Key Points: Last week, Tara Reade – a former Biden staffer – came forward with her story of allegedly being sexually assaulted by the former Delaware Senator in 1993.

Reade approached Times Up, the legal arm of the #MeToo movement, but the organization declined to represent her against Joe Biden.

Tara is the latest in a long line of women accusing Biden of inappropriate contact. However, like the others – as well as numerous humiliating gaffes this election cycle – nothing seems to stick to the former VP. This is primarily a consequence of the way he’s covered by the liberal media.

Early in the Democratic primaries – sometime around November or December – I remember writing about “Teflon” Joe Biden’s imperviousness to negative headlines and embarrassing gaffes, each of which would single-handedly sink most campaigns. Of course, back then, I was talking about poor debate performances and Joe’s ability never to own the more unfortunate moments of his legislative past.

For the last week, it’s become abundantly clear that there’s more to Biden’s ability to withstand controversy than the slippery charisma of a lifelong politician.

A former staffer named Tara Reade came forward (or was allowed to finally come forward), alleging that in 1993, she was sexually assaulted by the then-Senator of Delaware. The media’s silence regarding the allegations was deafening. The major news outlets ignored the story entirely.

2020 Presidential Election – Joe Biden (+140)

Heavy Lifting

Before I get into the absurd levels of hypocrisy and “journalistic malpractice” — if that’s even a real term — displayed by the news media and celebrity (self-described) activists over the course of the past week, I have to admit: the job that establishment strategists and pundits are doing, keeping Biden’s campaign afloat in the face of agonizingly apparent cognitive decline is awe-inspiring.

The poor guy can barely answer a question anymore with any level of coherence. Every time I write about Joe, there are two or three new clips circulating highlighting bizarre malfunctions on live broadcasts.

Watch Anderson Cooper try and play it cool during this beauty:

I’m not trying to pick on the guy, but I’ve never seen (or read about) anything like this in my life. The Democratic Party is doing everything in its power to nominate a person who can longer finish a thought. Half the time, he takes out note cards and tries to read pre-prepared answers – which itself has become a visible challenge.

I firmly believe that the Democrats only have plans for Joe up until the national convention in July. The donors need to stop Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination; after that, party elites can choose whomever they please.

For the entire primary, they’ve used the rest of the field, the news media, and social media influencers, strategists, and legions of bots as chess pieces, maneuvering them around the board as necessary.

Buttigieg did his job in slowing Bernie’s momentum out of the gate;

Mayor Pete, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bloomberg strategically dropped out to maximize Biden’s success on Super Tuesday;

and Elizabeth Warren stuck around for a few days longer so she could split the progressive vote and stop Sanders from winning Massachusetts. Then she never endorsed her so-called “close friend,” with whom she most closely agreed with on policies.

What makes the whole operation so remarkable is that they’re still pretending like Joe Biden is their choice for President of the United States. Like good soldiers, they all ignore what they must be seeing and experiencing on a day-to-day basis – the herculean undertaking that is minimizing the former VP’s exposure to the public and managing every second of footage that’s released.

Surrogates, think tank strategists, and pundits are all willing to expose themselves as con artists, knowing how their quotes and sound bites will be referenced later when the true behind-the-scenes story of the of this campaign is told someday.

The establishment machine has pulled off one of the great “smoke and mirrors” game plans in the history of electoral politics – the best since George W, Karl Rove, and “hanging chads” stole the 2000 election from Gore. They have done all the heavy lifting for a candidate that doesn’t know where he is much of the time.

Joe Biden’s candidacy will be worth studying for political betting handicappers. This primary has proven that when the establishment donor class encounters a threat to the status quo, they can coordinate a PR campaign capable of getting a corpse nominated.

Three of the main ingredients are: “Earned Media;”

Ignoring inconvenient narratives;

and, running defense whenever a story can’t be ignored.

The Tara Reade story has shone a blinding light on those last two.

Tara Reade’s Treatment

It wasn’t surprising when the liberal media shielded the public from Joe Biden’s deteriorating conversational ability. Their networks, newspapers, and websites are owned by billionaires who would sooner die than pay taxes and funded by advertising dollars from insurance and pharmaceutical companies – the industries with the most to lose from Medicare for All. Plus, Biden is a powerful DC insider with lots of influential friends; nobody on the Hill wants to see him humiliated.

However, I am shocked by some of the responses to Tara Reade’s accusations. As a general rule, I approach everything uttered by modern media outlets with a heavy dose of cynicism. That said, I still expected more liberals to prioritize their moral obligations towards the #MeToo movement above petty political affiliations.

In hindsight, I should have known better; Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Jeffrey Epstein have been accepted in these circles despite well-known offenses towards women for decades.

One year ago, NPR.com published an article titled, Joe Biden Is Democrats’ Past, But New Allegations Mean He Might Not Be Their Future. The piece, written by Ron Elving, delves into a pair of accusations brought forward by two women, each with their own story of being touched inappropriately by Obama’s Vice President.

It was Biden’s response to Lucy Flores (one of the two accusers), in which he said that “not once,” had the former Senator acted inappropriately towards women over a several-decades-long political career.

An Intercept article explains:

After she saw an episode of the ABC show “The View,” in which most of the panelists stood up for Biden and attacked Flores as politically motivated, Reade decided that she had no choice but to come forward and support Flores. She gave an interview to a local reporter, describing several instances in which Biden had behaved similarly toward her, inappropriately touching her during her early-’90s tenure in his Senate office. In that first interview, she decided to tell a piece of the story, she said, that matched what had happened to Flores — plus, she had filed a contemporaneous complaint, and there were witnesses, so she considered the allegation bulletproof.

The accusations of being a Russian asset, working to derail Biden’s candidacy on behalf of Vladimir Putin, were levied at Reade after that first interview; she contemplated staying silent.

Instead, Tara approached Time’s Up, an organization created in the wake of the #MeToo movement, to supply legal help to survivors of sexual misconduct/abuse. After a series of conversations and meetings, Time’s Up declined to take up her case, claiming that, “no assistance could be provided because Biden was a candidate for federal office, and assisting a case against him, Time’s Up said, could jeopardize the organization’s nonprofit status.”

This is critical to the story, because one of the main questions Joe Biden defenders always ask is, “why is she just coming forward now?” The timing, they assert, is evidence that Reade’s allegations are a salacious attempt to sink the Democratic frontrunner’s candidacy.

To Win Democratic Nomination – Joe Biden (-450)

Media Silence

On March 26, Tara Reade gave a long-form interview on Katie Halper’s podcast, in which she gave a detailed description of her alleged sexual assault perpetrated by then-Senator Biden in 1993.

Only two people were in the room that day, but Reade has corroborating witnesses who she told about the incident shortly after it happened, the paperwork from the formal complaint she logged, and circumstantial evidence of being retaliated against, ultimately costing the accuser her job.

Online, DNC loyalists openly questioned the validity of Reade’s story. The same craven personalities who invoked the phrase, “believe women” — meant to apply specifically to cases of sexual assault – earlier in the primaries when Elizabeth Warren made the laughable claim that Bernie Sanders said “a woman can’t win the presidential election, were suddenly comfortable contradicting that ethos.

Not only did the social media staff cast doubt on Reade’s story, they once again accused her of being a Russian asset. The army of surrogates and influencers found every blog post and story from her past that might be leveraged to attack her character and reliability. They literally engaged in every behavior, usually attributed to abusers.

Even Hillary Clinton, the great feminist icon – since 2016 – dismissed the claim saying, “We can pick apart anybody,” to PEOPLE magazine. “I mean, that’s a great spectator sport.”

“But this man who’s there in the Oval Office right now poses a clear and present danger to the future of the United States,” Clinton added, referring to President Donald Trump. “So, get over it.”

As for the news media, they ignored the accusation altogether. An article for Reason noted:

Reade’s story has garnered some coverage elsewhere, most noticeably from The Hill and The Intercept. Some left-leaning news sites—The Huffington Post, Vox—have written about it, and of course, conservative media are all over the story. But the biggest mainstream print and TV outlets are, at present, silent. I am not the only one to notice this. The Columbia Journalism Review notes that “media outlets on both the left and the right have covered Reade’s claim, yet mainstream news organizations have mostly avoided it.”

Compare the response to Tara’s story to how left-leaning outlets covered the accusations made against Justice Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford. The same voices that have either been silent or dismissive of Reade last week were the most outraged supporters of Ford. Back then, they were still “believing women.”

The Cost of Exposing Hypocricies

Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign could only exist in today’s media environment. Only over the course of the most recent two election cycles have we been living in a post-truth world. That’s not to say that politicians used, to be honest – they’ve always been liars – but, in the past, journalists would attempt to discover and report the objective reality of a situation or event.

Today, presenting the news is a team sport. The liberal outlets (MSNBC, CNN, NY Times) only do in-depth reporting on stories with the potential to harm conservatives or benefit the Democratic Party. Fox News and other GOP-friendly platforms approach journalism the same skewed way, only for the other side.

Americans are used to biased, unreliable news presenters, but nothing does more to erode trust than hypocrisy. The way establishment Dems and their supporters reacted to Tara Reade’s allegations (if they acknowledged them at all) is an extreme example of the liberal media only subscribing to progressive issues of race and sex when they can be weaponized against enemies. When the perpetrator is one of their own, the “woke” icons became the victim-blamers they’ve targeted since 2016.

I still think the Democratic establishment and their media allies will successfully deliver Joe Biden to the nomination. There’s only so much a candidate like Bernie Sanders can do when the entire machine is focused against you. If the major news outlets haven’t mentioned Biden’s sexual assault accusations yet, they’re never going to – at least not until after the election.

But, make no mistake; this political decision will cost the Democrats. They’ve publicly ceded the moral high ground and exposed the lack of sincerity behind their ally-ship. Identity politics and the #MeToo movement weren’t about helping victims or providing justice; they were about power.

Now that the curtain has been pulled back, neoliberals are going to need some new tricks. Next time they’re swarming some Republican Congressman over the latest accusation, conservatives will point back to the Democratic primaries and Tara Reade and scoff at the feigned outrage.

That’s one hyper-potent political weapon to surrender on behalf of a 77-year-old Joe Biden, showing signs of dementia or senility, and with at least eight other similar allegations out there.