By Dan McLaughlin
Monday, March 30, 2020
They never learn, do they? Democrats and their pundit
class have a long habit of promoting standards for others that their own side
can’t abide living under. Somehow, they make arguments year in and year out
that come back to bite them, and they never pick up on the slightest clue that
this will, predictably, happen again.
So it is — now that the presumptive Democratic
presidential nominee, Joe Biden, has been accused
by a woman who worked for him in the early 1990s of sexually assaulting her.
If we apply the standards
that Republicans and conservatives have advocated for these kinds of
things, the question we would ask right now is whether the evidence shows the
allegation to be credible. We can return to that another day. Because under the
“Believe All Women” standard promoted by Democrats, liberals, and progressives,
Biden should be simply assumed to be guilty. Case closed. David Harsanyi has a
selection of those arguments
from the Kavanaugh hearings, including from Biden himself.
The examples he lists are not hyperbole; they are what
Democrats argued with straight faces as recently as a year and a half ago. They
made those arguments loudly, insistently, repeatedly, emotionally, sometimes
with tears in their eyes and voices quivering with rage. They argued them in
congressional hearings and on the campaign trail, tweeted them and memed them.
And those Democrats who even bother to notice Tara Reade’s allegations against
Biden will now be forced to explain that they never really meant any of it.
To all of them, I now say: Not only did we warn you and warn you and warn you
that this exact thing would happen to you sooner or later (and probably
sooner), but it has happened to you before and you learned absolutely
nothing from it.
Those of you old enough to remember the Clarence Thomas
hearings will recall that a major part of the argument for believing Anita
Hill’s sexual-harassment charges against Thomas was this same line of
reasoning. We were told that men “just don’t get it” and cannot and should not
attempt to evaluate the facts and testimony to judge whether Hill was telling
the truth. This you-must-believe, you-may-not-question stance became a
centerpiece of the Democrats’ 1992 “Year of the Woman” Senate campaigns. There
were reasons that they took this tack: Polls at the time by Gallup and the New
York Times/CBS News showed that more voters believed Thomas than Hill, and
voters throughout the hearings favored his confirmation by a two-to-one margin.
The cleanest way to avoid discussion of the credibility of your witnesses is to
argue that their credibility is irrelevant.
This happens nowhere else in politics or the law. We
should, of course, listen to every accuser who comes forward with a
claim of sexual assault or abuse, and too often as a society we have failed to
do so. We should listen to Reade, just as we should listen to the women who
have made accusations against Donald Trump and other political figures of both
parties. But in any accusation of misconduct (sexual or otherwise), what
matters most is whether it is true or not. In the civil and criminal law, that
means we have the protections of due process. In politics, it sometimes means
making judgments about the facts without the benefit of a legal proceeding. But
the duty to take the truth seriously and apply our common sense in finding the
truth is no less important.
Lots of people on the right argued at the time that the
“thou shalt not question Anita Hill” edict was an insane standard that would
sting the Democrats at the next opportunity. Democrats, recklessly disregarding
all these warnings, not only persisted in making the argument but also went
ahead and nominated a notorious Lothario for president in 1992. Predictably
enough, early in Bill Clinton’s presidential term, he was sued for sexual
harassment by Paula Jones, a former subordinate in Arkansas. Kathleen Willey, a
Democratic supporter of Clinton’s, accused him of groping her in the Oval
Office. He was also accused, by Juanita Broaddrick, of rape.
The Paula Jones case eventually expanded to questions of
Clinton’s other workplace sexcapades, thanks to the liberal discovery rules of
civil litigation. That, in turn, led to the referral of the Monica Lewinsky
affair to yet another liberal innovation — the independent counsel. The
independent counsel was, itself, a Carter-era Democratic creation. In
1988, Justice Antonin Scalia tried to warn liberals of precisely why it was
dangerous, with its presumption in favor of launching unaccountable
investigations. Not one of these events dented the absolute certainty of
liberal pundits and Democratic politicians in making deeply illiberal
arguments, so long as the targets were Republicans. All of them were shocked
when their own rules were forced on them during the Clinton presidency. The “believe
all women” standards went quiet for a long time, workplace
sexual harassment was shrugged off as “compartmentalized” from Clinton’s
presidency, and the independent-counsel statute was allowed to expire by
bipartisan consent in 1999.
But in the long term, Democrats learned nothing. When
presented with the chance to play the credibility-of-the-accuser-doesn’t-matter
card in pursuit of Kavanaugh, they took the same absolutist position all over
again. It didn’t take long to blow up in their faces, as the thirst for
corroborating allegations brought out people such as the bottom-feeding
attorney Michael Avenatti to push ludicrous gang-rape charges against Kavanaugh
that just proved his defenders’ point. Boxed in by their own standards,
Democratic senators actually read Avenatti’s nonsense into the Senate record
during the hearings. Republicans and conservatives warned them that they would
regret these standards the next time charges were leveled against one of their
own. It didn’t take long, as two
women came forward to publicly accuse Virginia lieutenant governor Justin
Fairfax of rape in mid-2019. Fairfax is still in office, and he plans to
run for governor, and his party may well fall in line behind him. Now an
accusation has been raised against the party’s presumptive presidential
nominee.
Will Democrats learn their lesson this time? Don’t bet on
it.
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