I was seriously considering writing a rejoinder to the silly claims that #BelieveWomen didn't in fact mean #BelieveAllWomen coming from Susan Faludi in the NYT and Monica Hesse in the Washington Post. We are to believe these days that, apparently now that Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee, Tara Reade's accusations meet with condemnation and contempt if they aren't outright ignored.
Luckily for me, Cathy Young in Quillette wrote a fair piece examining Reade's accusations. She found them as vaporous as I do, unearthing a trail of exaggerations from a "serial fabulist", while noting Biden's hypocrisy in endorsing the convict-upon-accusation standard implicit in the "Dear Colleague" letter.) Excerpt:
Even leaving aside general questions about Reade’s credibility, some of which are discussed below, her specific story about Biden never made much sense. Reade has offered several iterations of what happened to her in 1993, when she was a staff assistant in then-Senator Biden’s office. According to the most recent and damning version, first made public less than two months ago, Biden pushed her against a wall, kissed her, got his hand under her skirt and jammed his fingers inside her—all this in a public space in the Russell Senate Office Building, in a hallway where she had seen him talking to someone else moments earlier. (She claims that Biden steered her to a “side area,” but no one has been able to find an alcove or other space in the building’s hallways that would offer the required level of privacy.)
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