There should be some sober reassessment on the left in the wake of the Tara Reade accusations of a sexual assault by former Vice President Joe Biden back in the 1990s. Why? Let’s have Andrew Sullivan explain it:
The problem with defending due process in a case like Biden’s with respect to Tara Reade is that Biden himself, when it comes to allegations of sexual abuse and harassment, doesn’t believe in it. Perhaps in part to atone for his shabby treatment of Anita Hill, Biden was especially prominent in the Obama administration’s overhaul of Title IX treatment of claims of sexual discrimination and harassment on campus. You can listen to Biden’s strident speeches and rhetoric on this question and find not a single smidgen of concern with the rights of the accused. Men in college were to be regarded as guilty before being proven innocent, and stripped of basic rights in their self-defense.
Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen noted the consequences of Biden’s crusade in The New Yorkerlast year. “In recent years,” she wrote, “it has become commonplace to deny accused students access to the complaint, the evidence, the identities of witnesses, or the investigative report, and to forbid them from questioning complainants or witnesses … According to K.C. Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College and an expert on Title IX lawsuits, more than four hundred students accused of sexual misconduct since 2011 have sued their schools under federal or state laws — in many cases, for sex discrimination under Title IX. While many of the lawsuits are still ongoing, nearly half of the students who have sued have won favorable court rulings or have settled with the schools.”
On Friday’s Morning Joe, Biden laid out a simple process for judging him: Listen respectfully to Tara Reade, and then check for facts that prove or disprove her specific claim. The objective truth, Biden argued, is what matters. I agree with him. But this was emphatically not the standard Biden favored when judging men in college. If Biden were a student, under Biden rules, Reade could file a claim of assault, and Biden would have no right to know the specifics, the evidence provided, who was charging him, who was a witness, and no right to question the accuser. Apply the Biden standard for Biden, have woke college administrators decide the issue in private, and he’s toast.
And, not incidentally, reminiscent of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The FBI didn’t find any evidence that a sexual assault by Kavanaugh on Professor Ford had occurred, but the Left still cried for his nomination to be declined. Their outrage when Senator Collins (R-ME) voted to affirm has led Collins to be considered one of the most vulnerable Republican Senators up for re-election. Collins is, ironically, one of the least loyal Republican Senators to President Trump, at least when measured by FiveThirtyEight’s TrumpScore, which, for Collins, is currently at 66.9%. Interestingly, this is over the two Congresses that have come into being while Trump has occupied the Oval Office; her score is an astounding 43.2% for the current Congress. All the usual caveats that apply to TrumpScores, of course, apply.
Be that as it may, I found an associated thread in this seemingly unconnected story from WaPo on the aftermath of the recent & controversial Wisconsin elections:
But in the end, tens of thousands of mail ballots that arrived after the April 7 presidential primaries and spring elections were counted by local officials, a review by The Washington Post has found — the unexpected result of last-minute intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In Milwaukee and Madison alone, the state’s two largest cities, more than 10 percent of all votes counted, nearly 21,000 ballots, arrived by mail after April 7, according to data provided by local election officials.
The surprising outcome after warnings that many Wisconsinites would be disenfranchised amid the pandemic was the result of a largely unexamined aspect of the court’s decision that temporarily changed which ballots were counted. Because of the order, election officials for the first time tallied absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day, rather than just those received by then — underscoring the power of narrow court decisions to significantly shape which votes are counted.
The lesson here? Spectacular overreach by the left. The former case, of course, is far more important. Abandoning rock-ribbed liberal processes of evidence in favor of the cries of the wolf-pack reflected poorly on the left, even if they are successful in beating Collins. I have often said the ends never justifies the means, and now with Biden taking a beating over a sexual assault accusation for which there is no evidence but some timely reports in the media, which is little more than Professor Ford presented against Kavanaugh, it becomes a relevant question to ask whether gaining Collins’ seat is worth losing the Presidency, once again, to Trump.
I suspect many lefties will sputter at the question. But if you call it the karmic kickback for abandoning proven principles, I won’t argue against it.
Similarly, in retrospect the outrage over the Wisconsin decision in SCOTUS, while certainly earned in terms of running an election in the middle of a pandemic, does leave a patina of disgrace on the left’s intellectual shell for failing to note how the SCOTUS decision favored the left – in the end. I still think the election should have been delayed, but the left’s failure to discern the boost given to it by SCOTUS leaves them with egg on their face. That is important because, as the right often tries to portrays, it makes the intellectual left appear to be braying animals rather than the adults that most Americans hunger to have leading the nation.
That, in turn, delays the necessary destruction and reformation of the Republican Party.
Those who want to consider themselves to be part of the intellectual left need to take a break for some introspection. Not all on the left have fallen for these inadvertent traps, but those who did yelled the loudest – and thus have left their compatriots open to attack because of their foolishness. A little thoughtfulness beyond the tips of their nose would be welcome.
