Columnist Katha Pollitt would vote for Joe Biden even if she believed Reade’s allegations of sexual assault, she wrote in her Wednesday column. “Fortunately, I don’t have to sacrifice morality to political necessity,” she wrote. Reade has accused Biden of kissing her, touching her, and penetrating her without her consent in 1993 when she worked for him as a senate staffer in Washington, D.C. Biden has repeatedly denied these allegations.
The Nation writer listed several examples of horrible things that the former vice president could do that would not prevent her from voting for him and voting for President Donald Trump — including eating boiled babies.
“I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them,” Pollitt wrote. “He wasn’t my candidate, but taking back the White House is that important. Four more years of Trump will replace what remains of our democracy with unchecked rule by kleptocrats, fascists, religious fanatics, gun nuts, and know-nothings.”
The Nation columnist, who has written for the publication since 1980, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that “some people didn’t like my dark humor and comic exaggeration,” regarding the boiled babies comment.
It wasn't funny. It also, as C.I. notes, was irresponsible. Spirit cooking, that's what people are going to think. Belief in spirit cooking, if you missed it, led to threats on people's lives. Katha's remarks were irresponsible and outrageous. They were also dangerous. It's past time that her tired ass was parked at the curb and THE NATION hired some young women to write for the magazine. I'm not a young woman. But I'm only writing at my own site (and ready to close shop just as soon as C.I. closes down at THE COMMON ILLS -- I could do it tomorrow and would be thrilled). Our older voices needed? Absolutely but not at the expense of the young. Feminists must pass the torch. That doesn't mean older ones take the veil, it does mean though that they step out of the way and stop hogging the spotlight. No one needs Katha Pollitt's columns for THE NATION. Her voice is generic and outdated. They need to hire a woman in her late 20s or early 30s. I'd also like to see them offer a real commitment to women in college and maybe get four each year to write a feminist column with a campus focus.
They could also do like one of the most influential teams online -- Ava and C.I. -- and pair a younger woman and an older woman. Ava and C.I. have been ahead of the curve on these issues repeatedly and have been a very strong and influential feminist voice -- combined voice. That's because they're two women with different experiences looking at the issues.
"Media: Lies and liars all around" (Ava and C.I., THE THIRD ESTATE SUNDAY REVIEW):
In the film SEBERG, they have Jean being hounded after the blind item runs -- reporters trying to get her to offer a response. That never happened.
In a comic moment, they have Dorothy Jamal, a revolutionary, confronting her husband at the breakfast table with Joyce's item on the front page of THE LOS ANGELES TIMES. Dorothy wouldn't read that rag -- and no gossip column ran on the front page of THE TIMES. THE LOS ANGELES HERALD-EXAMINER is the mainstream paper that would have been read in the Jamal's home. Know why that is?
Hakim Jamal often worked for that paper. It's not in the film because it's not in a WIKIPEDIA entry. Equally true, Hakim is not a "cousin of Malcolm X." That's a lie and CRAPAPEDIA needs to remove it immediately. The distant cousin of Malcom X was Dorothy Jamal. She was the blood relation. Hakim only married into that family.
And if everyone behind the scenes weren't so White, they might have known Dorothy was most likely to read THE LOS ANGELES SENTINEL -- an African-American weekly and it would be the Black press that she'd most likely confront him with -- for example, Hillard Hamm's blind item in Compton's METROPOLITAN GAZETTE about a Black leader who was sleeping with a White woman. (The item was about Hakim and Jean.)
Joyce's item ran in May of 1970. It came and went and not much happened (a related gossip short may have run in THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER right after Joyce's column -- it implied Jean Seberg had a secret she was keeping from the public -- it didn't say what secret but it did name Jean).
Now this is where the story used to end. It's certainly what FAIR and Steve Rendell loved to pimp -- this lie that Joyce Harber, working with the FBI, falsely reported Jean was pregnant by a Black Panther and that "soon after" Joyce's item, Jean miscarried.
No.
May 19, 1970 is when Joyce's blind item ran. It was August 23rd that Jean miscarried. This was right after NEWSWEEK ran the following written by Edward Behr and published by his editor Kermit Lansner:
Can a small-town girl from Iowa find happiness in Paris? It seems so, despite the ups and downs of her marriage. "It's wonderful," smiled movie actress Jean Seberg, 31, when reporters looked in on her in a hospital in Majorca, where she was recuperating from complications in her pregnancy. "We are completely reconciled -- ironically just when our divorce papers are finally coming through." She and French author Romain Gary, 56, are reportedly about to remarry even though the baby Jean expects in October is by another man -- a black activist she met in California.
For the record, Jean never spoke to Edward Behr. The quotes in the paragraph above are lies made up by NEWSWEEK's Edward Behr.
Now we consider it to be a success that CRAPAPEDIA and the film acknowledge NEWSWEEK. It would be better if they would the writer -- Edward Behr -- and the editor -- Kermit Lansner -- of the piece. They have no problem naming Joyce Harber.
The movie has to name NEWSWEEK because they use the press conference Romain held where he announced the lawsuit -- they sued NEWSWEEK -- not THE LOS ANGELES TIMES. They sued NEWSWEEK and the publication was order to pay a hefty sum and to run an apology.
NEWSWEEK is a key moment to the attacks carried out on US citizens by their own government. The movie includes NEWSWEEK but two idiots who wrote the script can't grasp the importance. FAIR and Steve? We think they knew the importance. Were they too scared to comment on it or were they covering?
The CIA. That's the news value here. The CIA was part of the plot against Jean. Now for those who feel Jean was murdered, that it wasn't suicide, the CIA is the best explanation for who would have killed her. They're international and Jean lived in France.
The NEWSWEEK reporter? Edward Behr? He was filing from France. He was part of the operation to destroy Jean. Are we to believe the FBI was leading the assault on Jean in France? The CIA was doing it. Their hands have been presented as clean all these years. There is blood on their hands with regards to Jean and shame on anyone who pretends to care while at the same time refusing to connect the very obvious dots.
B-b-b-but Ava and C.I., films do take liberties to condense and blah blah blah.
Yes, they do.
But why did this film need to condense so much?
Oh, that's right because it's the good FBI.
This piece of s**t film creates a character based on complete fiction. This is a man working for the FBI. He's the co-star of the film. He appears to fall in love with Jean while spying on her. This causes him to 'feel' for Jean throughout the film. We also get a lot of scenes where he's with his wife who wants to be a doctor. None of this has to do with Jean and the character is not a framing device.
What is he?
An attempt to rewrite history, to present the FBI as caring and concerned.
No, that's not the FBI and it wasn't the FBI in 1970.
It's a white-wash of what took place. How dare you pretend to make a film about Jean Seberg and try to make an FBI agent the good guy. He's the young guy, by the way. Everyone else in the FBI is much older than the young boy -- which is supposed to indicate to us that a new FBI was being born at this time.
Again, this is hideous. It is turning the criminals who destroyed Jean into good guys.
It's outrageous.
That is the type of real and hard hitting writing that the Katha Pollitt's never manage to do.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Thursday, May 21, 2020. Attacking Tara Reade isn't feminism though it clearly helps some make a quick buck.
Cher performing Stephen Stills' "For What It's Worth." Cher's version appears on her 1969 classif album 3614 JACKSON HIGHWAY.
There's battle lines being drawn
And nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting some much resistance from behind
As a friend with the Biden campaign gloated to me on the phone last night, "We knew what we were doing." Yes, they did. The campus papers are pretty much mute right now. That was always the biggest block for Joe. It's not just that young adults don't like him. It's also that they're better educated on assault and harassment.
The generational divide that's been at the heart of Joe's lukewarm reception continues. And you see it at THE NATION where the elderly write so many columns that 46-year-old Dave Zirin is the 'youngster' in the mix.
Joan Walsh? 61. Katha Pollitt? 70. Patricia J. Williams? 68.
I had to ask Jim to look into that 2007 e-mail from THE NATION. Ava and I had been sick of the imbalance at THE NATION in terms of gender. They were publishing far more men than women. We'd started to track it. Around July 4th, THE NATION had e-mailed frantically. They wanted the story killed. They would do anything. They would publish Ava and myself (we had no interest, thank you), they were going to be hiring women columnists shortly -- and young women at that. Could we please kill the story?
Do we look like whores? Maybe. But we're not.
We tracked it for a full year and served up "The Nation featured 491 male bylines in 2007 -- how many female ones?" on December 23, 2007. 149, by the way, that's the answer. They had 491 male bylines that year and only 149 female bylines.
And you don't see what women are up against? Even on the so-called inclusive Democratic left (as opposed to genuine left).
Well they never did hire a young woman -- 46-year-old Melissa Lacewell Harris Perry was the closest they got.
They don't get it, like so many, they just don't get it. They don't want to get it is probably the reason why they don't get it but it really doesn't matter. What matters is we're in the 21st century and they're stuck in the 90s with their James Carville mindset.
They smear and attack Tara with rape culture because they must stop Tara and any other woman who might come out -- two have now hinted publicly about coming forward.
Katha Pollitt, you're the new Midge Decter! To this generation coming up right now, that's what you are. Embrace your descent into frivolity -- or further frivolity.
They don't get it. They didn't get Anita Hill in real time either but we'll talk about that tomorrow.
Alexis Grenell (NEW YORK DAILY NEWS) plans to vote for Joe but is dismayed by the attacks on Tara Reade:
Alexis bills herself as a feminist. Is she? I'd say no. Xenophobia doesn't really belong in feminism. Maybe she's a domestic (and domesticated) feminist (tabby)? The Vietnam War? If we're going to count deaths, we should include the Vietnamese. It was their country. Reducing a war to the deaths on only one side -- regardless of the war -- is not just short-sighted, it's xenophobic.
But Grenell is a writer and she's right to be concerned about what's taking place which puts her far ahead of Katha Pollitt the faux feminist that we addressed in yesterday's snapshot. Others are addressing her nonsense as well. Here's Sady Doyle:
One element of Reade's claim - the most inflammatory, the rape - has the weakest evidence for it. But we DO have corroborating accounts for the harassment, more than are often required to take a claim seriously. If we're feminists, we should take that as our grounds for argument.
If the worst insinuation of Reade's critics is true -- that she inflated a sexual assault claim to a rape claim to get press attention she was missing -- that's a tragedy about a woman who went unheard so long she risked something desperate and destroyed her life in the process.
Another scenario is that a vulnerable woman, who struggled with money and an abusive marriage after being sexually harassed at work, was later preyed upon by bad political actors and convinced to escalate her claim. Again, that would be horrible, but it would also be tragic.
In no scenario does Biden emerge spotless. In no scenario does his track record with women become irrelevant. What makes Biden look worst, all this, is the rush to demolish Reade in the hopes of restoring some "feminist" reputation Biden does not appear to have ever deserved.
Katha Pollitt is an embarrassment. She opened that hideous column attacking Tara with the reveal that she would vote for Joe even if were seen on the street eating a baby. Is she trying to restart the spirit cooking nonsense? Is that stupid? I thought we agreed that nonsense was harmful, that people were wrongly being threatened because of it. But here's Katha offering, like a good whore, where her line in the sand is. The entire column is an embrace of and advancement of rape culture. That's not feminism.
Candice Russell Tweets:
Watching the Tara Reade coverage has become like some sort of trauma induced version of Groundhogs Day so of COURSE “professional feminist” Katha Pollitt just HAD TO give her two cents on sexual assault again (hint: still just as problematic as when she wrote about mine)
By the way, when Katha attacked Candice, Katha wrote, "Why not say, 'These are serious allegations, and we're going to look into them'?"
Double standard? Katha denies there's one with regards to Christine Blasey Ford and Tara Reade. But there is one. There's also a double standard to how Katha responded with Candice and with Tara.
The rank hypocrisy that wafts off Katha is something no FDS will ever send running.
COMMON DREAMS' Eoin Higgins offers:
Wow, Katha Pollit doesn't believe Tara Reade, what a shocking surprise, what's next, that she's a TERF?
It's left to Anthony Zenkus to provide the realities Katha avoids:
There is rarely "definitive proof" in rape cases. The reason so many victims never even come forward. And yet 1 in 6 women are victims of rape or attempted rape in their lives. Funny how that works.
Let's note two more from Zenkus:
And:
Andrew Levine (COUNTERPUNCH) notes:
Let’s begin with the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, whose leadership decided to throw Reade to the curb because of the identity of her alleged assailant. According to Reade, she only realized after reading Ryan Grim’s reporting for The Intercept that this happened owing, in all likelihood, to the nonprofit’s professional relationship to Anita Dunn, a Biden advisor who works for SKDKnickerbocker, the PR firm for Time’s Up. Leaving aside any other critiques one has of The Intercept and Joe Biden, it is a tremendous faux pas for Ryan Grim to let a journalistic bombshell like that be published without forewarning to his source. The Watergate conspirators were given more courtesy, as demonstrated by the classic exclamation “[Washington Post publisher] Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s ever published!” What was he thinking?
In 2019, both the Associated Press and the Washington Post worked the story but ultimately canned coverage. The AP had the story in April of that year, when, simultaneously, everyone was publishing about Biden being too touchy for people’s comfort case and point this particular column in Clinton lap dog Ezra Klein’s Vox. Even if there were inconsistencies within Reade’s story (purportedly the reason for squashing it), she deserved a fair hearing and a forum. These venues have given far more airtime to far more dubious actors over the years (cf. 2016 Donald Trump campaign) and have no shred of credibility here. Sexual trauma and memory are very messy things from top to bottom. There are plenty of women who have very public accounts of suppression and triggering that causes them to recall details sometimes years after the events.
We're living in a different century and what's going down will not have consequences. In this century, a woman writes her own "For What It's Worth" and performs it. Stevie Nicks:
In Iraq, REUTERS reports:
Royal Dutch Shell evacuated some 60 foreign staff from Iraq’s Basra Gas Company as a security measure following a protest over delayed pay, company officials said on Thursday, adding production was unaffected.
The staff were flown out of the country on Wednesday after workers protested at the headquarters of Basra Gas Company (BGC), a venture between state-owned South Gas Company, Shell and Mitsubishi, to demand payment of their delayed salaries, officials said.
“Shell confirms that as result of a security breach at the accommodation camp of Basra Gas Company, we have temporarily relocated Shell secondees,” Shell said in emailed comments.
The following sites updated:
Cher performing Stephen Stills' "For What It's Worth." Cher's version appears on her 1969 classif album 3614 JACKSON HIGHWAY.
There's battle lines being drawn
And nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting some much resistance from behind
As a friend with the Biden campaign gloated to me on the phone last night, "We knew what we were doing." Yes, they did. The campus papers are pretty much mute right now. That was always the biggest block for Joe. It's not just that young adults don't like him. It's also that they're better educated on assault and harassment.
The generational divide that's been at the heart of Joe's lukewarm reception continues. And you see it at THE NATION where the elderly write so many columns that 46-year-old Dave Zirin is the 'youngster' in the mix.
Joan Walsh? 61. Katha Pollitt? 70. Patricia J. Williams? 68.
I had to ask Jim to look into that 2007 e-mail from THE NATION. Ava and I had been sick of the imbalance at THE NATION in terms of gender. They were publishing far more men than women. We'd started to track it. Around July 4th, THE NATION had e-mailed frantically. They wanted the story killed. They would do anything. They would publish Ava and myself (we had no interest, thank you), they were going to be hiring women columnists shortly -- and young women at that. Could we please kill the story?
Do we look like whores? Maybe. But we're not.
We tracked it for a full year and served up "The Nation featured 491 male bylines in 2007 -- how many female ones?" on December 23, 2007. 149, by the way, that's the answer. They had 491 male bylines that year and only 149 female bylines.
And you don't see what women are up against? Even on the so-called inclusive Democratic left (as opposed to genuine left).
Well they never did hire a young woman -- 46-year-old Melissa Lacewell Harris Perry was the closest they got.
They don't get it, like so many, they just don't get it. They don't want to get it is probably the reason why they don't get it but it really doesn't matter. What matters is we're in the 21st century and they're stuck in the 90s with their James Carville mindset.
They smear and attack Tara with rape culture because they must stop Tara and any other woman who might come out -- two have now hinted publicly about coming forward.
Katha Pollitt, you're the new Midge Decter! To this generation coming up right now, that's what you are. Embrace your descent into frivolity -- or further frivolity.
They don't get it. They didn't get Anita Hill in real time either but we'll talk about that tomorrow.
Alexis Grenell (NEW YORK DAILY NEWS) plans to vote for Joe but is dismayed by the attacks on Tara Reade:
Reade may be only the latest in a long line of inconvenient women to
pipe up about a favorite son, but she’s the first to appear post-#MeToo
in the middle of an election year where the sitting president has
botched the response to a pandemic that’s killed more Americans than the
Vietnam War. All of this leaves less bandwidth for her in the public
imagination, as she asks us to weigh her individual pain against the
agony of watching our whole world bleed out. It certainly doesn’t make
her any easier to like.
The thing is, it’s not necessary to like or not like Reade, because
either way we cannot know what happened. I’ve read through every shred
of “evidence” and I still can’t make sense of the facts or my feelings
about them. I have no qualms about supporting Biden — we can’t re-elect
the titular head of the death cult formerly known as the Republican
Party — but my ambivalence about Reade is what keeps me up at night. I
want her, and anyone else who comes forward about alleged abuse, to be
allowed to be unlikeable and legitimate. I want people to be able to
separate feelings from facts, and when the facts don’t lead somewhere
conclusive, not to fill in the blanks with feelings. I want us to learn
that sexual abuse rarely comes with a certificate of origin and to sit
with that discomfort.
Alexis bills herself as a feminist. Is she? I'd say no. Xenophobia doesn't really belong in feminism. Maybe she's a domestic (and domesticated) feminist (tabby)? The Vietnam War? If we're going to count deaths, we should include the Vietnamese. It was their country. Reducing a war to the deaths on only one side -- regardless of the war -- is not just short-sighted, it's xenophobic.
But Grenell is a writer and she's right to be concerned about what's taking place which puts her far ahead of Katha Pollitt the faux feminist that we addressed in yesterday's snapshot. Others are addressing her nonsense as well. Here's Sady Doyle:
Here, from Katha Pollit's latest piece on Reade, is a problem troubling me with this coverage: Pollit names four-count-em-four witnesses corroborating sexual harassment, three of them roughly contemporaneous to the event. Then she calls it merely "possible" Reade was harassed.
The evidence for the assault itself is much weaker. But every witness, even hostile ones (like the ex) corroborates the harassment at least. Why "possible?" Why not "likely?" In any other circumstance, feminists would likely say "can be relatively sure harassment occurred."
One element of Reade's claim - the most inflammatory, the rape - has the weakest evidence for it. But we DO have corroborating accounts for the harassment, more than are often required to take a claim seriously. If we're feminists, we should take that as our grounds for argument.
If the worst insinuation of Reade's critics is true -- that she inflated a sexual assault claim to a rape claim to get press attention she was missing -- that's a tragedy about a woman who went unheard so long she risked something desperate and destroyed her life in the process.
Another scenario is that a vulnerable woman, who struggled with money and an abusive marriage after being sexually harassed at work, was later preyed upon by bad political actors and convinced to escalate her claim. Again, that would be horrible, but it would also be tragic.
In no scenario does Biden emerge spotless. In no scenario does his track record with women become irrelevant. What makes Biden look worst, all this, is the rush to demolish Reade in the hopes of restoring some "feminist" reputation Biden does not appear to have ever deserved.
Katha Pollitt is an embarrassment. She opened that hideous column attacking Tara with the reveal that she would vote for Joe even if were seen on the street eating a baby. Is she trying to restart the spirit cooking nonsense? Is that stupid? I thought we agreed that nonsense was harmful, that people were wrongly being threatened because of it. But here's Katha offering, like a good whore, where her line in the sand is. The entire column is an embrace of and advancement of rape culture. That's not feminism.
Candice Russell Tweets:
Watching the Tara Reade coverage has become like some sort of trauma induced version of Groundhogs Day so of COURSE “professional feminist” Katha Pollitt just HAD TO give her two cents on sexual assault again (hint: still just as problematic as when she wrote about mine)
By the way, when Katha attacked Candice, Katha wrote, "Why not say, 'These are serious allegations, and we're going to look into them'?"
Double standard? Katha denies there's one with regards to Christine Blasey Ford and Tara Reade. But there is one. There's also a double standard to how Katha responded with Candice and with Tara.
The rank hypocrisy that wafts off Katha is something no FDS will ever send running.
COMMON DREAMS' Eoin Higgins offers:
Wow, Katha Pollit doesn't believe Tara Reade, what a shocking surprise, what's next, that she's a TERF?
It's left to Anthony Zenkus to provide the realities Katha avoids:
There is rarely "definitive proof" in rape cases. The reason so many victims never even come forward. And yet 1 in 6 women are victims of rape or attempted rape in their lives. Funny how that works.
Let's note two more from Zenkus:
After being called out by multiple women for nonconsensual, inappropriate touch which they viewed as harmful, Biden joked about consent multiple times. Mr. Biden: what is so funny about consent? #AskBidenAnything
And:
We need nominee who doesnt think it's fair game to touch the thighs of sex assault victims after they talk about their assaults, and who then jokes about consent after being called out on his gross behavior. Biden needs to go. Consent is not a joke. #DropOutJoe #AskBidenAnything
Andrew Levine (COUNTERPUNCH) notes:
Let’s begin with the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, whose leadership decided to throw Reade to the curb because of the identity of her alleged assailant. According to Reade, she only realized after reading Ryan Grim’s reporting for The Intercept that this happened owing, in all likelihood, to the nonprofit’s professional relationship to Anita Dunn, a Biden advisor who works for SKDKnickerbocker, the PR firm for Time’s Up. Leaving aside any other critiques one has of The Intercept and Joe Biden, it is a tremendous faux pas for Ryan Grim to let a journalistic bombshell like that be published without forewarning to his source. The Watergate conspirators were given more courtesy, as demonstrated by the classic exclamation “[Washington Post publisher] Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s ever published!” What was he thinking?
In 2019, both the Associated Press and the Washington Post worked the story but ultimately canned coverage. The AP had the story in April of that year, when, simultaneously, everyone was publishing about Biden being too touchy for people’s comfort case and point this particular column in Clinton lap dog Ezra Klein’s Vox. Even if there were inconsistencies within Reade’s story (purportedly the reason for squashing it), she deserved a fair hearing and a forum. These venues have given far more airtime to far more dubious actors over the years (cf. 2016 Donald Trump campaign) and have no shred of credibility here. Sexual trauma and memory are very messy things from top to bottom. There are plenty of women who have very public accounts of suppression and triggering that causes them to recall details sometimes years after the events.
We're living in a different century and what's going down will not have consequences. In this century, a woman writes her own "For What It's Worth" and performs it. Stevie Nicks:
In Iraq, REUTERS reports:
Royal Dutch Shell evacuated some 60 foreign staff from Iraq’s Basra Gas Company as a security measure following a protest over delayed pay, company officials said on Thursday, adding production was unaffected.
The staff were flown out of the country on Wednesday after workers protested at the headquarters of Basra Gas Company (BGC), a venture between state-owned South Gas Company, Shell and Mitsubishi, to demand payment of their delayed salaries, officials said.
“Shell confirms that as result of a security breach at the accommodation camp of Basra Gas Company, we have temporarily relocated Shell secondees,” Shell said in emailed comments.
The following sites updated:
