Manos: The Hands of Joe Biden's Fate

Finally a woman* had the guts to go public with her disgust about being creepily kissed, gripped, nuzzled or otherwise man-handled by scary presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Photos of Creepy Uncle Joe, long lurking on the Internet for viewing by anyone with a hankering for cheesy horror, have suddenly been rediscovered by The Establishment Media to get the benefit of their careful, nuanced analysis. Is Joe just a loving harmless grandpa who is so old-school or clueless that he never learned about boundaries? Or is he really your typical sexist pig, hiding his malevolence beneath a folksy persona, in the vein of Poppy Bush and his own gross "David Cop-a-Feel" habit?

Biden is a combination of sociopathies. He is the typical powerful ruler who plots and passes neoliberal legislation to punish and harm people. Then he further adds to the horror by touching the bodies of women in order to convey his power to them. Manipulative ministrations of this type make many women feel that if they hadn't been sending out those invisible signals of neediness and vulnerability, they would never have attracted the magical male touch in the first place. It's all their fault if they take Biden-style handsiness the wrong way. Failure to accept it in the loving aggressive spirit with which it was intended will only prove their needy ingratitude and chronic hangups. 

As Lucy Flores, the former Nevada legislator who wrote the New York magazine story about her own experience with Biden in 2014. says, her reaction was all about the power that Biden wielded at the time. As to the defense of Biden written by Stephanie Carter, the wife of Obama's former defense secretary, Flores noted - correctly, I think - that this was a completely different scenario. The Carters and the Bidens are long-time friends, and Flores had only met the creepy veepy a couple of times.

It's about power, and even more, it's about class. Flores is not a member of the ruling class, and the Carters and the Bidens are at its very pinnacle. The class aspect of this new Biden media "wokeness" comes through loud and clear in Stephanie Carter's Medium piece.

Her main complaint about again being the center of attention in "That Picture" is that it has spoiled the joy of starting her very own private equity company. (She is a former Deutsche Bank official and partner at ABS Capital, positions that were briefly thought to be potential conflicts of interest given that her husband was in charge of the Pentagon. but which soon were glossed over in the spirit of class solidarity.) Carter writes:

Last night, I received a text from a friend letting me know that picture was once again all over Twitter in connection to Lucy Flores’ personal account of a 2014 encounter with Joe Biden. Let me state upfront that I don’t know her, but I absolutely support her right to speak her truth and she should be, like all women, believed. But her story is not mine. The Joe Biden in my picture is a close friend helping someone get through a big day, for which I will always be grateful. So, as the sole owner of my story, it is high time that I reclaim it — from strangers, Twitter, the pundits and the late-night hosts.

Stephanie Carter wants her friends and colleagues to know that she doesn't know Lucy Flores. Why would she know her? But she condescends to allow Flores to speak "her truth" -- rather than, say, "the truth."

Carter goes on to complain that Joe Biden was simply comforting her because she had just slipped on the ice while visiting Arlington National Cemetery with a contingent of the Pentagon officials who personally had sent a fair portion the buried soldiers to war and were there to honor their "sacrifice." She added that Biden sensed her discomfort at being rudely asked by annoying members of the press about her well-being. They apparently went above their station in doing so. It got so bad that one female reporter from the low-class tabloid New York Post even had the gall to later confront her in her own apartment building to ask about That Picture of Joe nuzzling her and squeezing her shoulders.

Yuck. First, they rudely asked if she was O.K. after her slip and fall, then they asked her about That Picture, and now five years later it's all coming back to haunt her. They're asking her about That Picture all over again. The first round of asks completely ruined the "crowning achievement of my husband's career" and the second round of asks are ruining the high of her own crowning career achievement of "entrepreneurial" high finance.

It is absolutely tragic.

Meanwhile, members of the Biden class collective are snarkily criticizing Flores, who is now out of politics, for daring to sell stuff on the Internet. They are also casting subtle doubt on her story. You see, she used to be a Bernie Sanders supporter. Smarmy CNN personality Jake Tapper snidely wondered whether "politics" is at the heart of her motivation for telling her story.

“I want him to change his behavior I want him to acknowledge that it was wrong,” she said, “And I want this to be a bigger discussion about how there is no political accountability structure within our political space, either for instances in which women feel that there was inappropriate behavior, or more serious allegations of sexual assault.”

“We are not protected in politics,” she said. “And frankly, on a much larger scale, we also need to have a conversation about powerful men feeling that they have the right to invade a woman’s space whenever they like. This really is about women feeling like we have agency. If we don’t want you to touch us, then don’t touch us.”

Biden himself has been incommunicado, save for a few written statements pleading that it has never been his intention to intimidate women while nobly acknowledging that his female critics could have a different perspective. The actual attacks on Biden's critics as the only way to defend him are being done by his paid spokespeople and Democratic Party colleagues. The rich and the powerful always have paid spokespeople and colleagues to do their dirty work for them.

Biden should absolutely run for president if he still has the nerve to throw his hat in the ring for one of his many underlings to pick up and dust off for him. And he should absolutely be confronted over his sordid history of incarcerating black people via the infamous Crime Bill which he personally wrote, his treatment of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation debacle, his support of the Iraq War, his championship of the Glass-Steagall repeal that set the stage for the 2008 financial collapse, his poor record on women's reproductive rights, his bankruptcy reform legislation that condemned mainly women to lifetimes of penury and debt to the usurious credit card companies that helped fund Biden's career.... the list goes on and on.

This campaign season is already so crazy that we should probably welcome Biden's hammy hands and cheese to give the class war a little levity for a change. Just when think you can't take any more of Perpetual Campaign Cinema, Joe's hands have been added to the script, and people are suddenly finding they just can't get enough of possibly the worst movie ever made. It's so bad, it's good. 

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn't think that Biden's hands should be disqualified from running, as long as they remain firmly attached to his straight arms. Anything to keep the poor and the uninsured from remembering that Medicare For All will never, ever come to be under her interminable binge-watch.

And as Biden's gatekeeper, Bill "Torgo" Russo, reminds us, the horrific images of Biden's hands come from a Cottage of Lies guarded by right-wing trolls located deep within the Forest of the Dark Internet. There is nothing cheesier than those redundant manipulated hands of fate. The movie trailer gets it right: there is no way out.

* Update, 4/3: A total of four women have now come forward to complain about Biden. One of them is a sexual assault survivor who says that when then-V.P. Biden sat next to her at a conference for sexual assault survivors, he rested his hand on her thigh. She was 19 years old. His behavior can no longer be excused as mere cluelessness or friendliness. But just to give him the benefit of the doubt, let's assume that he is, in fact, merely clueless or insensitive. These are not qualities we should tolerate in a president, particularly a president whose job entails interacting and negotiating with women leaders, both foreign and domestic. I have changed my mind. Biden should not run. The fact that some prominent liberals have come to his defense is just as disgusting as his behavior, in my view. Their implicit argument is that because some women have welcomed his touching, there must be something wrong with those who do not. Contrary to the motto for Biden's campaign against college campus sexual assault -- "It's On Us"(men) -- the real message remains "It's On Them" (women).  

The photos of a President Biden nuzzling and stroking women will send the message to boys and men all over the world that such behavior is not only O.K. it is desirable -- just as Trump's hateful rhetoric gives tacit permission to people act out their darkest fantasies.

Some defenders of Biden say he is a saint compared to Trump, who boasted that he can grab women by the pussy and get away with it. To date, there are no photos of Trump grabbing any woman's body part. Although there have been allegations of physical assault, his preferred method of degrading women is with his big fat mouth rather than with his hands. There are many degrees of bad behavior, none of which should be tolerated, particularly if they are tolerated in the big-dollar interests of either of our two deeply corrupt political parties.