The way she got treated
Biden is just flummoxed that anybody gives a damn about the way he treated Anita Hill.
Biden appeared on ABC’s The View Friday morning and told the show’s five female co-hosts: “I’m sorry for the way she got treated.” But then he added that people should go back and look at what he said during those hearings, asserting, “I don’t think I treated her badly.”
And yet, Hill doesn’t agree with him. Imagine that.
Host Joy Behar said, “Here’s your opportunity right now to just say you apologize, you’re sorry. I think we can clean this up right now.”
Biden responded, “I said privately what I said publicly, I am sorry she was treated the way she was treated.”
In other words he continued to frame it in the passive voice so that no actual people can be said to have treated her the way she was treated, especially not Joe Biden. She was treated a way, a way that can’t be specified, a way that apparently had nothing to do with any human agents. Biden feels just rotten about that way. Bad bad way – let’s all get together and scold it.
Moira Donegan at the Guardian is not impressed.
In the past, Biden, under pressure from women’s rights activists and a Democratic base increasingly intolerant of sexual misconduct, has spoken of the Thomas hearings in passive terms, as something that happened rather than as something he did. At an event in New York in March, he said: “To this day, I regret I couldn’t give her the kind of hearing she deserved. I wish I could have done something.” Like his announcement, this statement partakes of a kind of rosy historical revisionism, one that conveniently absolved Biden of all responsibility. Because he absolutely could have, in his words, “done something”. He was the chairman of the committee overseeing the hearings. There was no one with more power to “do something” than him.
Biden’s non-apology to Hill, coming as it did 28 years after the disastrous hearings, six months after a similarly humiliating and futile ordeal was endured by Dr Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, and mere days before Biden’s own presidential run, smacks of insincere opportunism. He seems to understand Hill as an annoying obstacle to his own rise, rather than as a full person with rights and dignity, whom he wronged and should make amends to.
His insistent use of the passive voice, meanwhile, makes him appear to lack an understanding of his own agency and power, like someone who will exaggerate his responsibilities for successes and disavow any role in missteps, wrongdoings and failures. As the journalist Bryce Covert put it: “There’s a huge difference between ‘I’m sorry for what I did’, and ‘I’m sorry that happened to you’.” In failing to grapple with his own blind spots, privileges, prejudices and personal failures, Biden has betrayed a lack of personal responsibility that in unacceptable in any adult, let alone in a national leader. The episode does not make Biden seem like a responsible, self-aware man who had learned from his mistakes and wants to make amends. It makes him seem like a man who wants to shut a woman up.
I wish someone could shut him up.
Wait, haven’t you already got one of those?
I’m a middle aged white dude who had hoped he wouldn’t run (but not American, so not really able to influence things vote-wise in any case). Can the baton be passed to someone else, please? Can he set his ego aside, step out of the spotlight, and let others do the work that needs to be done? If he wants to help, do so in the background. If someone asks him about what direction things should go, let him direct attention to faces and voices other than his own. Will someone please tell him to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down?
Ugh! The passive voice stuff! In that magical world where things just magically happen with no human agents behind those happenings. Years and years ago, when those “court TV” shows were big, I saw a man trying to get a more lenient sentence out of a judge after being convicted of picking up and gang-raping a prostitute with a group of friends. He was all passive voice and terribly sorry that he “FOUND HIMSELF” in such a horrible situation. Like he and his buddies were out for a charity walk to raise funds for the local orphanage and that mean old prostitute just fell out of the sky. Erugh! I can’t even!
Thank you YNNB? I was just going to write that, with more swears and less thought. Why the fuck is he even running.
Looks like the next presidential election will present America with the usual situation. Razzamatazz and ballyhoo galore through the primaries and the campaign, and then finally an opportunity for the voters to select the candidate who in their opinion is the least worst. (That is, apart from Trump, who is in a class of his own and who probably makes both God and the Devil uneasy. The latter probably wonders if Donald would be an asset or a liability in Hell.)
In the immortal words of Hud, as played by Paul Newman, “by the time you have separated the saints from the sinners, you are lucky if you’re left with Abe Lincoln.”
What does he think that he brings to the table that the other candidates don’t?
The fact that he’s Joe Biden. It’s just sheer entitlement, that’s all.
Money. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/26/biden-fundraising-numbers-2020-1291180
Electability (though how much more than the other leading candidates I’m not sure)… He’s s lot more interesting to the subset of olds that are turned off by people who give a shit about Anita Hill, presumably including the arseholes that gave Trump Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (?).
That’s really the only case he can really make for himself; dunno if he’s correct.
Omar, the devil will never let Trump into hell. He’d be afraid Trump would coat the place with faux gold and put the Trump brand all over it. Great way to destroy the value of the real estate.