NYT’s Goldberg: No Hypocrisy in Supporting Biden and Not Kavanaugh

Feminists from Jessica Valenti to the Washington Post’s Elizabeth Bruenig are finally beginning to see that supporting Joe Biden through his sexual assault scandal means unraveling everything the #MeToo movement was supposed to be about. Given a choice between admitting that maybe we shouldn’t actually believe ALL women automatically and, on the other hand, turning their backs on Biden, these women have chosen to stick with the tenets of the movement. They don’t want the nasty specter of due process creeping back into sexual assault allegations, and they certainly don’t want to admit that they went a little overboard when Brett Kavanaugh was taking his turn in the barrel. As much as we might disagree with these women, they at least have the courage of their convictions.

The same can’t be said for all feminists. The same can’t be said for almost any elected Democrats. And it certainly can’t be said for the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg. In a new column on Tuesday, Goldberg tried her damnedest to make a laughable case: That if Christine Blasey Ford had been as unreliable as Tara Reade, Democrats would have never rallied behind her.

Okay, Michelle. Let’s hear it.

“Commentators on the left and right have compared Reade to Blasey, usually to accuse mainstream Democrats of hypocrisy,” Goldberg writes. “Democrats, the argument goes, supported a movement whose slogan is ‘Believe women,’ and yet many are unconvinced by this particular woman. Checkmate, libs!

“But Democrats are not being asked to hold themselves to the same standard they apply to others. They would never have the audacity to demand that their political opponents act on a story with as many ambiguities as Reade’s,” she argues.

All right, pause the tape.

First of all, Democrats not only would have the “audacity” to demand such a thing, that’s exactly what they did. Blasey Ford had absolutely no evidence that she ever attended a party with Kavanaugh in the early 1980s, much less that anything happened at that party that would disqualify Kavanaugh from taking the Supreme Court bench. She couldn’t even nail down the party to a specific year. She never mentioned any such assault until many, many years later. She never, until Kavanaugh was nominated for the Supreme Court, identified him as her attacker. The list of holes in Blasey Ford’s story is at least as long as those in Reade’s. Reade can, after all, at least prove that she once knew Joe Biden.

Second, Goldberg undermines her own argument in rapid fashion.

Her entire column flip-flops between two extremes: Poking holes in Reade’s allegations against Biden and then admitting that the holes she pokes don’t mean that Reade’s story is untrue. Um. Well, Michelle. Then if you’re supporting Biden and calling Reade a liar (and insisting to this day that Democrats did the right thing when it came to Kavanaugh), then you are indeed a hypocrite of the highest order.

Checkmate, libs, indeed.