Quote (IceMage @ Apr 27 2020 02:17pm)
Alright... having now read the story, this is pretty bad.
It won't change my vote of course, but based on the evidence so far, this accusation has real credibility. Although Biden's lack of a history of other sexual assault claims definitely helps him, as well as the testimony of others who worked for him at the time.
To beat the dead horse of comparing it to the Kavanaugh hearings, we never even had evidence Ford had met Kavanaugh in her life let alone contemporary verifiable-but-hearsay records of any kind to corroborate it like the Larry King tape here, and not even the fairly minimum bar of hearsay corroboration by someone who says they heard it at the time, like the {several} witnesses here. And Kavanaugh was swamped with the distraction of many hoax bandwagon jumpers while having the squeakiest reputation possible prior to that, whereas Joe Biden had an entire website devoted to him groping people a year before this even came out (
http://joebiden.info/ is a banned link on several social media platforms)
Sure in an era of partisanship and team sports its easy for me to say I believe my teams and don't believe the others. And its easy for accusations of hypocrisy in both directions for and by those that say the same. But objectively, the facts and evidence are
here that weren't
there, all the major causes for doubt that sprung up aside (We haven't examined Reade's life under a microscope, so I don't think stuff like Ford's fear of flying / house renting / ex boyfriend credit card / polygraph coaching are fair comparisons without similar muckraking on Reade)
I mean at a distance, we have proof with these allegations that Reade and her friends aren't making it all up right now, and that she's said something similar for decades. That's big. Because with Ford's allegation, it could not only be explained by her and Monica McLean making the whole thing up together, but we even knew the timeline of when they were penning the accusation together at that beach house.
I really don't see how this can all get swept under the rug here. There are some plausible cynical plays, like what if democratic activists try to poison the well by staging fake rape accusation pile-ons against Biden just to get them discredited? Okay, that's a loony conspiracy theory and far-fetched, but its the kind of desperate action he'd need right now. Strategically, I stand by my analysis that the previously unthinkable scenario where either Joe Biden willingly withdraws from the race, or his endorsements are withdrawn, and the DNC goes to a brokered convention with {any outcome other than Joe}, is looking more and more plausible.
This post was edited by Goomshill on Apr 27 2020 01:30pm