[nathanbedford]

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.

[postt]

Why so sympathetic to those who have zero documented evidence of their supposed encounter with Cain? Yet, here is a man who has provided receipts of his encounter with Zero and gets no media coverage whatsoever. At the very least, the media should acknowledge.....”Yes, we continue to hear about Zero’s homosexual liaisons, but we refuse to report it because we have been threatened by Axel-rod, Jarret, Emanuel, Mrs Zero and Zero himself so we refuse to report it.

This is the real story. That the guy living in the white house is gay. And the media refuses to touch it even though they know it's true.

[postt]

Notice how all the anti Cain threads shut down once confronted with zero’s gayness factor. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Those who bring false charges about a conservative candidate in regards to his sexual encounters will continue to confronted with zero’s gayness and why the media has a double standard. CAIN ... full court press for the win. Because Cain can address and handle the fake media.... whereas zero’s gayness cannot. No wonder he fled the country, even he can connect the dots and knows that his gayness will eventually make it into mainstream now that these whack jobs are going after cain.

[FredZarguna]

The logic of this, frankly defies me.

First, I don't regard any of the Presidents who cheated as especially good Presidents, including Eisenhower. So, we must conclude we are virtually certain to get a mediocrity (at best) if we pick a cheater, but only likely to have an awful one 1/3 of the time if we pick a non-cheater. I have to go with the 2:1 odds.

Second, regardless of the size of a man's ego, an inability to control his sexual appetites when it endangers his career and more importantly the most important relationship in his life does matter. Being in command of things -- especially yourself -- is an important aspect of masculinity, unless you're a boy. I don't want another boy President.

Heraclitus had this right 2500 years ago: Character is destiny.

I was always darkly amused at the claims that Bill Clinton's job as President, not his urges, were what really mattered. Anyone who has ever had a skirt-chaser as either an employee or a boss knows perfectly well that it's a full time job, and the man's career is really just a hobby in pursuit of the next ankle-twist. So, the question in 1998 should probably have been did his indiscretions affect Hillary's ability to "run the country" -- an idiotic exaggeration if ever there was one -- because Bill certainly could not have been.

Third, you determine on the basis of body language that Herman Cain is lying. OK, well... that job is already taken on Ted Baxter's show, but maybe you can make your name "with the folks" by reading the entrails of a goat on Wednesday evenings.

Please be serious.

Even if we stipulate that body language can be used as an indicator of deception for the purpose of advancing this silly discussion, there's no real specificity in the technique. Maybe Cain didn't quite believe his claim that the severance package wasn't a payoff, because he doesn't want to admit there was a payoff. A lot of people don't understand that corporations will do a calculation and gladly pay $50,000 to make a liar go away, and Cain may resist admitting to a payoff that he knows full well was a payoff for that very reason. But in any event, body language? Really?

Fourth, Republicans created this mess for themselves; there I will agree with you. Since the common law, the legal fiction applied to injuries has always been that of a "reasonable person." For reasons beyond the understanding of any sane (let alone reasonable) person, there is no reasonable person standard in sexual harassment jurisprudence or settlement. What constitutes harassment varies with every individual and circumstance. This is a source of endless mischief and downright evil, and -- it goes without saying -- a tremendous gift to ambulance chasers and publicity whores such as Gloria Allred.

All that said, please note that no credible witness has yet appeared. It's not necessary to circle the wagons in defense of Cain on the basis of the everybody-does-it defense quite yet. I don't need to read body language to know that the media lies, and as long as no blue dress appears, I'm going to take Cain's word over the claims of anonymous sources, known prevaricators, and outright liars.