Why didn't this come up when Cain ran for President in 2000? Why didn't it come up when he ran for the Senate in 2004? Why only now?
It stinks and anyone with a bit of critical thinking and skepticism can see it....
It actually did come up. Cain finally had to admit that he had discussed the employment complaints with his advisor in the 2004 race, and this was what he used to blame the Perry campaign (because he said that the adviser had later at some point worked for Perry and therefore must have been the one who alerted Politico). So note that he never explained his side of the complaints but simply went on to blame someone - with no foundation - for "leaking" it. The reason it was not used by the Dems as an issue at the time was because they didn't need to: Cain ran disastrously and lost by a huge margin, so he was never really a serious contender.
As for the confidentiality agreement, IIRC shortly after this started, the NRA said it would be willing to release the parties. Both parties have to agree to that, however, and I suspect that Cain did not. Or at any rate, if he did, he's not talking about it, even though he would also be free to do so.
That said, I don't want to go over the details again. I think the point of the article is the important thing, which is that we are behaving just like the Democrats and we are engaging in exactly the same tactics as the left and we are even proudly proclaiming that if it's our boy we're talking about, we don't care about either our character or his.