I liked Herman Cain before this current difficulty, and I like him now.
I don’t believe he did it. And even if he did do it, I’m not bothered enough to dump him.
The worst-case scenario is that 15 years ago he propositioned some women. If so, that’s between him and his wife.
But I don’t believe this is about passion.
This is about politics.
And this isn’t just a high-tech lynching, it is a coup by innuendo. Because Herman Cain isn’t really the victim here.
We are.
As the reporters race around hyperventilating, trying to bring this man down – pushed on by whatever campaign orchestrated this – the intent is to cheat democracy.
This isn’t about workplace harassment.
This is about stealing an election.
Either Barack Obama or Rick Perry or Mitt Romney, threatened by Herman Cain’s success in the polls, decided to play the nuclear card. And these accusations – real or trumped up – were leaked for the purpose of removing Herman Cain as a candidate.
Sure, that hurts him.
But nowhere near as much as it hurts those of us who would have voted for him.
See, the real point is that this information and this controversy were manufactured to make sure Herman Cain didn’t become the president of the United States. The whole thing was cooked up to take an option away from voters.
That makes voters the victims.
As well as our Republic and its electoral system. When the system is cheated or manipulated, we have been oppressed, just as surely as if some palace intrigue had poisoned the prince. When you take a candidate away from the voters, you are taking freedom away from the voters.
You are subverting the Constitution and fundamentally damaging our way of life and governance. If there is no choice, your vote is meaningless.
It’s a big deal.
Now, let’s get to the accusations.
First, an accusation without an accuser or a specific claim, is bull crud. Nameless women claiming unspecified things are not credible.
Period.
Now, as to the bleach blonde who came out with Gloria Allred. She doesn’t seem credible. I can’t say if she’s telling the truth or not, I wasn’t there. But her background and her story raise real questions.
She seems to be a schemer, always working an angle. Her life seems to hop from controversy to controversy.
That doesn’t mean she’s lying, but it doesn’t help her credibility.
Neither does the way she told her story.
She claims that after dinner and drinks, Herman Cain drove her someplace and then put his hand on her thigh and attempted to slide it up her dress, and that he tried to push her head toward his lap.
Maybe those things happened. Like I said, I wasn’t there. He says no, she says yes.
But it strikes me as odd that those things would happen in a vacuum.
Typically, I think the hand up the dress comes after a fair amount of kissing and boob squeezing. There is an order of escalation to these things, as I understand, and I think human experience shows there’s a fair amount of logic in that first base-second base-third base-home plate progression we heard about when we were young.
Further, I think the push-the-head-toward-the-lap thing makes more sense when one or both people are in some stage of at least partial undress.
Don’t make me get graphic.
But the notion that this guy tries to get somewhere with this girl and his play is to immediately go gyno or try to physically suggest some intimate act, I’m not sure that is the most likely course of events. Perhaps. But more commonly, I believe there is an escalating pattern of seduction and arousal. Physical contact between two people tends to build, and liberties are built upon other liberties.
Maybe a guy would just get grabby like that, but experience would seem to teach him that he’s not going to get anywhere that way.
I don’t want to be crude or inappropriate, but in the context of two folks together alone in a car, and one of those folks is hoping to get something sexual from the other, there probably are some typical patterns of events.
The events described by Herman Cain’s accuser do not fit those patterns.
Quite possibly, she’s leaving out part of the story – that they were making out and were engaged in some level of physical intimacy – or she’s lying. The first would indicate that she was a willing participant, to a point, and only objected when that point was about to be passed – which is a normal human interaction, not an act of sexual harassment.
Or she’s lying.
Which is, to my way of thinking, more likely.
Personally, I believe Herman Cain.
His sense of moral indignation seems real. The passion of his denunciation of these claims strikes me as genuine.
I believe him.
I know that is subjective, and others might feel otherwise, but I believe him.
And I support him.
And I hope I get the chance to vote for him.
And I hope that we are smart enough not to let this media circus derail us or destroy him. I hope we can recognize an ambush when we see it.
I hope we can be smart enough not to be manipulated by politicians who are afraid of this man’s ideas.
If they want to fight Herman Cain, let them do so. But let them do it fair and square.
