Will Joe Biden Live Up to His Own Principles?

According to Joe Biden, Joe Biden should step down under sexual-assault allegations.

In the midst of the Democrats’ campaign to deny Brett Kavanaugh confirmation to the Supreme Court, Lawfare’s editor in chief, Benjamin Wittes, took to the pages of The Atlantic to argue that traditional concepts of due process were not applicable under the circumstances. Justice, he wrote, was merely an “optical” consideration, and in this case, “Kavanaugh himself bears the burden of proof.”

This upending of liberal ideals had nothing to do with the veracity of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations — opaque, decades old, and unprovable — and everything to do with the accused party, upon whom, Wittes noted, we were about to “bestow . . . an immense honor that comes with great power.”

We don’t know if, in 1993, presidential hopeful Joe Biden sexually assaulted a woman named Tara Reade by pressing her up against a wall and digitally penetrating her without her consent. But under Wittes’s standard, it shouldn’t matter. Indeed, that we do not know is all that we need to know. No person in America is accorded a more “immense honor” or more “great power” than the president. Surely, as with Kavanaugh, the existence of the accusation is disqualifying?

Apparently not, for ideals of justice seem to be quite malleable these days. Journalistic norms, too. The same media that relayed every unsubstantiated and tawdry rumor during the Kavanaugh confirmation, and that happily transmitted the Michael Avenatti–produced gang-rape smear, is treating Reade’s story quite differently. Why, we might ask, isn’t Reade receiving the same coverage as E. Jean Carroll, a woman who accused Donald Trump of assaulting her in 1995 or 1996 at a Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan? Virtually every major news organization let Carroll tell her story. Reade has been trying to tell hers for decades. Believe women?

Indeed, to understand how to proceed, the media has only to take the advice of Biden, who two years ago argued that society had an obligation to presume that women who come forward with allegations of sexual assault should be believed irrespective of how flimsy that accusations may be: —>

Read the rest from David Harsanyi HERE.

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