(Vanity) Unasked Questions: Herman Cain and Sexual Harassment

In the past week, ever since the first allegations were made public by Pollutico, GOP Presidential Candidate Herman Cain has been facing a crescendo of questions about misbehavior in his past. The funny thing is, even though the original allegations were made by "unnamed sources" -- which is usual liberal-press-speak for "I made it up" -- they were treated as serious issues. The second funny thing is that, even though the original allegations were of "offensive gestures" of a "non-sexual nature," the scandal has morphed in little more than a week to reports of FIVE cases "of sexual harrassment" in which two "settlements" were made.

Does anyone remember Anita Hill? And the high-tech lynching of Clarence Thomas? No, I'm not going to play the race card. I'd like to point out the inconsistency between THE POLITICIANS then and now.

In the Clarence Thomas affair, you may recall, Anita Hill had accused Clarence Thomas of making off-color jokes to her about a pubic hair found on a soft-drink can. Left unstated were several pertinent facts:

1) that as a black woman with an Ivy League Law degree, she was "untouchable" and nobody would have been able to fire her in that day and age except if she had been caught in flagrante delicto with Ronald Reagan on the steps of the Supreme Court building.

2) that even *after* the supposed harassment, she followed Clarence Thomas around to two or three jobs.

And yet...and yet, even with these disqualifiers, a number of Democrats championed her cause.

Where are all the Democrat heroes of the female cause giving voice to their support of Cain's accusers?

She's the one who lightly spoke of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband -- even though she had helped lead the 'bimbo eruption squad' -- until news of the stained blue dress appeared.

And then, with a deftness worthy of David Copperfield, she pirouetted into Victorian femininity. As she wrote in her book, upon hearing of Lewinsky, "...gasping for air, I could hardly breathe." One would be hard pressed to recognize this shrinking violet as the foul-mouthed ashtray hurler we had all come to know and loathe.

1) Having posited a "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" -- even though it is clear now that she believed no such thing -- are any of the press willing to entertain the concept of a "Vast Left Wing Conspiracy" ?

2) Can anyone take one look at Hillary's eyes ; or Elliot Spitzer's wife, or Jonathan Edwards's wife ; and compare them to Herman Cain's wife, and suggest for even a microsecond that Cain is guilty?

3) Speaking of guilty wives, and Hillary, what about Huma Abedin? Long rumoured to be a paramour of Mrs. Clinton, she was paired off in one of those D.C. marriages of convenience and left center stage.

And does anyone remember the response of the press, with multiple independent witnesses, and literal, self-incriminating, PHOTOGRAPHIC evidence?

Funny how Jesse Jackson (child out of wedlock) isn't defending you, Mr. Cain ; nor the Congressional Black Caucus.

But then, that's the same way it has been for well over a hundred years with the Democrats.

I would've voted for Sarah, until she declined to run (God alone knows what they threatened her family with).

It’s not 5 as they are reporting! The 5th so called person is 1 of the first 3 that refused to come forward. Bennett tried to make her come forward, but she supposedly wanted nothing to do with it. She was one that received a settlement after Herman Cain no longer worked at the NRA.

I’m even confused if there were actually 3 in the beginning or just 2. Then the 3rd or 4th Sharon Bielek which also could have been one of the 3 since Bennett (lawyer) stated that a woman called him named Sharon from the Chicago area 5 times. But she never followed through. So was she one of his original 3?

If so, we are still only dealing with 3. 2 of which allegedly took settlements from the NRA and the 1 of which called this Bennett guy and only stated her name was Sharon.

Are you confused yet?

So, really how many anonymous people were there and is the count actually only 3?

Seriously, I’m to the point where if Cain goes down over this, I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that the Republic is finished.

Not because I believe that Cain is the only guy that could possibly save it. I like him and support him, but I dont worship him.

But because of two seperate things:

1. because it means that now the media truly can pick the candidates, because if anyone they dont like decides to run, they just will bring anonymous accusation out, then two, then three, then four....and once they get so many, say “well, sure, there isn’t any proof, but with this many charges theres GOT to be something to it”, and too many of the sheeple will just blindly swallow it and move on. And voila the media has now set up every election between the Dem and the RINO.

2. it means that a person can not truly win an national elective office if they aren’t a career politician, which is so far away from what the founders intended, that maybe its time to do what the declaration suggests and abolish the present form of government, and build another a little farther out west.

I do believe that if it isn’t Cain, its going to be Romney. As cool as I am on Romney to begin with, it absolutely terrifies me that the end result is going to be that we’re going to end up with the EXACT candidate that the media told us all along that we were going to end up with, because the media set it up so we had to end up with him. It will mean that two elections in a row we’ve gone the “moderate” route, and probably the second time in a row, we’re going to lose because the same liars in the MSM that tell us that this “has” to be our candidate, then tear him to shreds in the general election agains the lib. End the end, we get the Government we deserve, and judging from the electorate, I dont like the prospects.

The conservative movement is writhing in an agony of frustration which often proceeds out of false premises.

We are lashing out at Rick Perry, Barack Obama, the media, the women, their lawyers, and, tragically, each other. We are blaming everyone except Herman Cain himself-and I do not mean for the way he has handled the accusations-and the underlying sexual harassment law.

Ultimately, the federal sexual-harassment statute and its regulatory enforcement has presumed to codify good manners. For millennia women have had to deal with sexual harassment without a federal bureaucracy to defend them. It is this ill begotten statist drive to criminalize bad manners that has led us to the point where the Republican Party is virtually alone in its vulnerability to these scandals, leaving the Democrats relatively immune.

I consider myself to be a social conservative with a contradictory and pesky libertarian streak that erupts from time to time like a virus to affect my views. So long as we have a wing of the Republican Party insisting on sexual purity among our alpha males we will suffer under this contradiction. Men do not become president of the United States without giant egos and men with great egos are men with strong sexual drives. Anticipating a howl of protest from social conservatives for my apparent rationalization of adultery by "alpha males" I offer the following:

Some people might feel that it is nice to have a chief executive who was not an adulterer. Others might ask, how does that affect me as a citizen and how does it affect the candidate in how he governs? I have looked at the presidents in the modern era and I can find no correlation between marital fidelity and what we conservatives should seek in a president.

Here is my list and my subjective analysis:

Presidents who cheated (both before and during tenure): Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton = (5).

Presidents who did not cheat: Truman, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43, Obama = (8).

By my calculations 38.4 % (nearly 4 in 10) of the modern presidents cheated.

Of those who did not cheat, Nixon, Carter, Obama (3) 37.5% were utter, unmitigated disasters as president. If we are to select our presidents by virtue of their marital fidelity, history tells us that we will get our worst presidents more than one third of the time.

Yet, like our sexual-harassment law itself, our persistence in relating marital fidelity to competence in office when history does not support that relationship, leaves the Republican Party vulnerable to real or trumped up sex scandals.

So the Republican Party is turning on itself like ravening wolves and diminishing our chances against Obama, all in pursuit of a reality that is artificial and out of keeping with our culture. That is not to say that we should not strive for the virtuous but it is to say that we should not crucify ourselves on crosses of hypocrisy.

I happen to believe that Herman Cain has committed the "offenses" alleged. I came to this conclusion watching him in an interview with Greta on Fox in which his body language betrayed a man who was lying. Since then we've had more women come forth and the odds of him telling the truth against three negotiated financial settlements and one live witness become more and more difficult to sustain. One of the anonymous women who received a settlement has conditionally offered to go public. The harder we try to support Herman Cain's increasingly unsustainable position, the more we harm ourselves.

Yet, our problem does not end there. Our history as a party is cowardly in the extreme. We abandon one champion after the other if they are merely accused of an intimation or penumbra of racism. We have seen this with Senators Lott and Alan and I have had something to say about this on my about page. Much of the "baggage" encumbering Newt Gingrich today comes from the shameful desertion of him by the party at the end of the speakership.

There has to be a time and a place where we Republicans and conservatives resolve to stand together against all of these attacks. Since I do not believe that Herman Cain is telling the truth, I do not think this is the time or the place to stake our claim to the confidence of the nation on the outcome of the scandal. I accept that when it comes to Democrats' scandal, the matter of truth is utterly irrelevant to their decision to defend their politicians. I hope we are better than that, so I think our job should be limited to defending Herman Cain's right to due process. I think we should refrain from some of the idiotic attacks on the women and especially on other Republican candidates such as Rick Perry.

We should understand that what we are doing is almost the inevitable results of the incoherence of our basic assumptions.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.