If not for the lionization of Bill Clinton, it's hard to imagine how President Trump survived the Access Hollywood tape, combined with the allegations that accompanied it of unwanted kissing and groping. Lucky for him, he was running against Hillary Clinton. He brought Paula Jones, the woman who credibly accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment, and Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who credibly accused him of rape, to a predebate press conference and repeatedly deflected Hillary Clinton's barbs about the Access Hollywood tape by blasting her husband's conduct and her complicity therein.

Three in 5 voters polled by CNN said that Trump's debate performance exceeded their expectations, while just 2 in 5 said that Hillary Clinton's did. Thanks to her husband's malfeasance, thrust back into the news, and then the James Comey letter, her nearly 5-point lead over Trump had vanished to barely a point by the beginning of November. The rest is history.

Clinton's loss should have given Democrats the opportunity to wash their hands of the Clintons' sins. For a moment, it looked as though they had done so. Without Hillary Clinton's coronation, the #MeToo moment was finally allowed to take down former Clinton cronies like Harvey Weinstein. And when presented the opportunity to choose principles over politics, Democrats did the right thing by sacrificing the promising career of Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat.

But then Brett Kavanaugh happened. He was supposed to be the conciliatory option to replace Anthony Kennedy — a successor hand-picked by the retiring Supreme Court justice to preserve his more moderate legacy. Democrats could not accept even him, prompting their unquestioning embrace of uncorroborated and then increasingly nonsensical sexual assault allegations.

The Julie Swetnick allegation, heralded by convicted felon and pathological liar Michael Avenatti, was dead on arrival; the Deborah Ramirez allegation was denied by every other person supposedly in the room when Kavanaugh allegedly showed her his privates. Only Christine Blasey Ford had a veneer of earnestness, yet even in her case, every single person she said had been present at the party she described, including her close friend, denies ever being at such an event. Nor could she remember the precise year or the location where the incident had supposedly happened. In short, no one could place Ford and Kavanaugh in the same place at the same time at any point in their lives. What's more, Kavanaugh possessed enough evidence of his teenage activities to make the claim appear seriously doubtful.

At its outset, the #MeToo movement established a renewed understanding that for far too long, society has wrongly silenced or ignored victims of sexual misconduct. The nation readily embraced the idea that social consequences were in order where allegations were credible, even if they couldn't be proven to the taxing standards of criminal courts.

But Democrats blew up this common-sense conclusion with Kavanaugh's case, arguing that an allegation could be definitive proof in and of itself. They tried to use #MeToo as cover for their usual party political chicanery.

Democrats are now reaping what they've sown. A dubious eleventh-hour allegation has been raised against Joe Biden just when he has the party's nomination in hand. Tara Reade, a Putin-loving Bernie Sanders supporter, went to fringe left-wing outlets claiming that Biden had assaulted her when she was a staffer in his Senate office more than two decades ago. Reade has dramatically shifted her story throughout the years, and the corroborating evidence is limited to one friend who says Reade told her about the assault at the time, another who said Reade claimed Biden touched her inappropriately in 2008, and her brother, who has vaguely corroborated the account to left-wing reporters. No one working at Biden's office at the time has corroborated any element of the story, and there are no witnesses.

So is this allegation worth investigating? Absolutely. But it lacks the evidence necessary to believe it, and it should be shelved unless that evidence does materialize. This is the sensible standard, yet it's certainly not the one Democrats embraced when on their own witch hunt in September 2018.

This leaves Biden and his allies in an untenable position. After suffering in 2016 for their soft-glove treatment of Bill Clinton, they overcorrected to weaponize even the sketchiest sexual assault allegations for political purposes. In the end, they hurt the credibility of real victims and perhaps also of their own 2020 nominee.