Tara Reade's story is exactly the kind of dubious claim that has damaged other women who have really been sexually assaulted

I have always made the distinction between alleged sexual assault which is tested with evidence in a trial and accusations that are never tested with evidence, I've done that repeatedly here, with pre-indictment accusations made against a number of men, including Bill Cosby, one of the few of such men who has had the accusations tested in a court and been found guilty in a trial where his lawyers got to question witnesses and evidence.  The only proper means of determining guilt is by the presentation of evidence in a judicial setting in which the accused faces their accuser and the evidence is fully questioned by their attorney.   

I have also talked about instances of that in which long-standing multiple accusations have been made against individual men in which the accusers tell a consistent story of sexual assault but who never get their accusations before a court - either because prosecutors don't bring a case or police prevent that from happening or botch an investigation or because the one making the accusation never presents their accusation in a form that is testable.  In those instances it isn't possible to determine the guilt of someone who is accused, though it is possible to decide, for yourself what you believe.  No one can stop you from doing that.

It is also possible for someone to decide if the accusations are not true and the accuser is NOT telling the truth, to make that decision, though it is one of the casualties of informal trial by media and internet that one is not supposed to make that determination, even if the accusations made are burdened by everything from impossible time lines, lack of credible verification to the accuser not being credible for any number of reasons.  No one, no man NO WOMAN has the right to demand being believed on the basis of their gender anymore than a white person has the right to demand being believed because of their race. 

I think the shifting and shifty story told in the context of Bernie Sanders second campaign to get the Democratic nomination for president, by Bernie Sanders supporter Tara Reade is not credible because she has waited almost three decades after the loosely defined time-frame in which she claims Joe Biden semi-publicly embraced and finger-fucked her and because her story has seemed to evolve to fit the requirements of getting it into the news stream, in this case a stream that is more like an open sewer of unsupported claims and innuendo.  

No one should be answerable to a claim that the self-proclaimed victim - WHO WAS AN ADULT AT THE TIME OF THE ALLEGED ASSAULT, NOT A CHILD - waited through decades of the accused holding public office - which the self-proclaimed victim supported - including as a powerful senior senator and as Vice President of the United States and, lest it be forgotten, as a man who ran a previous presidential campaign during which his now accuser could have made her claims public in a far more timely fashion.  I don't know when Tara Reade's mother, one of those she claims to have confided in, was still alive when Joe Biden was running for President or Vice President or for reelection to the Senate but it's mighty convenient to Reade's narrative now that her mother isn't around to tell us what she may or may not have been claiming in the early 1990s.   The alleged phone-call to the Larry King show allegedly by Reade's mother mentions nothing about sexual assault and rather remarkably seems to indicate that the unnamed daughter in question respects the unnamed man whose behavior is the subject of the call.  

I don't believe her because what she claims is not matched by other women making claims of similar behavior against Biden, though there has been at least one claim made subsequently which is known to be false because Biden was not in the place where the claimed incident took place at the time it is claimed to have happened.  

And I don't believe her because she shows every sign of being a nut case.  Her fawning, public, lusting after the pasty-white dad bod of the Russian dictator Putin would seem to contain evidence that she maintains a very sick, very vivid stream of sexual fantasy.   She is hardly alone among the Bernie Bots to have shown a sick attachment to Putin but none of the others I'm aware of have gushed about him in such masturbatory prose.  

Tara Reade's recent sit down with the right-wing former FOX sex pot, Megyn Kelly is nothing that couldn't have been expected.  It shows that the (non-Democrat) Bernie Sanders cult and the Trump cult have a heck of a lot in common, destroying the real progressive party of the United States foremost among those.  I have come to believe that there are more than a few of them in the pay of the Russian dictator or who have some tie to him or his American allies, both Republican and "socialist".   Reade choosing to tell her tale to Kelly only adds to  the case against her credibility.  I doubt she'd choose to sit down with a real journalist who could be counted on to question her closely on her political identity, her claims, her inconsistencies and her bizarre public sexual fantasies about the dictator of Russia, Trump's owner, Putin.  

Tara Reade deserves none of the benefit of the doubt that might rightly be given to women who make more credible accusations without the baggage of political expediency and obvious embroidery that she has given to her claims.   Her story is exactly the kind of dubious claim that has damaged other women who have really been sexually assaulted and who have, AS ADULT VICTIMS, done the responsible thing of reporting those assaults in a timely manner.   She, as credible victims have not, has burdened her claims with baggage which must be unpacked and which I doubt her claims could survive.  

I don't believe her, I think she is lying because I think she has a fantasy of being the one who delivers the Democratic nomination to Bernie Sanders and being the hero of the play-left.  That or maybe she figures Putin will notice her if she delivers Trump to him.   If she would complain about that last sentence, I'd never have even wondered about that if she hadn't publicly slobbered over the shirtless photos of the well-larded Russian dictator. 

I think among the victims of Tara Reade's three decade old claim is, ironically, the Me Too movement.  While that movement has had some notable good come of it, it has also made it clear that the informal, biased standards of judgement of claims of sexual assault are hardly uniform in their credibility.   It is clear to me that it is being gamed by the Putin-Billionaire-Republican-fascists in exactly the same way that the play-left has been, to benefit them by destroying Democrats.  I may support the goals of Me Too, of holding actual sexual assaulters accountable but not at the expense of American Democracy.

Tara Reade stands a good chance of going down in history as the woman who put Trump back in the presidency as Bernie Sanders will as the man who helped put him there to start.  

I will say that nothing in my lifetime, nothing in the decades of me being a workers-rightfully-own-the-means-of-production socialist that has put me off of socialism more than Bernie Sanders and his supporters, including the "Democratic Socialists".   Before I am a socialist I am a democrat, socialism without democracy isn't not only not socialism, it's just another form of gangsterism.  I have no suprise in 2020 that Bernie Sanders has given some of the worst gangster dictators in the world another opportunity to destroy democracy.   I don't have any residual respect for him or for the "socialism" that supports him.