The Democrats' Woman Problem

Have you noticed that no one, and I mean no one on the left or the right has come out and said, in a time of coronavirus: I wish Hillary were president.

I like to imagine, in optimistic moments, that no one was really fooled by the incompetent fraud named Hillary Rodham Clinton. When the dowager duchess of Chappaqua yesterday declared her support for sexual predator Joe Biden, the stories were all about the fact that hypocrisy is her middle name. She had been there and done that, for her sexual predator of a husband. And she was rewarded richly for it.

America’s left will never have any credibility on the subject of sexual harassment until it comes to terms with its disgraceful dereliction in supporting Bill Clinton and in rewarding the one person who defending him the most fiercely: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As it happens, Democrats tend to come together when they need to join forces. Even if the cause is appalling, the party loyalty is admirable. Democrats seem not to attract turncoats like Mitt Romney.

When it comes to Tara Reade and her accusations against Joe Biden, we must note that members of the more radical, more socialist left, led by one Nathan Robinson, have been all over the Reade story. While the chickenshit senator from Vermont falls in line, Robinson and his ilk from Current Affairs have been on the case. And have kept the story alive. 

If this were only a right vs. left story it would never have had the legs that it has. Attacks on Biden from the left have kept the story alive.

And, let’s not forget. Mainstream media reporters, in all of their interviews with senile old Joe, have never once asked him about Tara Reade's allegations. Speaking of hypocrisy and corruption. By now, Reade’s allegations have been corroborated by several people, even by her own mother, in a call to Larry King that was more or less contemporaneous with the event.

So now we have the high priestess of impotent rage, one Rebecca Traister, who manages to offer something resembling a sane and rational analysis of the Biden trap. Surely, she is right. If Biden chooses a female vice presidential candidate, the woman will be obliged to offer up her full- throated support for an accused rapist. How will this affect her credibility, and the moral basis for the feminist cause? 

Does Traister somehow wish that Biden becomes so senile that he will feel obliged to resign from the presidency, thereby creating the first woman president, by an act of succession?

Of course, the feminist cause has long since compromised its moral position, by its support for the Clintons. But, don’t tell Traister and her comrades.

So, examine her thought:

And part of what’s sickeningly clear is that if Biden remains the Democratic nominee, whichever woman gets the nod to be his running mate will wind up drinking from a poisoned chalice. Because the promise to choose a woman ensures that whoever she is, she will be forced to answer — over and over again — for Biden’s treatment of other women, including the serious allegations of assault leveled by Tara Reade.

Of course, zany feminists like Traister are so consumed by their hatred of Donald Trump that they would vote for a raccoon, if it would protect them from more Trump. One does not like to use the word hysterical when defining women-- one retains a modicum of decorum-- but the notion that the Trump presidency has or will lead to a “cataclysmic collapse of our environment, etc.” is ridiculously hyperbolic. At the least, it helps Traister retain her position as ranter-in-chief of the feminist left. Girl's got to make a living, don't you think?

But now that he is the presumptive choice, he may in fact be the only presidential bulwark against Donald Trump, who is both murderous and incompetent and whose reelection would lead to further cataclysmic collapse of our environment, health-care system, courts, and democracy, with fatal results that will redound more negatively to women than to men and most negatively of all to women with the fewest resources. In the fight to prevent this, Biden and his campaign will be calling on women — especially the women who have challenged him in the past, including on feminist grounds — to help him build support by rallying other women around him. That rallying will now have to entail somehow papering over the disgust and dismay provoked by multiple allegations of inappropriate touching and alleged assault made against yet another would-be president.

As it happens, any woman who supports Biden will find herself charged with hypocrisy, not to mention with enabling a sexual predator, a man who has been credibly accused of digital rape:

Yet in putting themselves forward as subsidiaries to Biden, in accepting an invitation that he might extend, or even in voicing their support for his campaign, these women wind up imperiling themselves by getting tied to him and the mess of his historical shortcomings, often on exactly the issues that have driven them into politics. In fact, they are quite likely to have their own history of righteous advocacy held up against them, used to make them look like hypocrites for agreeing to be on a ticket with a man who has been credibly accused of behavior they have aggressively condemned, and as sops to a system that they are in fact working hard to change.

Think of it: women who support Biden will look like hypocrites. In truth, the women who supported Bill Clinton and his chief enabler were also hypocrites. And yet, it took a Biden to bring feminists to their senses and to make them recognize that when you have two sets of rules, one for your allies and one for your enemies, you are dividing the country against itself.

Even those women will still be asked about Reade — Amy Klobuchar and Gretchen Whitmer, both reportedly on his shortlist, have already been asked about it — and any willingness to defend him or shield him from this story will leave them vulnerable to being held responsible for the misdeeds of the mediocre man to whom they will now be publicly bound.

Then, if Biden chooses a woman vice presidential candidate, Traister opines, the world will blame her for his loss. This is patently untrue, even absurd. Given that senile old Joe shows manifest signs of mental deterioration, the blame for an eventual loss will not fall on his vice presidential candidate:

And make no mistake, if Biden loses, regardless of his running mate, even as feminists are being criticized for hypocrisy in not condemning him more swiftly, it will also be feminists and women who are blamed for his loss, for encouraging an environment in which claims of sexual harm are taken seriously enough to damage a politician.

So, Traister concludes on a pessimistic, but totally fair note. It’s one of those: you made your bed, now lie in it. The feministocracy has a larger problem than Joe Biden. It has a Clinton problem. And until it rids itself of that, its flagrant and misogynistic hypocrisy will be on public display.

But it’s near impossible to imagine prominent Democratic women being able to give voice to this and still wind up with any sway within a potential Biden administration. So as we move closer to the abyss, remember that plenty of Women never wanted to be here, and now that we are, have no good choices in front of us.