Lucy Flores with Bernie Sanders' hand on her shoulder

[highplainsdem]

11. If you'll look at other threads about this, you'll see that there are a lot of problems with her

account of the incident in her own essay about it, details that undermine her interpretation of what happened.

The more I've looked at it, the more likely I think it is that Biden never sniffed her hair or kissed the back of her head. (And btw, Flores's own story changed on the kiss detail; people were pointing out he'd have had to be kissing the top of her head, not the back, so she changed it to the top of her head this morning.) She made a point in her own essay that she hadn't washed her hair that day. It was the kind of detail she would have been unlikely to bring up unless it really bothered her.

I think it's most likely Biden was whispering something reassuring to her, at the same time he'd briefly put his hands on her shoulders in a reassuring gesture after she'd started taking deep breaths all of a sudden backstage (another detail she mentioned) and apparently had stage fright. I think she missed what he said. I think his closeness to her made her even more self-conscious about her hair and resentful of his being that close.

And then there's the statement from Henry Munoz, who organized the event and checked all the photographic documentation and spoke to nearly all the people who were there. And found nothing to back up Flores's story, even though there were lots of other people backstage when this allegedly happened.

I'm still giving Flores some benefit of the doubt here. I think it's possible her apparent stage fright led Biden to offer a quick reassurance, one lasting only a couple of seconds, one that he'd have no particular reason to remember and that anyone else who saw it would be likely to forget, too, as nothing particularly remarkable, given Biden's habit of trying to reassure and comfort people. I think some of what Flores describes happened, even though I'm sure she misinterpreted it.

But I find her timing with this accusation very suspicious, given that she's a Bernie supporter.

And I think she discredited herself using part of her essay to drag in old, debunked smears against Biden that RWers have been trying to use for years. Smears she should have known were untrue and probably knew were untrue, like the one involving Stephanie and Ash Carter, which Stephanie had to debunk yet again today.

It was a shameful thing for Flores to do.