Politics over evidence

We can engage if we want in a full public airing of the allegation of sexual assault coming from Tara Reade against Joe Biden.

But it will not matter. People will base their conclusions not on the evidence but their political biases. They will not arrive at conclusions. They will start with a conclusion and rationalize backward.

Biden will soon select a female running mate who will have deemed Bret Kavanaugh guilty of sexual assault but will explain that Biden is different.

She will say she looked into Joe’s soul and saw innocence, unlike the time she looked into Kavanaugh’s soul and smelled beer.

Female leaders in the MeToo movement will explain that they never said all women had to be believed in all respects. They will say they agree with Joe that all women deserve the respect of a fair hearing.

Republicans who defended Donald Trump, Clarence Thomas and Kavanaugh will decry hypocrisy in Democrats who defend Biden.

Liberal women will defend Democrats, and evangelical religious conservatives will defend Republicans. And the band will play on. Either way, a male accused of sexual assault against a woman or women will be the next president of the United States.

That will preserve a balance of power. Two men accused of sexual misbehavior sit on the United States Supreme Court for life, participating in rulings deciding the rights of women to be in charge of bodies these two justices are accused of being abusive toward or sexually harassing about.

For politicians, which is not to say for movie moguls or corporate executives, men facing charges of harassing sexual behavior toward women inevitably ascend to or hold high office.

Unless they are Al Franken. Men in politics formerly in comedy must live by Weinstein rules, one supposes.

Compare and contrast what you choose to believe with my belief choices:

■ Paula Jones was telling mostly the truth that Bill Clinton got the state police to usher her up to a hotel room so he could make some kind of sexual advance, which left her frightened and flattered in a blend that confused her.

■ Kathleen Willey was telling the truth when she said she went in to see Clinton in the Oval Office to seek a promotion because she needed more money, and somehow wound up with the president making a move on her.

■ Clarence Thomas made crude sexual references about pornography to Anita Hill in workplaces at the federal Education Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

■ Christine Blasey Ford is mostly accurate in her telling of the boy Kavanaugh’s near-comatose drunken assault on her at a beer bash. Getting the year wrong is less significant than her recollection of a boy pinning her. We all have vivid recollections we cannot clearly tie to the calendar.

■ Biden is entirely too handsy but did not assault Reade in the way she now describes, which is different from what she previously described.

■ Donald Trump is believable on nothing, including that he grabbed ever-willing women uninvited by the you-know. He is full of it, a crude and disgusting blowhard, a pathological addict of celebrity and braggadocio. He so boasted not because he had ever made that brazen move but because he thought it made him seem cool to say he did to the television personality with whom he was smoke-blowing.

He never dreamed it would all get played publicly a few weeks before he would get elected president because 63 million voters did not care. Somehow, they thought Hillary Clinton was unimaginably even less worthy of the presidency, perhaps because she never divorced the radiator-overheating cad they twice elected president.

If all of you are mad about something or other in that recitation, then I am feeling confident of objectivity and accuracy.

So let us now set the stage for a moment to occur in a presidential debate this fall. The candidates will be asked about sexual-assault accusations against them. Biden will say he respects the charge but that it is false in his case and that he never admitted any such behavior as Trump has. Trump will say he never admitted anything but just shot off his mouth in locker-room talk.

Biden will say he can easily believe that Trump would shoot off his mouth. Trump will say shooting off one’s mouth is one thing Biden knows about.

And America will have been edified.

It is good that we are reforming, if clumsily and unequally, on male sexual behavior toward women. But politics provides the last evidence of the reform. Sexual harassment and assault are less important to American voters than whether their political and cultural leaning is left or right.

We do our politics the way Southern college football fans do their rooting. We say our boys will be boys but that theirs ought to be suspended.