RUTHFULLY YOURS

Democrats, especially people who identify as women and also identify as Democrats and especially people who identify as women and identify as Democrats and also identify as feminist, seem to believe that it is perfectly fine for men who identify as Democrats to assault and sexually harass women or otherwise take advantage of them.  This is a decades-old line of Democratic thinking, as there are now senior citizen Democratic women who still swoon over noted Democratic, er…Lotharios such as Sen Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).

Skipping through the decades to the present, there are the many Democratic women who not only excuse President Bill Clinton (D) despite all the solid proof of his sexual predatory behavior against women, but also defend him.  Most notable is his supposed injured wife, noted feminist Hillary Rodham Clinton, who dismissed the charges and allegations against her husband as “a vast right-wing conspiracy” in numerous public outings.  (What she thought in private might have been different.)  Incidentally, Hillary added Clinton to her name, not in 1975 when she married Bill, but years later to help her husband win re-election as governor of Arkansas.

Here’s how Bill Clinton explained it to Bruck:

When she came to me and said she wanted to change, I could see in her eyes that she had made the decision to do it. And I said, “I do not want you resenting me. I would a lot rather lose the election than lose you.” She said, “I’m not going anywhere.” I said, “I know, but I don’t want you to resent this for the rest of your life. You made this decision when you were a child. I like it. I approve of the decision. I don’t care about it.” And she said, “Look, Bill, we cannot—this is stupid! We shouldn’t lose the election over this issue. We shouldn’t run this risk. What if it’s one per cent of the vote? What if it’s two per cent? You might win or lose the election by two per cent.”

That was, Bruck wrote in 1994, an essential moment in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s transformation into a politician — the moment when “she surrendered the notion that she could do things in her unvarnished way; and she set about repackaging herself — changing her name, her appearance, and her public demeanor.

Well, okay, she’s his wife.  But then there is another rabid Clinton-supporter, Nina Burleigh, who, “for the uninitiated, is the reporter who infamously said she would be ‘happy to give [Bill Clinton] a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.’  Burleigh formerly was the White House correspondent for Time Magazine and covered the Clinton White House.”

Oh.  That’s Democratic feminism for you.

Even the mother — so to speak — of modern feminism, Gloria Steinem, still defends former president Bill Clinton, despite all the proof of his sexual attacks against women.

Gloria Steinem wrote an essay in 1998 which defended former US president Bill Clinton from accusations against sexual harassment.  Now that essay has come under scrutiny again, and the feminist has refused to apologise for what she wrote.  However, she does say that she wouldn’t write the same thing again.

Her essay had been titled ‘Feminists and the Clinton Question’.  Steinem refused to condemn Clinton over sexual harassment claims from former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones, who had sued him for summoning her to his hotel room.  Jones said that Clinton had touched her inappropriately an demanded that she perform oral sex on him. …

“The problem at the time was, the sexual harassment law was in danger,” Steinem said. “If Clinton had resigned, that would have endangered the law.”

Oh, again.  That twisted logic is as clear as the face masks worn to protect ourselves against Wuhan coronavirus-2019.

And so you have the precedent for understanding the logic that Democratic women — and men — are now using to support Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden.  Biden, who notoriously gives the phrase “hands on politician” a whole new meaning, has been publicly pawing at and fondling women of all ages and backgrounds for years.

So it should come as no surprise that modern Democratic women, the same women who were so eager to believe the fantasy ramblings, with absolutely no proof, against Supreme Court nominee and now Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, by the obviously disturbed psychologist Christine Blasey Ford, now support Biden.  Tarana Burke, one of the core founders of the #MeToo movement opposing sexual misbehavior, particularly in the media and entertainment professions, nevertheless justified her support of Biden in a twisted twitter thread.  Outrageously stating that she didn’t have “easy answers” (Oh? She wasn’t that murky about Kavanaugh and others), she defines the present charges against Biden as a “zero-sum game where no one wins” (Why wouldn’t women win against “outsized power dynamics”?), finally answering in her unease that “it hits at the heart of one of the most important elections of our lifetime.”  So Biden “should

demonstrate what it looks like to be both accountable and electable,” and boom! all is forgiven.

Read her convoluted reasoning in its entirety.

I took a moment away from work and movement-related issues to be present where I was needed as my family was affected with COVID. But, I know many of you are wondering about my “take” on the Tara Reade story. 1/14

My stance has never wavered: survivors have a right to speak their truth and to be given the space to heal. 2/14

The inconvenient truth is that this story is impacting us differently because it hits at the heart of one of the most important elections of our lifetime. And I hate to disappoint you but I don’t really have easy answers. 3/14

There are no perfect survivors. And no one, especially a presidential candidate, is beyond reproach. So where does that leave us? 4/14

In a just world, we’d have a transformative approach to dealing with claims of sexual violence where a survivor’s story is given fair consideration and they are made whole by a process that supports both accountability and healing. 5/14

This is doubly important when outsized power dynamics are involved. But, we don’t have that right now. 6/14

What we have now is a zero-sum game where absolutely no one wins, in part because most people weighing in at the moment don’t actually care about transforming a culture of sexual violence. 7/14