Democrats

[Stan]

[buckett]

[Phoebe]

[buckett]

He can't even commit to NOT vetoing a Medicare for All bill. That's not a half-truth, and it's extremely disappointing however you spin it. If Biden wants as many people as possible to have healthcare coverage and thinks healthcare is a right, his platform certainly doesn't demonstrate it. It's a pretty meaningful difference to people who won't have it under Biden.

Obviously preferable to Trump, but not within the same universe of what we need. If that's the platform you're going to put forward, then yeah - you're susceptible to both good faith and bad faith attacks. How is that surprising?

Those same websites are ALSO going to paint Biden as a far-left Obama brand lite Socialist. So who cares what they say?

Again, I just don't see this level of vitriol directed toward Biden supporters who wouldn't vote for Sanders. This is what's puzzling to me. Legitimate progressive complaints about Biden's platform are branded as "helping Trump," but it never works in the opposite direction.

[Kyle]

[Stan]

After a one on one debate, Biden won 3 states handily, 2 of which have fairly big populations/delegates. It's conceivable for Bernie to win but the 300 delegate deficit makes it really unlikely, barring a catastrophic event. With roughly half the delegates already allocated, Biden only has to do almost as well as Bernie from here on out to win; and he's been doing better in recent primaries.

I hope Bernie starts bargaining behind the scenes.

[Phoebe]

What I really hope he starts doing is communicating with all his supporters who are pissed as hell that Biden is winning and can't believe it's not "rigged". If you get all those people under 40 to vote, you would have a different outcome, but it is what it is right now.

[Phoebe]

What we are seeing right now is maybe the best argument for Sanders' campaign. Wonder what would have happened if this occurred a few months ago? Most Rs (except the ones who have a scorched earth philosophy or crazeetown libertarian economic theory) and most Ds will agree on bailout and stimulus packages that boost the largest businesses and reward their greed by refusing to restrict their behaviors. A President Sanders would be zeroing in on all the workers and small business owners living on the edge, ensuring they get help.

[Stan]

[Phoebe]

And vice-versa, if Biden would agree to take a more aggressive universal health care position and demand that the entire tax system stop favoring the wealthiest few, that would go a long way to helping people unite.

[Phoebe]

Progressives are very upset, like their right-wing bedfellows, that Biden has been accused of digitally penetrating someone. The progressive who wrote the linked essay thinks the problem goes so far as to poison any of his potential female running mates in a terribly unfortunate way, and she is very dramatic about it!

And to all this noise I say: too f****** bad. The Republican party has consistently delivered us a diet of creepy sexual aggressors as political candidates. They have been utterly deaf to completely credible allegations against the president for all this time. So they can take this latest completely incredible allegation from an erratic and unreliable source and shove it, with a hearty f*** you for their endless hypocrisy, and a f*** anyone who pretends that my feelings on this make me a bad feminist, or that somehow sexual assault survivors are all supposed to feel the same way about this in solidarity.

I sat there and watched as a now-Supreme Court Justice sneered and raged and fulminated against his mild-mannered accuser, and lied about things that he didn't have to lie about, and went after Amy Klobuchar with utter disrespect because her father was an alcoholic. I watched that pathetic little bitch Lindsey Graham crying and screaming about how terrible it was that anybody would come forward with an allegation to mar the character of a good man. I watched as the Republican party en masse could barely bring themselves to disavow Roy Moore, even when it was extraordinarily credible that he had made creepy adult assaults on young teenagers. Gross.

I've had to watch all this crap and internalize all this crap for all these years. I had to watch as Bill Clinton was credibly accused of assault, yet the only thing the Republicans cared about was a semen stain on a dress from a consensual encounter, because they didn't really care about whether he had assaulted anyone! They only cared about hurting him politically, and they didn't care whether they hurt Monica or anyone else in the process. Let's look at Ken Starr's record at Baylor University in dealing with this issue shall we? That's right, he does not give one tiny s*** about it or about women. We're supposed to be very mad at how Biden treated Anita Hill, when in fact it was all the Republicans who were attacking her like crazy, and the complaint against him was simply that he was unable to control those maniacs adequately! Yet the party of maniacs gets a pass? Where's their apology? I think I'm going to need an apology for all of these hundreds of things before I would take seriously any claim they have about hypocrisy on the part of anyone else!

So now this party, which for decades has been completely unconcerned about sexual assault and completely dismissive of credible reports, unwilling hold anyone to account on the issue, rudely and mercilessly and cruelly dismissive of young feminists everywhere, mocking their take back the night rallies, angrily protesting sexual assault policies at universities, and constantly resisting all of the actual policy measures that could have made life safer for women, like VAWA (hello, for which Biden was instrumental), now these people want to step up to me and decide what makes me a good feminist or a good survivor or a good woman. F*** you all.

It's an unfortunate thing, perhaps, but this latest accuser wrote a goddamn absurd love letter to Vladimir Putin in which not only did she talk about her own feelings, but she also talked about mine as an American woman! She wanted to say that I was somehow taken by this man's ridiculous displays of supposed virility, or tenderness to small animals or whatever b******* that was. And this is the person you want me to believe now? The first person in the history of the freaking world that has been believed by Republicans? No. Sorry. Try again. Ukraine isn't working out, this isn't working out, but I'm sure you'll come up with something.

[Phoebe]

Wow there's so much more I didn't even know about this case. For years she's been writing pro-Biden essays, she has offered all sorts of prior testimony about this where she was very specific that the encounter was non-sexual, none of the people who are supposedly corroborating the story heard that there was anything sexual about it, and only when Bernie Sanders, her preferred candidate, was losing did she decide to change the story, and then coordinate with a reporter to have some sort of gotcha moment. "Tick tock". Right. If she really was assaulted by him then I feel very badly for her, but you do not go publicly on the record specifying that it didn't happen and then change your mind and claim that it did happen, so that Republicans can viciously attack all the rest of us women that they have never believed for our entire lives. There's not a snowball's chance in hell that her claim would hold up in court. And again that's too bad if it's real, but there are millions of women in this country who have completely credible claims who have been s*** on for decades by Republicans, and I will not take one minute of it more.

[Phoebe]

I checked in with myself to see if I was just angry about this yesterday or if this is a lasting state. Still just as angry today. It's good that we have social distancing because if any Republicans came within biting distance of me and started talking about how I was a hypocrite for not being mad about Biden, I don't know what would happen. My entire life people, my entire life with this entire political party being a bunch of terrible jerks on this specific issue... Suddenly they care.

[Phoebe]

How dare people smear Stacy Abrams because she believes Biden, not reflexively but after looking into the details of the story. The people trying to make political hay out of this, not only to damage Biden but now ALSO to damage any of the women who might be in the running to be his VP, clearly have not looked into the details of the story. It's riddled with people saying one thing and then contradicting themselves and saying another, and that's not even close to good enough reason to attack Stacey Abrams for being skeptical. It's weird how the mantra, "believe women", is now being used to try to take down an ascending black woman politician, isn't it? How convenient.

[Phoebe]

Still furious about this, sustained by every foolish, double-standards-driven, dishonest, sloppy, evidence-free think piece I read about it. Because of his denial there are tons of those pieces in my news feed.

Republicans don't even have to do anything to get their horrible candidates elected; they can just sit around and watch Democrats be complete idiots.

[Kyle]

I’m going to be honest. I’ve looked into the allegations, and I’m not convinced she’s lying. I’m not convinced she’s telling the truth either, but that’s often the case in situations like this. And when this all started coming out, I found myself clinging to the justifications for how it couldn’t be true and not really critically looking at it. Because I didn’t want it to be true. But then I realized that that’s not fair to the woman making the claims, nor was it consistent with how I’d formed my opinions on other alleged sexual assaulters like Trump, Hardwick or Weinstein. So I realized that was bullshit and looked into it.

And so now I’m not convinced she’s lying. I can see why there were inconsistencies with her story over the years. I can see why she denied it. A lot of that makes sense to me from what I understand about the trauma and response to sexual assault. All of that said, it’s also consistent with someone who is not being truthful. So I don’t know if it’s true or not. But I do know that Biden has a history of inappropriate touching and expressions of unwanted intimacy with women. That makes me lean towards believing it’s true.

And that sucks. Our system sucks. I didn’t like Biden as the candidate before these allegations came out. Now I’m being faced with an election with two candidates that I don’t think I can vote for.

[Stan]

Really !?! Look, Biden was not in my top 3 choices in the primaries (which we still haven't voted in due to the schedule). He is not great. I give him a B-.

However, I give Trump an F. He appoints incompetent and corrupt people everywhere. Drain the swamp? He's Jabba the Hutt in the middle of the swamp. Except at least Jabba was a strong leader. Trump is a bumbling idiot who is easily swayed by foreign dictators. His total lack of leadership during a pandemic has resulted in more deaths in the U.S. than in any other country.

If Trump gets another term, another drunken fratboy will be put on the supreme court. Say goodbye to environmental protections, marriage equality, and reproductive rights. We will officially be a white nationalist country.

I'm not saying let Biden give you a massage. I'm saying think about the ramifications of one party's control over the other. It's not just about the person, it's the whole package of effects. If you have an inability to distinguish between Biden and Trump to the level that you can't vote for either of them, you need to move beyond a binary scale.

Regarding the allegations, there was no hint of this existing in 2008, which is suspicious.

[Phoebe]

I can understand why people with good intentions might believe her, or at least remain open to it, despite all the evidence that she's untrustworthy. I was 100% open to believing her - I've heard so many completely trustworthy trauma victims firsthand state truths that might seem unbelievable because they're so terrible, or they struggle to tell the whole truth not because of dishonesty but because naming the full truth is so profoundly upsetting. I get that completely. It's psychologically easier sometimes to be vague or say something was less bad than it really was. Some details may be hazy while others remain precise. You might conceal parts from loved ones due to not wanting to hurt them or being concerned about their reactions. Truth can be something dug up after many attempts to re-rake the soil.

However, what this accuser has given us over the years is not consistent with that pattern of struggling to come to terms with trauma. She was able to give specific accounts in writing and interviews of what happened, but without any specifics that would permit further investigation. Usually people remember at least some details of the surrounding context, but she has none, and does not even recall other people besides Biden whose presence was mentioned in her account. By her own account, she was frustrated that journalists weren't making more of the story, and after seeking out other journalists who were more politically sympathetic to Sanders, she changed the specifics.

As this happened, she went back and deleted older published material that would cast doubt on her motives or judgment. In addition, she edited a previously published account of what happened to make it consistent with her brand new story, while trying to hide the fact that she edited it. She hasn't responded to the questions about why she edited, which should be easy enough to do if it was a simple matter of updating with accurately recalled details.

None of those actions are consistent with a typical response to trauma creating difficulties for naming the more serious truth of what happened in an incident. When decades later you are comfortable enough with your story to deliberately seek multiple interviews with journalists and make many written statements about it, it makes no sense that the story then changes within a few months. It makes no sense that you don't name your assailant when now filing a police report, when you're now so certain of what happened that you filed that report, and in theory would then have welcomed a criminal investigation. What could you possibly have to lose at that point by naming him to police, since you're making the same claims in public attached to his name? Well, the consequences for lying differ.

[Kyle]

I hear everything you’re both saying. And I don’t know if it’s true or not, but if I was forced to guess, I’d say it’s true. Not enough that he should be tried, or convicted. But if you’re asking me to choose what I think, then I’m telling you I think he did it more than I think he didn’t.

To Stans point, I reject the system that has repeatedly put me here. I reject the system that lets power brokers give me two bad choices and then forces me to vote for the least bad of the two. This is the same system that gave me Hillary Clinton as a candidate and got Trump elected. It’s crooked and I reject it. I’ll vote. But my conscience won’t let me vote for one person who I don’t like and think may have sexually assaulted someone to prevent an even more horrible person from getting elected. If I compromise my morals and vote for Biden, then I’m endorsing this awful system that needs radical reform.

[Tahlvin]

I agree there’s probably some grain of truth to her story, but I feel like somethings still missing. And I saw recently that she was in contact with some lawyers recommended by the #MeToo movement, and they refused to take the case, which makes me wonder what that missing something is.

And while I hate the flawed two party system, I’ll definitely vote for the Democrats in order to get rid of Trump. In another 4 years, I’ll consider voting third party or for better candidates in the primaries. But right now, as flawed as Biden is, and as much as I’d preferably different candidate, he is leaps and bounds ahead of Trump.