Had a conversation with someone about Biden some time ago. It wasn't mind-numbing, by far, but what I found interesting was how the conversation went re: the Reade allegation. The person says that they had been sexually assaulted at some point, themselves, and I believe that, but the way she went about trying to dismantle the Reade allegation for herself was... off? It was kind of a kludge because we repeatedly went back and forth with the hypothetical of her being truthful, but:
- She wanted to impugn her by pointing out that she hired a Republican lawyer that's donated to the Trump campaign (as if this matters for representation).
- She tried to make a distinction between sexual assault and rape, seemingly downplayed sexual assault (likened it to an ass grab versus the forced penetration entailed in rape), and didn't acknowledge that there were states (e.g. Texas) that made no such distinction.
- I had to tell her to let me finish as I explained why I could confirm that the allegation escalated to digital penetration, and then when she finally let me finish-- because she insisted otherwise-- she then talked about how the event allegedly happened in a usually crowded hall in the building and Biden wasn't one to stay late because he caught the train at 6.
- She kept questioning why she brought it up now, even though many of the alleged sex harassment/assault cases against Trump are comparably distant, time-wise.
- She also argued that, in the case that it happened, it was just one time and he may have given his life to God at any time afterwards or otherwise regretted it (I pointed out that he was always a self-avowed Catholic-- I didn't point out that he's pro-choice despite being a self-avowed Catholic).
- When I got to explaining that the bigger criticism has less to do with the allegation and how it's being treated by Biden and those around him, especially in light of Biden's past words, she qualified what I paraphrased Biden saying about believing women first with "to her" (as in, the allegation is true to her), and then when I insisted that he said that we need to take the essence of the allegation as true, she made "the essence" be that "she was assaulted" as opposed to "she was assaulted by Joe Biden" before conjecturing that she could have been drunk and mistook her assaulter.
I think my biggest issue was that if you can throw up all this reasonable counter-evidence for her claim, then there's no point in permitting the possibility that he may have in fact assaulted her, or even that she was assaulted in the first place at the time that she was.
My biggest takeaway was that it's not a good time to be a Democrat.