Bernie Bros. Go Mainstream (or try to)

Ooooook then https://t.co/liYJzrCc26

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 1, 2020

When I brought up Michael Stern's column on Tara Reade's accusations against Joe Biden, I didn't mention this part, on purpose:

During 2017 when Reade was praising Biden, she was condemning Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s efforts to hijack American democracy in the 2016 election. This changed in November 2018, when Reade trashed the United States as a country of “hypocrisy and imperialism” and “not a democracy at all but a corporate autocracy.”

Reade’s distaste for America closely tracked her new infatuation with Russia and Putin. She referred to Putin as a “genius” with an athletic prowess that “is intoxicating to American women.” Then there’s this gem: “President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity.”

In March 2019, Reade essentially dismissed the idea of Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election as hype. She said she loved Russia and her Russian relatives — and "like most women across the world, I like President Putin … a lot, his shirt on or shirt off.” 

What does that have to do with Joe Biden?  Well, maybe this:

Pivoting again this month, Reade said that she “did not support Putin, and that her comments were pulled out of context from a novel she was writing,” according to The Times. The quotations above, however, are from political opinion pieces she published, and she did not offer any other "context" to The Times.

Reade's writings shed light on her political alliance with Sanders, who has a long history of ties to Russia and whose stump speech is focused largely on his position that American inequality is due to a corporate autocracy. But at a very minimum, Reade's wild shifts in political ideology and her sexual infatuation with a brutal dictator of a foreign adversary raise questions about her emotional stability.

Suspect timing. For 27 years, Reade did not publicly accuse Biden of sexually assaulting her. But then Biden's string of March primary victories threw Sanders off his seemingly unstoppable path to the Democratic nomination. On March 25, as Sanders was pondering his political future, Reade finally went public with her claim. The confluence of Reade’s support of Sanders, distaste for the traditional American democracy epitomized by Biden, and the timing of her allegation should give pause to even the most strident Biden critics.   

I left that out of my post because it was a whole other tangent and I didn't have access to the opinion pieces Stern mentioned.  Now, however...  These tweets don't disprove Reade's allegations; but they support Stern's argument.

Gossip and innuendo were not invented by the internet, especially in political campaigns.  There's the apocryphal (maybe) story of LBJ telling a staffer to start a scurrilous rumor about a political opponent.  When the staffer objects that the story isn't true, LBJ tells him "I know it's not true!  I want to see him deny it!"  Pretty much what seems to be going on here.  For example:

Extremely important note on this — Biden does *not* mention in his his lengthy statement the people who *did* corroborate Reade’s assault allegation (they include an unnamed friend and a former neighbor) https://t.co/R6gl2aQSwS

— MJ Lee (@mj_lee) May 1, 2020

Yeah, maybe not all that important, after all.