Editorial: Regarding Joe Biden and his accusers – plural…
By: Lisa M. Hayes – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
I think we need to get really clear about the bed we’ve made and get ready to lay down in it. Anyone who wants to get on the “she’s making it up” bandwagon is playing party politics of ugliest kind.
“Believe women.” Uncle Joe gave us those marching orders when the accusations were about someone else. We shouldn’t need an old white man to tell us to believe women but in a historically painful pattern of shaming and discrediting women who come forward, we prove over and over again, we still take our marching orders from old white men – So, Joe told us, “believe women” and we absolutely should.
I might have been tempted to want to not believe Tara Reade if her allegations were isolated. I might have wanted to believe the story was a republican manufactured distraction. I might have wanted to lean into the “good old Uncle Joe”, persona that was so comforting during the Obama days. However, even wanting to think Joe’s accuser is lying makes me complicit. We don’t get to only believe women when they are conveniently accusing the men of the “other side”.
We’ve all cringed a little watching Joe get a little too handsy in public with women who were visibly pulling away from him. We’ve all heard the excuse about the generational gap in understanding the difference between appropriate and not appropriate groping as we try to excuse him for things we see him doing.
To be clear, there is more than one accuser. In fact, there is a troubling number of them. Only Tara Reade has accused Joe Biden of sexual assault. However, more than a handful of other women have openly accused Biden of being sexually inappropriate or just downright creepy. You know, stuff like sniffing someone else’s hair. This isn’t exactly news and we don’t get to act like it is now for the sake of debate or moral outrage.
We knew who we were nominating and pretending like we didn’t doesn’t make it any less true. Joe Bidden’s track record with women is problematic and it always has been AND YET we nominated him anyway. We nominated Biden discounting a field of the most qualified women in the history of presidential politics.
And now we’re going to have to just swallow that reality like a bitter poisonous pill and get on with it because as painful as this is, we cannot just roll over in disgust and let Trump take another term.
I started compiling a list of things that have happened under the Trump administration that illustrate the reasons why he cannot have another term. It is so vast and so devasting it’s almost paralyzing to consider. The crimes against humanity have been too many to count. It never slows. The horrors of what this administration is capable of are unspeakable and our current daily reality paints the picture perfectly.
We have a President who is publicly encouraging armed militia to “liberate states” from the Governors trying to protect their population. This is, of course, is happening in the good old USA where Trump himself dismantled the pandemic protections that were previously in place. We’ve all but forgotten kids in cages, (yes, that’s still happening), because we’re just trying to survive another day.
So, to the Bernie or bust folks, please just don’t even bail on us now. You need to strongly consider pulling your heads out and going to the polling place to vote for the democratic nominee. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to think we’ve got to get a very wide margin on the count to overcome the Russian election tampering that is no doubt being encouraged by the current administration, just like it always has been. They bought and paid for him once and they’ll make every attempt to do it again. We can not sit this one out because we aren’t inspired by the pervert we’ve nominated.
At this juncture, voting for anyone but Biden doesn’t just put our democracy in jeopardy. It compromises our chances of survival – and yes, that means we have to vote for another misogynistic shriveled old man who touches women in ways he shouldn’t at will and has always gotten away with it.
The thought of it makes me sick, but I’d rather be nauseated than dead.
So, here we are Biden 2020 with whatever woman they decide to decorate the ticket with. God bless her and you know, God bless us all…
Lisa M. Hayes, Senior Editor of Confluence Daily.
