Joe Biden is facing intense scrutiny for behavior that he has been exhibiting in public, including on the world s largest stage, for the past 40 years. If I didn t know any better, I would say that maybe this is just a cynical attack. But what do I know? We will analyze Joe Biden s moment.
00:07:08.840Joe Biden comes up behind her, puts his hands on her shoulders, smells her hair, which is pretty weird, and then gives her a kiss on the back of the head.
00:08:32.520Yes, of course, I want him to change his behavior.
00:08:34.640And I want him to acknowledge that it was wrong.
00:08:37.580And I want this to be a bigger discussion about how there is no accountability structure within our political space, either for for instances in which women feel that there was inappropriate behavior or more serious instances in allegations of sexual assault, etc.
00:08:56.620We are we are we are not protected in politics and frankly, on a much larger scale.
00:09:04.360We also need to have a conversation about powerful men feeling that they have that they have the right to invade a woman's space whenever they'd like.
00:09:23.960That's whenever someone says and the larger point, what they're really saying is this particular instance, don't pay too much attention to.
00:09:35.420One of the women in one of the most famous creepy Joe massaging your shoulders moments, Stephanie Carter, is calling this B.S. as well.
00:09:44.500You'll remember when Ash Carter was being sworn in as secretary of defense, his wife was there and Joe Biden was very creepily sort of massaging her shoulders and whispering something in her ear.
00:10:47.420And then she goes on to explain why it's B.S.
00:10:49.560So Stephanie Carter is explaining this moment here.
00:10:52.260She says, by the time then Vice President Biden had arrived, he could sense I was uncharacteristically nervous and quickly gave me a hug.
00:11:01.020After the swearing in, as Ash was giving remarks, he leaned in to tell me, thank you for letting him do this, and kept his hands on my shoulders as a means of offering his support.
00:11:09.280But a still shot taken from a video, misleadingly extracted from what was a longer moment between close friends, sent out in a snarky tweet, came to be the lasting image of the day.
00:11:22.340Stephanie Carter is not the only woman defending Joe Biden.
00:11:25.120Here's Mika Brzezinski defending Joe Biden as well on Morning Joe.
00:11:45.360He is extremely affectionate, extremely flirtatious in a completely safe way.
00:11:52.880I am sure that somebody can misconstrue something he's done, but as much as I can know what's in anyone's heart, I don't think that there's a bad intent on his part at all.
00:12:07.080And I read the account, and I was like, yeah, that's Joe Biden, but never thought for a second that he meant anything from it except to be nice, to be kind.
00:12:16.840So she's defending him, and now I get why conservatives want to pounce on the Joe Biden story, because Joe Biden is a jerk, because there's a total double standard.
00:12:28.600Imagine if a Republican politician was massaging girls' shoulders and smelling their hair and stuff at campaign stops.
00:12:35.960The guy would be crucified in the mainstream media.
00:12:38.440But because Joe Biden is Joe Biden, and because he's a Democrat, Mika Brzezinski says, oh, he's a great guy.
00:12:43.620The Washington Post says he's a nice guy.
00:12:46.420The Washington Post headline on this was, quote, Joe Biden's affectionate physical style with women comes under scrutiny.
00:12:53.700Imagine what they would say about a Republican.
00:12:55.680They'd say, this predator, this assailant was endangering the lives of women.
00:14:57.700Admittedly, it's weird behavior that is no longer acceptable on campaign trails or elsewhere.
00:15:04.640However, however, the question is, is Joe Biden a sexual predator, or is Joe Biden an overly flirtatious, kind of weird, awkward, somewhat creepy politician?
00:15:29.760How many politicians have sex scandals?
00:15:31.600How many have mistresses, illegitimate kids, their Elliot Spitzer going to $15,000 hookers every night, Bill Clinton obviously sleeping with every woman under the sun?
00:15:43.200All those guys have had long sex scandal histories.
00:16:22.820If Joe Biden were some crazy sexual predator deviant, would he be doing all of these things on cameras, on C-SPAN all of the time?
00:16:33.980If he thought that he were doing some sort of deviant behavior, don't you think he might have said, hey, maybe we'll get the C-SPAN cameras off before I kiss a girl on the back of the head or something?
00:16:45.000And if there was that image in or that part of Paul Joseph Watson's video where he's talking to the teenage girl, the daughter of the senator, and he says, you know, if I were a younger man, I want to get a picture with you.
00:16:56.460Is he really saying, I want to date a 16-year-old?
00:17:00.960I, a 70-year-old man, I, the vice president of the United States, really want to date a 16-year-old?
00:17:06.500Or is he being an overly flirtatious, unctuous politician?
00:17:13.120When we're all being honest with ourselves, we know it's the latter, but we don't want to admit that because we don't like Joe Biden and we want to take him down a peg.
00:17:20.780And it's particularly enjoyable because in this case, it's not Republicans going after him, it's the left that's going after him.
00:18:08.380If Joe Biden had said, I'm not going to run for president, do you think Elizabeth Warren would be coming out saying, we need a full investigation?
00:18:14.560We need to figure out what Joe Biden's been doing?
00:18:20.680But I think this is the bad, it's a bad route to go down.
00:18:24.280One, because most people know that this is fairly disingenuous.
00:18:28.160Two, because it minimizes actual sexual assailants.
00:18:31.860Like, I don't know, Anthony Weiner, for instance, or Bill Clinton, who legitimately are sexual predators.
00:18:37.140And Joe Biden is a flirtatious guy who says, hey, you, if I were a younger man, if I wasn't married, ha, ha, wink, wink, give me your vote, father, ha, ha, ha.
00:19:30.500But not some disingenuous Me Too hit job.
00:19:34.400Why didn't this girl, Lucy Flores, why didn't she go after Joe Biden in 2014 when she was having him help her run for lieutenant governor of Nevada?
00:19:46.680Why didn't she go after him in 2016 when she was running for Congress?
00:20:39.960He's being accused of putting his hands on people's shoulders and smelling their hair, super weird but not sexual assault, and kissing them on the head sometimes.
00:20:54.480Also, if you were kissing them on the mouth, that's one thing.
00:20:57.020But when you see your grandfather, your grandfather might give you a little kiss on the head.
00:21:05.100When you see someone just at an event, let's say it's a professional event or a personal social event, you can shake a hand, I guess you can give them a high five, or you can do what is very common, which is a sort of half hug and a little kiss on the cheek, but you're not really kissing on the cheek.
00:21:20.980You're just putting your cheeks together and sort of kissing out in the air and giving the sound of a kiss.
00:21:25.500It's vaguely European, but people do it all the time.
00:22:06.060If he does get the nomination, he's not going to beat Donald Trump.
00:22:09.580We don't need to use this cynical attack because what it will do is legitimize the worst excesses of the Me Too movement.
00:22:18.460I know people who have been Me Too, legitimately Me Too, like men have sexually harassed them at work,
00:22:24.400and it's caused them personal distress and professional distress.
00:22:28.380We should not water down legitimate instances of that by allowing people, consequence-free, to use sexual assault, whatever that means these days, as a political cudgel to attack your opponents.
00:23:10.480Speaking of fair attacks, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was on MSNBC for a town hall just the other day.
00:23:20.520It is, I wish we could play the whole thing, because you could go through every sentence and parse every single sentence of it.
00:23:27.360But here she is, for the first time, addressing her most radical proposal, which has now been embraced by every candidate virtually running for president as a Democrat.
00:23:39.200It is being co-sponsored by every Senate Democrat who's running for president, and yet not a single person in the Senate voted for the Green New Deal, and she encouraged them not to.
00:23:50.520Here is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trying to explain the bungled rollout of her signature policy proposal.
00:23:59.620I mean, on the concern trolling, there are people that you guys issued an FAQ.
00:24:03.620It had some things that people thought were ridiculous and radical, like anyone that was unable or unwilling to work would be guaranteed a job.
00:24:09.820The FAQ was withdrawn and said it was preliminary, a draft.
00:24:18.140What I will say is that I definitely had a staffer that had a very bad day at work and did release a working draft early.
00:24:27.980So I get that that's what they're seizing on.
00:24:31.080But really what we need to do is have a serious conversation.
00:24:35.140And and and even in in those draft versions, what they were talking about and is really about the fact that we need to innovate on our technology.
00:24:47.740You know, obviously, like I had a staffer, you know, police a document to talk about cow flatulence.
00:25:20.280That's weak sauce even when it's true.
00:25:22.300This obviously is not true because she's saying I oppose the Green New Deal now.
00:25:28.560She's saying there was draft legislation that they had been writing and then a staffer had a bad day at work and released it.
00:25:37.880First of all, what does that mean, a bad day at work?
00:25:40.380He was really angry at AOC, so he released her stupid policy proposal.
00:25:44.140Or he had a bad day by definition because he accidentally released this and then they just all accidentally touted it for several days and weeks before they had to walk it back accidentally.
00:25:59.220What was the bad day that makes you release on multiple platforms your signature policy proposal that you've been talking about for weeks that you wrote?
00:26:10.660But then the second question, which a legitimate journalist would have asked her, obviously she was talking to Chris Hayes, so that wasn't going to happen.
00:26:20.420But a real journalist would have asked her, okay, a staffer released this proposal for the Green New Deal.
00:26:28.240You now apparently are upset about that.
00:26:31.880Do you oppose the draft legislation of the Green New Deal?
00:26:35.640Do you, what specifically do you oppose in the draft legislation?
00:26:43.500Because she's saying, oh yes, no, it was draft, it was a staffer that released it.
00:33:34.100So you want to spend nearly $100 trillion on a new program.
00:33:38.660And in order to achieve that, $100 trillion, we would have to take all tax receipts to the federal government for 32 years, cancel the entire government, disband the military.
00:33:49.800For 32 years, we still probably wouldn't be able to cover it, and the entire economy would crash long, long before then.
00:33:55.680But you want to take that, the biggest spending proposal ever in American domestic spending, by a long shot.
00:34:03.860And before you do that, you want to deal with the single toughest fiscal problem facing the country.
00:34:10.720And then also before you institute the Green New Deal, you want to fix Flint, Michigan, whatever that means.
00:34:21.380I'm happy to fix Flint, Michigan, too.
00:34:23.240That's a town that's been run by Democrats for, I don't know, since the Stone Age.
00:34:26.900So I guess one way to do it is you guys should stop destroying Flint, Michigan and have decent governance, and then you'll fix it.
00:36:17.860Don't worry, though, on this stream of being factually incorrect in her moral crusades.
00:36:22.980AOC then finally puts herself into making a very clear historical claim.
00:36:30.240The one problem with that, of course, is that it's completely incorrect.
00:36:33.380When our party was boldest, the time of the New Deal, the Great Society, the Civil Rights Act, and so on, we had and carried super majorities in the House, in the Senate.
00:37:06.420I studied history in college, and I don't remember that lesson.
00:37:10.440Because the way I thought it happened is that Franklin Roosevelt died in office in 1945, and then the 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1947, two years later.
00:37:23.360That's what I guess that's just what I because I'm I'm still in the world of the what is factually correct.
00:37:28.500I didn't I guess I'm not living in this divorced, bizarro world where you're morally right, but factually incorrect.
00:37:36.060She's saying that they passed an amendment to prevent Franklin Roosevelt from being reelected.
00:37:41.880The amendment she's referring to term limits for the president was not passed until two years after Franklin Roosevelt died.
00:37:49.260The only thing that prevented Franklin Roosevelt from serving his term or being reelected was his weak ticker, which gave up while he was in his mistress's arms, speaking of Me Too and impropriety by Democrat politicians.
00:38:08.420So obviously, that's just one example.
00:38:10.580It's so obvious and easy to point to that one, because when she does make an explicit statement, she's almost always demonstrably incorrect.
00:38:16.940This is proof, though, in a broader sense, that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not a right wing creation.
00:38:24.040People say sometimes they'll say, Michael, you've written multiple columns about AOC.
00:41:36.440What she's really saying is she's Hispanic, and we're importing a ton of Hispanic immigrants, and our politics are primarily racially based here at CNN.
00:41:45.860And so she represents the future because her name is Ocasio-Cortez.