On Friday’s “Real Time,” Bill Maher waded into the accusation by former Senate staffer Tara Reade that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. And in his view, whatever truth of the matter turns out to be, it’s not worth destroying Biden’s candidacy if it gives Donald Trump another four years.
“Just because Fox News is obsessed with the Biden sex assault allegations, it doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be,” Maher said, kicking off the final part of his weekly “New Rules” segment. “You may have noticed that Donald Trump has one move” accuse you of the very thing he’s guilty of. ‘Puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.’ Remember that one?”
In Maher’s view, Reade’s accusations essentially turn Trump’s infamous ‘grab them by the p—-y’ comments around and fling them at Biden. “Not that he even needs to say it,” Maher said about Trump. “The ‘liberal media’ and liberal party is doing it for him. Exactly what Republicans want. For us to go down the rabbit hole of ‘Joe Biden, sex monster.’ So now everybody’s investigating, but there is no fact-finding here.”
“It’s a ‘he said, she said, she said something else entirely,’” Maher continued, referencing the apparent inconsistencies in Reade’s story. “Yes, Biden’s accuser, Tara Reade, has been contradicted by multiple people. Most importantly, Tara Reade. Just last year, she said of Biden, ‘I wasn’t scared of him, that he was going to take me in a room or anything. It wasn’t that kind of vibe.’”
“She suggested she had filed a sexual harassment report. Now, she says she didn’t. She says she was fired by Biden’s office, but in deleted posts she said she left because quote, ‘I love Russia with all my heart… President Putin scares the power elite in America because he is a compassionate, caring, visionary leader. His obvious reverence for women, children and animals, and his ability with sports is intoxicating to American women,’” Maher continued.
Reade’s attorney, Douglas H. Wigdor, responded to Maher’s comments, telling TheWrap in a statement: “Sadly, Bill Maher has decided to recycle old rape myths. He ought to be ashamed, and I expect that those who believe in the #metoo movement will join me in condemning him for his hurtful words that, unfortunately, will act as a deterrent to survivors that grapple with coming forward because of comments such as his.”
Maher then complained that “we’re letting this person change the subject from ‘Donald Trump, lethal incompetent’ to ‘Joe Biden, sex monster’? She literally wrote a love letter to the murderer trying to keep Biden from the White House,” referencing the extrajudicial murders carried out on foreign soil linked to Putin.
“Yet the New York Times is calling for the DNC to establish a truth panel on this. Truth panel, huh? Which part? Putin’s reverence for animals, or how intoxicating he is to women? And Democrats are coalescing around the position that this accusation must be thoroughly vetted for the party to keep its credibility.”
“Well, you know credibility certainly is a problem for the Party on this issue,” Maher said, arguing that Democrats “‘woke’ themselves into a corner when they adopted #BelieveWomen as their slogan when it should always have been #TakeAccusationsSeriously. Kirsten Gillibrand said of the Al Franken allegations, ‘The women who came forward felt it was sexual harassment, so it was.’”
“That was never tenable because believing everything doesn’t make you noble,” Maher continued. “It makes you gullible and leaves us with the world where Republicans don’t care about this stuff. So it’s just a unilateral weapon that is used only against Democrats. Trump rides the bus with Billy Bush, we throw Al Franken under it.”
Sidenote: While Gillibrand joined several other Democratic members of congress when she called on Franken to resign, he was never formally expelled. He was however accused by at least eight women of inappropriate behavior.
“You know Democrats are the party of choice,” Maher added. “We can choose not to completely f— ourselves over this. I know it’s a sex scandal and in normal times that’s what we do instead of issues, but there are actually some pretty big problems going on right now. I don’t know if you noticed but America has turned into a failed state that does a worse job keeping it citizens alive during a pandemic than Cambodia.”
“And to me, that’s a little more important than Tara Reade achieving closure. She says Biden attacked her, and he says he didn’t. Those are their positions. How about this for yours? Don’t know, never will, don’t care,” Maher said. “I care in the macro about women being attacked, of course, but on this one, I’m with Bogey, who said, ‘I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.’”
“Everybody says we need to do everything we can to defeat Trump. Yeah, except anything. Well, I’m no good at being noble either, but if in 1993 Joe Biden had grabbed my nuts in a corridor — and I was in Washington that year — and I had this knowledge, and revealing it could hurt the guy running against Trump, I’d save it for my memoirs,” Maher joked. “I’d like to think that I’d have a little more perspective.”
“We have a president who says drink bleach,” Maher noted, referring to when Trump literally suggested that people could inject disinfectant into their bodies to treat coronavirus. “Jeez, you waited 27 years. It couldn’t hold another few months? That’s what I would like to ask Ms. Reade. Why now? I’m not saying, ‘Why not 27 years ago?’ I understand. It can take victims years to come forward. I’m saying why not before Super Tuesday?”
“Why not last fall when we still had a dozen other candidates to choose from. Why wait until Biden is our only hope against Trump, and then take him down,” Maher concluded. “This story is gathering an importance it should not have. There is so much at stake in this next election. The entire world needs to be put back together like Humpty Dumpty. Why should one person’s victimhood trump everyone else’s?”