The liberal media owes Brett Kavanaugh a major apology

Pundits and journalists on the left really want these allegations from former senate staffer Tara Reade against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to die. Their consternation as to these accusations, however, reveals how absurd so many of these allegations against powerful and not so powerful men have been. As flimsy as these allegations are, they are no flimsier than those of Christine Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, yet Kavanaugh’s reputation is still tarnished among leftist commentators, while Biden is their presidential nominee.

Columnist Michelle Goldberg, who is noted for her efforts to bolster the Me Too and Believe All Women movements, wrote in 2018 “[Kavanaugh’s] story shows, in lurid microcosm, how a certain class of men guard and perpetuate their privileges. Women who struggle ceaselessly to be smart enough, attractive enough, ambitious enough and likable enough have been playing a rigged game. As they realize that, their incandescent fury is remaking our politics. We’ll know things have changed when palling around with sexual abusers carries more stigma than being abused does.” This was in an editorial titled “Pigs all the way down.”

While that day has not yet come to pass, Goldberg seems relatively fine with Biden getting away with what he has been accused of. While she admits she’s no fan of Biden, and let’s face it, few are, her concern now is not that he was “palling around with abusers” as he ascended the ladder of leadership power. Nor is she wringing her hands that the milieu in which Biden launched and maintained his career was full of men who may have abused their power against women in their orbit. Given her years of work on this issue, it seems that should be her main issue. Somehow it just isn’t.

This week, Goldberg writes “No one, looking at what’s been reported about Reade and Biden, can claim to have more than a hunch about what happened, which is why, I suspect, a lot of mainstream feminists haven’t said much about it."

Yet somehow in 2018, Goldberg had the magical ability to Travel back in time to the 1980s to verify something that even Christina Blasey-Ford’s friends and family could not. And further, she concluded, based on these magical abilities, that all men are pigs. Her assertion was that even if Kavanaugh wasn’t guilty of what Blasey-Ford accused him of, he was guilty of being part of a culture that probably would have allowed it anyway.

Comparing the two statements, something just doesn’t fit. Kavanaugh was held to a standard of proving his own innocence against shaky memories, Biden isn’t. What changed? And in the intervening years, Biden has not been free from accusations of sexual misconduct, yet none of the same outlets that raised Kavanaugh’s supposed misconduct to the level of a federal crime have batted an eye about dismissing Reade’s contentions.

The New York Times went 19 long days before even reporting on the Biden allegation, and when they did, they had to stealth edit their own article, presumably because it revealed that Biden has been a “touchy-feely” guy for a long time. The NYT actually deleted this sentence: “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.”

In The Federalist, Emily Jashinsky points out the striking similarities between the Kavanaugh and Biden allegations. “The allegations are both decades old. Both are denied by the accused men. That does not render them false. It does, however, offer an instructive case study in media bias … [it’s] the kind of biased treatment conservatives receive regularly from the corporate media, which largely refuses to address the problem and instead insists its critics are dangerous fools.”

Jashinsky is right. Kavanaugh was eventually exonerated, but not until his life was completely turned upside down by a spectacle that would have made the townsfolk of Salem blush. Biden probably won’t ever face any cross examination for his decades-old allegations. Not in The New York Times, not in congress, not on the campaign trail, YouTube based though it may this year be.

The treatment of Kavanaugh, when compared and contrasted with the coverup of the Biden allegations, confirms what logical, rational observers have been saying for years—Kavanaugh got a raw deal, and the Me Too movement was always political and never about justice. It was a tool for the establishment. Now that it’s being used against the establishment it’s of no use, and useful idiots like Goldberg (and Biden for that matter) are being exposed.

This shows that the underpinnings of these movements were about the disruption of one power structure for another power structure. As those who made Blasey-Ford their cause celeb shift and court justice for Biden, it becomes clear that due process was always the thing missing from these movements. Goldberg is right when she says that there’s good reasons that mainstream feminists haven’t come out to support Reade.

It’s not that Reade’s story is flimsy, because lots of these stories have been flimsy, it’s not that she’s not creditable, because Believe All Women was never about credibility, it’s that Biden is the guy going up against Trump, and no leftist feminist worth her salt can advocate for the dismissal of the Democratic presidential nominee in a year when the going line is to “vote blue no matter who.”

So here’s an idea: if the entire liberal media establishment is going to provide cover for Joe Biden so that he can pursue the presidency without having to face a dubious allegation of misconduct, then perhaps they should issue an apology to Brett Kavanaugh for putting him through hell over virtually the same thing.