That’s the question, pro or con, that everyone has been discussing since “An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden,” a recent article by a female Democrat politician from Nevada about an incident from five years ago.
This was quickly followed up by a female Democrat activist here in my own state of Connecticut, who alleged a similar incident by Biden ten years ago.
In good Alinskyite fashion, the second accuser then blasted Connecticut Democrats for their “silence” over her decade-delayed claims.
It is at this point in a manufactured controversy where the smart set on the conservative side describe for us What’s Really Happening.
As Peggy Noonan notes, the whole thing is really about taking down Biden for being a centrist old white male who is not sufficiently “woke.” Noonan urges Biden to skip the presidential race so as to avoid the indignity of what is to come.
For pro-lifers of a certain age, the thought of Joe Biden as the centrist Democrat is enough to make you ill. Really? The Vice-President of an Administration that tried to force nuns to provide abortifacients is now the centrist Democrat?
With pro-life Democrats like Bob Casey, Sr. and Sargent Shriver long dead, and Dan Lipiniski the last man standing in that honorable tradition, Noonan’s description of Biden is probably accurate. So is her analysis of why they are out to get him.
And yet, neither the question of Biden’s creepiness, nor the real reasons for why it is suddenly an issue, are what should most interest Catholics.
What should interest us most is the amazing cultural power of the Democrats to decide when something will be important to the nation and when it will not.
Joe Biden is only the latest example. His behavior was not just known, it was giggled about for years. But now that Biden has enemies inside the Democratic Party that want to take him out, his behavior is suddenly Very Serious.
This is a pattern we have seen over and over again. Consider the most obvious recent example, Bill Clinton.
When Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was first exposed in January of 1998, he denied it. Hillary Clinton blamed the accusation on “a vast right-wing conspiracy.” The press carried that message against Special Prosecutor Ken Starr for the next eight months.
But when in August of that year the infamous blue dress with Clinton’s DNA emerged, the story changed. Clinton admitted that he lied but said it was none of our business.
Following the Clinton White House’s script, the same media that had attacked Clinton’s critics for eight months, for supposedly harassing an innocent man, likewise turned on a dime and told us it didn’t matter that the accusation was true, that we were still bad people for making a thing of it.
And there things stood for most of the next 20 years. As late as the second Obama Administration, your liberal friends on social media were still posting memes like this:
But then Republicans elected a President with his own history of womanizing. And, lo and behold, all of the sudden Democrats declared that they had been wrong to defend Clinton. Your same friends who posted the above meme during the Obama era were posting articles like this now that Trump was President.
But wait, it gets better.
The Atlantic article calling for a “reckoning” with Bill Clinton is more than a year old. Have you noticed that you are not seeing articles like that anymore?
It’s because the “reckoning” with Clinton did not have the desired effect. The point was not to reckon with Clinton but to set (or restore) a standard by which they could get Trump. When that effort failed, the phony desire to reckon with Clinton disappeared. He’s their hero again.
There are many other examples of the Democrats caring or not caring about women based on whether it suits their political fortunes. Don’t even get me started on Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick.
So yes, Joe Biden’s creepiness is a problem. And yes, it’s only a problem now because he has enemies inside his own party who want to take him down.
But the most important thing about the Biden episode is how something is not important unless and until the Democrats decide it is. No one else’s opinion matters.
And they wonder why we don’t trust them.