Democrats

[Phoebe]

[Phoebe]

[Kyle]

Its weird when people tell you both that they sympathize with you and that you’re horrible. This is the division that has infected politics and is ruining civil discussion in our country. Being attacked for a reasoned opinion is symptomatic of people that don’t want to have a discussion, but rather want people to just tell them that they are right. There’s no purpose in those conversations. There’s nothing insightful.

[Phoebe]

I didn't say YOU were horrible; I said it's horrible not to vote for Biden if there's a real chance he could beat Trump in your state. I don't know if that's true or not, that there's a chance. But otherwise you're saying it's not worth voting to keep our democracy, or to save the lives of people who will die because of this administration's policies. Why isn't that a horrible vote? I don't see how a questionable, "I think I probably believe her, more likely than not, so I can't vote for a bad man", turns into that. I actually think you'll change your mind about it, honestly, so it's not worth pursuing. But I wanted to make clear I didn't say you were horrible. I think refusing to vote means in effect increasing Trump's chances, and it is literally destroying our country and badly hurting many people.

[Phoebe]

As of yesterday, we were thinking that Reade filed an official complaint against Biden while she was employed by him, right? The existence of this complaint was supposed to help prove her story today is legit. Biden agrees this report should be found and made public. Meanwhile, Republicans insist we need to search his University of Delaware archive of papers for a copy of it (along with any other random dirt they can extract from context to use against him in the campaign).

But wait: it turns out Reade already mentioned this formal complaint last year when she was interviewed by the AP and telling a different version of her story that specifically did not include a sexual assault. The AP reporters retrieved those old notes and asked Reade about her previous comments on the complaint. Suddenly Reade's memory on this point improved a great deal, and she now says her complaint didn't specify sexual harassment, much less sexual assault. So even if it were located, it wouldn't corroborate her current story. It only took an AP reporter contacting her about the discrepancy with her comments from last year to prompt the volunteering of this new insight. This is not the type of change in account we often expect when trauma victims struggle to piece together the fractured memories of a painful trauma, or come to terms with the full weight of an incident. It doesn't mean she's not telling the truth about something - it's still consistent with one or another version of her story being true. But it is wrong to explain this type of story shift by appealing to the way PTSD affects survivors' memories of trauma.

[Phoebe]

Sen. Gillibrand: spends much of career defending politically unpopular positions advocating for sexual assault victims; one of the few voices pushing for reforms to aid sexual assault survivors in the military and fix that culture.

Sen. Gillibrand while hoping to be the D nominee for President: risks her reputation and donor support to call on Sen. Franken to resign, even when doing so is unpopular. Faces years of criticism for it. May even have suffered in the Democratic race because of it.

Sen. Gillibrand now, with little chance of being chosen as VP nominee and little to gain or lose either way:
Decides that she believes Joe Biden, whom she has known and worked around for many years now.
Pilloried relentlessly now by so-called Progressive Democrats who once claimed to love her, who held her up as a champion supporting sexual assault victims, because if there's anything that progressive Democrats have proven they're about right now, it's supporting women and women leaders! Never mind what your Democratic male leaders may think about this case; I don't recall vicious attacks on Beto or Castro or Booker or whoever lately. Their views aren't important here - what matters is making sure any black woman or any woman generally gets trashed if she doesn't turn on Biden, all on the basis of a story that has changed all-too-conveniently only when pressure to expose a factual truth arose.

But tell me again how I'm not a feminist, Progressives.

[Phoebe]

Why are the women being targeted? Because Biden is the only candidate who has EVER, to my knowledge, committed to choosing a woman VP!
And because the progressives are really mad that their favorite man, who pointedly declined to make any such promise, did not win the nomination.
Sick ironies.

It's important that Cuomo will be left alone to be an expert on Covid without having to comment on this case, because if Biden gets sick or something untoward happens at his age, so many people think it would be helpful to draft Cuomo. Not Warren or Klobuchar or Harris or even Sanders, mind you, but Cuomo, because we need a male savior in the event that our first man doesn't work out.

But feminism! These people are the real feminists who believe women, and Karens like me are alienating the entire group under age 40, supposedly, all of whom clearly support women and are definitely feminist.

[Phoebe]

Here is at least one reason, among the thousands, why it matters a lot to the immediate life experiences of people who are sexually assaulted and harassed that you support any Democratic opponent of Trump: we won't have Betsy DeVos or her policies anymore.


I actually agree with bolstering the due process rights for people accused; I don't agree with the details of how that is going to happen under this policy, but in theory it's important that those rights be protected. However, the details are indeed bad and will discourage complaints from being brought, even when the only thing the victim hopes to accomplish is being allowed to remain separated from the assailant. The definition of harassment is being narrowed in an unacceptable manner. As I reflect back on instances where I or others I know were sexually harassed in the course of education, it's clear to me that some egregious cases would no longer qualify under this new guidance. Ironically, Tara Reade's original complaint about sexual harassment would not qualify under this guidance. I realize that she has now changed those claims completely and claims she was fired in retaliation for complaining, but I'm just pointing out that her original complaint would not qualify.

[Phoebe]

Nice article in Vox today about this, by one of the reporters who originally tried to break the story but couldn't find enough corroboration to reach the threshold to publish. Some parts of it are lost on me because my bs detector started pinging on this a long time ago, but for people who feel otherwise, this reporter attempted to be very sympathetic to Reade's difficulty in coming forward. Indeed I would say she went too far in that direction, but whatever. She looked into any possible sources and attempted to find copies of the written complaint in a variety of places. She was in direct contact with the witnesses who were supposed to corroborate the story. One of them told a version of events that is inconsistent with the new story today; that witness now says she deliberately misled the reporter about the truth back then but is telling the truth now. The neighbor now isn't sure what she thinks, because Biden was so persuasive. The brother changed his story about what he was told. Reade herself has told inconsistent stories about how the media has responded to her complaint, as documented in this piece. So it's fine to believe them, but you know that in believing them you're believing people who have lied about the same things. Maybe they did it to protect themselves or others.

If our standard is excusing people who lie because they're in pain, I find it absolutely astonishing that people are now trying to smear Biden in this context for two offhand remarks suggesting that the truck driver who killed his wife and child might have been drinking. Maybe he believed it at the time, maybe he went back and forth on whether he believed it, maybe he wrestled with his own desire not to believe it and his later comments to the man were sincere. Maybe forgiveness was a hard process in that case? I just find it incredible that this man has lived through one of the worst things most people can imagine happening, and people are using it as a basis to attack him so that they can promote this shifting assault narrative. I keep hearing there's a special place in hell for women like me who don't believe every single other woman completely uncritically without asking any questions or having any skeptical doubts; but I think maybe there's a special place in hell a little bit further underneath me for the people who would use the death of a man's child and spouse against him in this context.

[Tahlvin]

That was a good article.

[FlameBlade]

One of interesting points was that Obama administration had insane vetting procedures that everyone who worked for Obama had to be vetted thoroughly because this was the first black man in the White House. That meant VP picks had to be scoured at every possible point. Of course, entirely possible that the record was not found, but you have to wonder.

[Phoebe]

Katha Pollitt gets real about how much damage this BS Reade story has done to actual assault victims. It's tragic. https://www.thenation.com/article/polit ... legations/

Biden was never going down for this, but the whole #metoo movement was damaged in the process just as hoped for, and Trump was rendered even more politically immune to the many allegations he has assaulted people. Obvious playbook: strawman the feminist argument as a super simplistic "believeallwomen", push forward a woman whose unbelievable shifting-sands story gets no purchase with most people; use that reaction to discredit the whole movement to empower assault survivors. If Biden gets dinged in the process, fine, but the real goal here was to destroy #metoo. Good job, Berniebro media writers who pushed this as their first action in support of survivors.

There's no pleasure in any of the story, no schadenfreude, no grim satisfaction; there is only despair over an easily predicted defeat that will linger in our poisoned culture. But at least it's nice to know that a serious person's bullshit detector was set off by the same sentence that mine was from day one. As soon as you read that, you know you're dealing with a person who isn't firing on all cylinders and something really weird is happening. Time to back off. But people just had to push. And she's also 100% right about the obligation people have to vote for Biden, unless for some reason it turns out that he too is an anti-democratic dictator wannabe.

[poorpete]

I feel, at this point, the only reason Kamala Harris won't be the VP is if vetting has found something disqualifying. Only negatives, that she doesn't have the progressive bonafides to unite the left, and that she's not from a swing-state, aren't enough. We'll see how the next month or two goes, but I'd be very surprised if this changes. Then again, a few month ago, I was convinced Liz Warren was the best and clear choice...

Big win for LGBT today at the Supreme Court. I remember back after the shock of the 2016 election, how a gay friend of mine was worried about their rights being taken away. I told her that what she has that others like immigrants don't have, is gay rights are constitutionally protected. Those rights are the most difficult to override. But I get it. At that time I was even worried about my own rights, and as a straight white cis male I am the most protected class. But, almost four years later the court solidified gay and transgender legal protection! Thank Goodness.

[Tahlvin]

[akiva]

I think that the fact that Harris was a prosecutor is going to be a serious impediment to her getting the VP slot.

[Kyle]

[Phoebe]

It shouldn't, sadly. She was terrific. But Val Demings was what, police chief or sheriff? Imo it makes her even better for this time.

[Mike]

I really like Elizabeth Warren, but I also think having two white septuagenarians on the ticket is not the best look. I'll still vote for them, but they could do better.

Harris would have been a good balance, but I agree that her prosecutor history was already troublesome and is now untenable. I love Stacy Abrams and think she is eminently qualified, but I think she's too scary to the powers that be.

I have no clue how it will all go down; I just hope Donald Trump is not president after January 20th.

[Interesting that Texas's inauguration day is celebrated a day early on Robert E. Lee's birthday, which again is a Texas holiday called Confederate Heroes Day. 12 southern states recognize Confederate Heroes Day or Confederate Memorial Day, and Texas is one of 5 that have it as an official civil paid holiday.]

[Phoebe]

I have to ask what she did as prosecutor that was troubling? I have yet to see it. She was my candidate back in the day of the primary, and I heard a lot of attempts to smear her record as a prosecutor, so I went and read all the cases at issue and talk to my in-house counsel about it, and there is no problem with her record as prosecutor that I'm aware of so far unless something new has come out.

[Mike]

Well, your stated approach to the subject is that you've done extensive research which proves to your satisfaction that Harris has nothing troubling in her past and there is nothing that will convince you otherwise short of newly uncovered evidence. Therefore, as I have nothing new, we will just agree to disagree. For me there is enough evidence of things like knowingly allowing the withholding of evidence (or at the very least actively defending said withholding), and pushing regressive policies like punishing parents for their kids' transgressions, etc, to categorize it as "troublesome". Which I did.

On the other hand, she is also on record as no longer standing behind most of those troublesome pieces and in fact actively recommending more progressive actions as a senator and as a presidential candidate. I like her and would have been happy with her as the Democratic nominee, but her history as a prosecutor has caused trouble for her in the past and would have continued to be something she was constantly addressing. And now with the huge strides made by the Black Lives Matter movement and others, and the accompanying change in the national attitude and conversation, her troubles with her history, whether justified or not, would have been (will be?) greatly amplified. I don't think the Biden campaign is brave enough to risk that.