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View Full Version : NYT Columnist: We Should ‘Believe’ Women, But Only If Liberals Tell Us To



Common
11-15-2017, 06:22 PM
Liberals are flagrantly cracked

We should only believe accusations of rape vetted by qualified liberals.

So goes Michelle Goldberg’s patently absurd logic in a recent column for The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/opinion/juanita-broaddrick-bill-clinton.html). To get there, she’s forced to dismiss a dominant liberal dogma: the “absolute” that every woman deserves to be believed. Her very next step institutes a new dogma: only women who liberals believe deserve unqualified belief.
(Never mind the litany of liberally vetted women — from the Duke lacrosse accuser to Mattress Girl to Rolling Stone’s “Jackie” — whose testimonies turned out to be extremely dubious or outright false.)
Goldberg is working out a Bill Clinton problem she and many liberals have on their hands now that the mantra to “believe women” is actually toppling men, some we might like. Is there a way to celebrate and affirm the downfall of Roy Moore and others based solely on the testimonies of multiple women, while continuing to dismiss the testimonies of Clinton’s accusers?
There is, it turns out, a way, but it requires being willfully oblivious.
“Democrats are guilty of apologizing for Clinton when they shouldn’t have,” Goldberg writes. “At the same time, looking back at the smear campaign against the Clintons shows we can’t treat the feminist injunction to ‘believe women’ as absolute.”
She points to several mitigating factors in the Clinton case, which is totally fair. Yes, Republicans were out to get Clinton at the time. Yes, some of the victim testimonies were conflicting. Yes, a right-wing billionaire spent millions to fund what has been described as a “dirty tricks operation” against the Clintons at the time. The conservative media was no friend to the president, and some pushed outlandish conspiracies.
“In this environment, it would have been absurd to take accusations of assault and harassment made against Clinton at face value,” Goldberg writes. Again, totally fair point.
I have zero interest in defending Moore, but the parallels here are unavoidable. Powerful political enemies? Check. Motivated journalists and wealthy activists looking to take him out? Sure. Yet Goldberg makes almost no mention of the obvious similarities between the politically loaded context of the Clinton accusations and the context of the Moore accusations.
If the political context is what determines the validity of a woman’s testimony, we should absolutely question Moore’s accusers.

http://dailycaller.com/2017/11/14/nyt-we-should-believe-women-but-only-if-liberals-tell-us-to/