OPINION:
Sen. Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s pick for vice president. But Sen. Kamala Harris thinks Joe Biden is a woman-groper. So much for women’s rights?
“I believe them,” Harris said in April of 2019, of the women who came forward to accuse the former vice president of inappropriate touching.
“I respect them for being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it,” Harris told reporters, of the women who came forward to accuse Biden of inappropriate touching.
She was speaking of Caitlyn Caruso, of Amy Stokes Lappos, of Vail Kohnert-Yount, of D.J. Hill, of Lucy Flores — that last, a former Democratic state legislator who put her accusation against Biden in print. In a story for “The Cut,” Flores described how Biden placed his hands on her shoulders, breathed in deep on her hair and “proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head.”
Gross.
“Here are all the times Joe Biden has been accused of acting inappropriately toward women and girls,” Business Insider wrote in May, 2020. It was a lengthy story.
There were eight women whose stories of uncomfortable Biden associations were told.
“[I was] so shocked” by Biden’s “inappropriate behavior” that “it was hard to focus on what he was saying,” Kohnert-Yount told The Washington Post in April 2019. What’d he do? The then-22-year-old White House intern accused that Biden, in 2013, “put his hand on the back of my head and pressed his forehead to my forehead” and called her a “pretty girl.”
Gross.
Biden, when asked in 2019 about these accusations, said in a video “social norms” had changed.
He tweeted, “Social norms are changing. I understand that, and I’ve heard what these women are saying. Politics to me has always been about making connections, but I will be more mindful about respecting personal space in the future. That’s my responsibility and I will meet it.”
Biden, in other words, denied the accusations by simply glossing over them and painting them as the “social norms” of the times.
Harris, however, believed the women.
On Tara Reade, the woman who accused Biden of sexual assault, Harris — who was asked about the situation shortly after she dropped from the primary presidential race to become a whispered vice presidential pick for the Democratic Party — slyly, coyly, politically correctly, said only this: “[Reade] has a right to tell her story.”
But of the other women: Harris “believe[d] them.”
And now she’s running alongside Biden for the White House.
Now she’s partnering up tight with a man whom she believes is a sexual harasser. A serial sexual harasser. A pervert, a pig. Perhaps even a rapist.
Or does she? Who knows. But really, there are only a couple of conclusions that can be drawn here about Harris: Either she’s a hypocrite and has no principles. Or she’s a liar and has no principles. Or Joe Biden is actually a saint who’s been oh-so-unfairly painted by all these women — and Harris, suddenly, sees the light of his halo.
Smart money’s on the first.
Harris the hypocrite reached for the vice presidential ticket and swallowed hard. In a flash, those women were gone.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE.
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