Easily the most hands-on vice president the United States has ever seen, Joe Biden’s creepy old man behavior is finally catching up with him.
After decades of snuggling up to, hugging, sniffing, and kissing unsuspecting, helpless women of all ages, the avuncular, gaffe-prone 76-year-old politician has suddenly come under attack for two such examples of unwanted touching that allegedly took place in Nevada in 2014 and in Connecticut in 2009.
Lucy Flores, the Democrats’ nominee for lieutenant governor of Nevada five years ago, wrote an essay March 29 at something called The Cut detailing how she endured undesired touching by Biden who had come to her campaign event to lend a hand.
Contenders for the 2020 Democrat presidential nod are distancing themselves from Biden. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn) both said they have “no reason not to believe” Flores. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro also said they “believe” Flores. Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said the allegations about Biden are “very disconcerting.”
Flores’ story apparently inspired Amy Lappos to go public Monday with a claim that Biden touched her inappropriately at a fundraiser for Rep. Jim Hines (D-Conn.).
“It wasn’t sexual, but he did grab me by the head,” Lappos, a congressional aide to Hines at the time of the incident, told the Hartford Courant on April 1. “He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth.”
“I never filed a complaint, to be honest, because he was the vice president. I was a nobody,” Lappos said. “There’s absolutely a line of decency. There’s a line of respect. Crossing that line is not grandfatherly. It’s not cultural. It’s not affection. It’s sexism or misogyny.”
So far the complaint by Flores has made a bigger splash than the one by Lappos. This is at least in part because of the opportune timing of Flores’ article, which allowed all sorts of ambitious Democrats to stampede their way onto Sunday TV talk shows to denounce Biden.
According to Flores, back in 2014 after she found her way to the holding room for rally speakers at a union hall in Las Vegas, “we were ushered to the side of the stage where we were lined up by order of introduction.”
She continued:
As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. “Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?”
I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual fuck? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, “tragame tierra,” it means, “earth, swallow me whole.” I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me. My name was called and I was never happier to get on stage in front of an audience.
Instead of feeling empowered and energized, Biden made her feel “uneasy, gross, and confused.”
The U.S. vice president “had just touched me in an intimate way reserved for close friends, family, or romantic partners — and I felt powerless to do anything about it.”
Biden “stopped treating me like a peer the moment he touched me. Even if his behavior wasn’t violent or sexual, it was demeaning and disrespectful. I wasn’t attending the rally as his mentee or even his friend; I was there as the most qualified person for the job.”
“If Biden and I worked together in a traditional office, I would have complained to the HR department, but on the campaign trail, there’s no clear path for what to do when a powerful man crosses the line. In politics, you shrug it off, smile for the cameras, and get back to the task of trying to win your race.”
Caught with his pants down, so to speak, Biden, a perennial favorite of Democrats who would be a serious contender should he seek his party’s 2020 presidential nomination, offered a hard-to-believe statement to the media regarding Flores’ allegation, a statement his office repeated when the Hartford Courant asked him about the Lappos claim.
“In my many years on the campaign trail and in public life, I have offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort,” Biden said.
“And not once – never – did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention. I may not recall these moments the same way, and I may be surprised at what I hear. But we have arrived at an important time when women feel they can and should relate their experiences, and men should pay attention. And I will.”
Serial rapist Bill Clinton provided a similar statement on Jan. 26, 1998, when confronted about his affair with a young White House intern.
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie. Not a single time. Never. These allegations are false and I need to go back to work for the American people.”
Except Biden, who has falsely claimed at least twice that a drunk driver killed his first wife, is even less believable than Clinton was.
Biden’s groping and prurient pawing of women in public is well-documented.
Jeremy Lott, author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency, was mildly sympathetic to Biden’s plight.
“Some people are more tactile than others, and I think we should allow a bit of leeway for that,” Lott told FrontPage.
“‘He hugged me!’ Uh, sorry but so what? But when I’ve seen pictures of some of the public liberties Uncle Joe has taken with over the years, well, it’s not a surprise that it would come back to pinch his electoral buttcheeks now.”
In a National Review piece titled “Joe Biden is Done,” Kyle Smith may be jumping the gun a little bit, but then again, in the #MeToo age, maybe not.
Biden, Smith notes, “is a creepy old goat. Everyone knows this. There is much photographic evidence of him crossing the line with women.”
But there was never a reason before for the Democrats’ public-relations arm, also known as the mainstream media, “to hold Biden up to scrutiny.”
“When he became veep, any attack on Biden risked looking like casting aspersions on the man who made him his number two, and the media could not countenance any naysaying about the judgment of the Precious.”
But now that Democrats have a smorgasbord of options for 2020, there is no reason to hold back. “All of this goes away as soon as the Democratic pick for 2020 becomes evident, but until then we’ll be seeing some actual vigorous reporting,” Smith writes.
Smith is right.
But there is also a racial animus at play. Biden is unlucky to be white in an epoch of identity politics-driven political correctness.
Democrats hate white people and white men in particular, and they reserve a special place in the depths of Hell for dead and nearly-dead white men. Make the white man an unctuous elderly creep who can’t keep his hands off vulnerable women forced to endure humiliation at his finely manicured hands in public ceremonies, and it’s just a matter of time before he hangs from the nearest lamppost.
So it was just a matter of time before the #MeToo brigades came for poor old Uncle Joe.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared April 2, 2019, at FrontPageMag.