “ Kennedy's Woman Problem, Women's Kennedy Problem” — “suggests a severe case of arrested development, a kind of narcissistic intemperance. . . . Certainly it suggests an old-fashioned, male chauvinist, exploitative view of women as primarily objects of pleasure.”
Party loyalty I understand. Politics making strange bedfellows I understand. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland calling Ted Kennedy “one of the Galahads of the US Senate” I am incapable of understanding. (What a metaphor! Galahad was the chaste knight at the Round Table.)
I'm not a woman. Nor am I a Democrat. But if I were, I think I'd be a little ashamed of Senators Murray, Boxer & Co. I think I'd feel betrayed to find that women senators aren’t a different kind of senator after all. And I think I'd be disgusted by their willingness to compromise their principles and look the other way, exactly like the men they railed against with such righteousness just one election ago.
So, no, the 180-degree flip by those who beatified Kavanaugh’s accuser doesn’t shock me. This is what American politics has turned into: Partisanship is everything. The only enduring value is to win at all costs. Right-wingers are guilty of it too — look how many of them are only too ready to make excuses for Donald Trump’s sexual and other offenses, real and alleged. Time and again, the most unabashed hypocrisy comes from those who make a point of declaiming their high-flown principles as proof of their moral rectitude. “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons,” wrote Emerson. Would that we worried less about our spoons, and more about our honor.
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