Is Biden another Franken(stein)? An inappropriate hugger or something far worse?
Al Franken was sacrificed to the #MeToo gods, his career gone in a blink of an eye, the Democratic zeal to respond forcefully to any allegations of impropriety by their own the counterpoint to the Republican adamant refusal to seriously investigate supposed crimes by a Supreme Court nominee or the rampant, persistent sexual wrongs of the President.
Every political impulse would say what is good for the Republican goose should be so for the Democrat presumptive nominee. That the possibility of allowing Donald Trump four more years of his special brand of perversion is too high a price to pay for retaining our own moral high ground.
But I know the answer is that when matters are the hardest, that is the moment of the true test of one's convictions. If we want to be better than our lesser selves, better than what we rail against, then we must give full weight to the charges of Ms. Reade. We must challenge the position of Mr. Biden as we did Justice Kavanaugh and as we wish we could the repulsively smug Mr. Trump.
Otherwise,we are no different from those Republicans we castigate for their moral failings. For it is our duty to search even for inconvenient truths.
4 comments:
You are right that what is “right is right,” no matter that we fall far to the left or what have we “left?”
EA
I appreciate your point but denying him the nomination guarantees four more years of trump and that would be a disaster for our country.
JP
I strongly disagree with this position and your article- you sound like the holier than thou NY Times
1. Biden was fully vetted to be vp- the lead lawyer announced that there were no issues of sexual harassment
2. This controversy is being used by trump as an equivalent to his molestation charge by 24 women
3. Bernie Sanders campaign is using this to discredit and get Bernie to be the nominee
4. Anne knows him personally even during the Ted Kennedy / Chris Dodds debauchery era- there was never any hint of Biden being involved in that type of inappropriate behavior. Yes he is a touchy- feely type but never a gropper
5 Biden request to search senate personnel records is another statement of not hiding anything
6 and lastly, your righteous morality is unjustified - Biden is a decent human being
Who should not be smeared by a disgruntled
Former employee and Bernie supporter
Sorry - you should not be piling on!
FCL
This says it all:
From Charles Pierce, in Esquire:
"In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, "And we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
"These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
"And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
"The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.
"Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.
Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now."
- Charles Pierce
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