TIME OUT

TIME OUT

Donald Trump is the worst president in my lifetime.

He is a pathological liar, over 18,000 during his presidency alone according to the data base maintained by  The Washington Post.

He is lazy, routinely showing up to work in the Oval Office at or after 11 a.m. because he spends most of his mornings, and large parts of his apparently inomniatic nights,  glued to the cable shows and his twitter feed.

He is immature, a man-child who thinks the puerile ripostes of a schoolyard bully deriding those who disagree render him clever or authentic.

And he is dangerous, the natural consequence of a narcissism that avoids hard study, expert input, or even facts that are at odds with whatever self-interest captures his (brief) attention span.

His wealth, never as great as his boasts, was generated in part through an estate tax evasion scheme that illegally shielded large amounts of his father's estate from federal tax, and as a businessman he regularly stiffed vendors and contractors, forcing lawsuits and delaying payments with bogus defenses.  After six bankruptcies, at which point New York banks would not touch him, he reportedly got in bed with Deutsche Bank and was thereafter funded in part by Russian oligarchs (which probably explains his love affair with Vladimir Putin).

And nothing changed after he was elected president.

Last year he tried to illegally bribe Ukraine's president by withholding appropriated military aid in exchange for a phony investigation of Joe Biden, and this year, he ignored early warnings of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the government he runs should have been testing, tracing and quarantining the recently infected back in February, moves that, had they occurred, could have mitigated the spread, he was instead telling all who would listen that it would go away "miraculously" when the weather warmed.  

Failing that, and once the pandemic took off, he disclaimed responsiblity, refused to wield the purchasing power he had under the Defense Production Act to commandeer business and industry into manufacturing needed protective gear, left it to the nation's governors to find supplies more or less on their own, and then speculated on cures, some of which lacked a sound medical basis (hyroxychloroquine) and others of which were just plain crazy (ingesting disinfectant) .  

Those state governors more like him, mini-Trumps as it were, have now decided to "re-open" their states without even meeting the standards set by the administration itself (14 days of declining cases), and the nation's economy is on life support as unemployment approaches Depression-era levels.  

Two stimulus packages have passed and been signed into law, but a third, which would help state and local governments whose balance sheets have been decimated, is on ice in McConnell's Senate as Republicans claim they are not willing to use pandemic relief to fund state pension plans.  In fact, however, no such demand is being made by the states; to the contrary,  their tax receipts have cratered and they need the federal cash merely to replace what the taxpayers, were they fully employed, would have provided.

Meanwhile, right-wing nut jobs are showing up armed and in cammo in Michigan, pretending their phallic accoutrement will cow state leaders into ignoring the science they themselves choose to disregard.  And on Friday, one of them shot a cop who ordered his sister to don a mask while in a Dollar Store in Flint.

This is America, circa May 2020.

Distraught. 

Divided.

And on edge.

Enough on its public policy plate to keep an army of competent government leaders busy on the one hand.

Bereft of such leadership at the top on the other.

Under the circumstances, this is not an ideal time for a sex scandal. 

But, mirabile dictu, one has emerged.

Joe Biden is now accused of having sexually assaulted an ex-aide, Tara Reade, in the halls of Washington, DC's capitol building sometime in 1993.  Last Friday, he calmly but expressly denied the allegation on MSNBC's Morning Joe in a seventeen minute interview with show host Mika Brzezinski.  

As we now know, any knee jerk dismissal of Reade's charge  given the passage of time is neither appropriate nor necessarily accurate.  For many reasons -- trauma,  fear of reprisal, embarassment, re-victimization -- victims often deep-six accounts of  assaults for years, or can't remember all the particular details once they decide to talk, and the fact that they have done so does not in itself render their reports false or malicious or vindictive or any of the other shibboleths routinely launched by those who shower them in disbelief.

It is, of course, a given that political partisans, myself included, are the last people who should be called upon to adjudicate claims involving politicians.  If we have learned anything on this subject over the past thirty years, it is this -- partisan bias pretty much predicts where you'll come down.  

No one I know who wanted Clarence Thomas or Brett Kavanaugh confirmed, or Donald Trump elected, was willing to fully believe Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford or the twenty-five victims of Donald Trump's apparently unbridled libido.  Some of the same people who defended Thomas later impeached Clinton for lying about a consensual but inappropriate relationship, others who defended Thomas or Sen. Packwood (himself forced to resign in the '90s from the Senate on account of sexual harassment) cheered for Paula Jones, and some of the same people who vilified Kavanaugh are now defending Biden.

It is also easy to predict the arguments that will be made.  

Those who favor Biden's accuser will embrace the claims made above regarding victim memory and delay, and saddle Joe's defenders with the charge of hypocrisy in view of how they went after Kavanaugh in 2018.  

Those who favor Biden will note the passage of time, the fact that his accuser has told different stories at different times regarding the nature of her claims against him, the fact that  her current late report is her second late report, the first having come in 2019 (without any of the incendiary sexual assault claims regarding digital penetration), and the fact that then staffers in Biden's Senate office have all denied that any claim was ever made against their boss.  Perhaps most importantly, his defenders will note that, in a public career spanning almost fifty years, Joe Biden has never been accused of sexual wandering, let alone sexual assault, of any kind.   

Biden's defenders will also contrast his calm demeanor and clean past with the defenses mounted by Thomas, Kavanaugh and Trump.  

The two justices more or less trademarked outrage in the hearings held to assess the claims against them.  Thomas claimed he was the victim of a "high-tech lynching" and Kavanaugh literally shouted his denials, insulting anyone who pondered the possibiity that his well-known penchant for beer might have clouded his memory as much as it loosened his shorts, while lying about the meaning of references to  "devil's triangle[s]" (i.e., threesomes) in his high school yearbook.  

For his part, Trump's defense is not remotely sophisticated.  He says everyone of his accusers, all twenty-five of them, are lying about allegations that run the gamut from groping to rape.  His current press secretary is now asserting that the claims against him were in effect litigated in his favor by the voters in 2016.  If so, it's the first jury where a minority of the votes determined a case's outcome.

What to do?

There is no good answer.  

Unlike Senate confirmations, there is no forum in which an investigation can be launched, even were we to assume it could be a fair one.  None, thusfar, have been.  Witnesses who might have corroborated Blasey Ford's story in 2018 were never contacted in the much ballyhooed follow-on FBI investigation after the initial Kavanaugh hearing, and Biden himself was roundly criticized for not having called a witness who could have corroborated Anita Hill's testimony in 1991.  And political campaigns seem uniquely unsuited to the task.  No one who talks to a reporter, including both victims and the accused, is under oath.  No one can be subpoenaed.  No one can be cross-examined.

There is also a greater  risk here.

This presidential campaign will be among the ugliest in our history.  Trump himself makes that ineluctable. He is incapable of living anywhere but the gutter and has turned every campaign he ran -- all of the 2016 primaries as well as the general election -- into mudbaths.  He will lie, insult, and troll his way to November 3, diverting attention from his latest outrage as he works to drive-up Biden hatred and hijack the election.

That's what he did with Hillary and her emails.  

It's what he tried to do last year with Ukraine.

And it's what he'll do with Reade's allegation. 

Demands for investigations that cannot happen, or sealed documents that have no relevant information, are already being made.  Trump will enlist those demands to create yet another shiny object designed to take all eyes off him -- his incompetence, his vulgarity, his idiocy, his sheer danger -- while training them on his parody of Biden.  If the media play to type, as they did in 2016, a commttment to phony balance will make them constantly repeat this single and as yet unproved charge against Biden while voters spin their heads in the blur created by Trump's two dozen plus victims and his constant but ever changing parade of disqualifying inanities, tantrums and lies. 

America needs a break from sex.  

A time out.

Tara Reade waited twenty-seven years to tell her story.

Maybe we should wait six months . . .

Before deciding to listen to it.