VDH dissects the quagmire that Herman Cain has found himself in. “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter”, well, read it:
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here,” is the placard that raderman Cain must have read last week when he descended into the Sexual Harassment Inferno, from which he has not yet emerged.
I thought it was only a matter of when, not whether, Gloria Allred, the leftwing billboard lawyer, would show up at a press conference with more “evidence” of Cain’s “serial” transgressions against the meek and defenseless of yesteryear. All the usual Allred landmarks were there: her crass quip, “stimulus package”; the “no-questions” evasion of cross-examination; the long-distant, heretofore-dormant act of harassment some 14 years in the past, whose graphic details were not shared at the time even with close friends, but are now oddly to be disclosed to 300 million.
Odd, that. But then, women are like that (was that insensitive of me? Oh, my!). Whither do we go from here:
As of now, Cain has confessed only to expressing admiration for a female worker’s height, as best he can remember that remark and perhaps others some years back. Most establishment conservatives — perhaps mindful of the fates of Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle — don’t necessarily disbelieve Cain but do feel that four or five “victims” are too many and that Cain’s responses are too sloppy. He thus should confess at least to a married roving eye, or perhaps even leave the race — and thereby ensure that a Ross Perot–like tea-party candidate without any political experience won’t blow an otherwise good Republican chance to unseat Barack Obama.
Cain’s supporters bewail the unfairness of it all — the three previous anonymous accusers, the fourth identified when coaxed by Gloria Allred, a fifth, and who knows how many more, who years later suddenly feel pangs of conscience — as they reckon up the relative media uninterest in sex-poodle Al Gore, the serial wenching of Bill Clinton, or Eliot Spitzer’s prostituting — not to mention the fact that the National Enquirer was alone in breaking the John Edwards love-child story. All that is in antithesis to the supposed sex talk of Clarence Thomas, Donna Brazile’s demand for George H. W. Bush to “’fess up” about a supposed affair, or the rumors that were floated about Dan Quayle, who supposedly had danced “extremely close and suggestively” with a Washington lobbyist.
Ah, yes, the foibles of powerful men. men, men, men! Men should be under watch, 24-7-365. They need to be in PC Prison, or at least all of them need to be on Parole, to be revoked any time any woman feels the least bit uncomfortable. VDH asks the question I’ve been wondering about:
Cain, who has not as of yet actually been accused of engaging in sexual intercourse with a female subordinate, finds himself in the “sexual harassment” labyrinth, from which there are few paths out in the present era. The idea of “sexual harassment” started out as a noble enough effort to stop the proverbial casting couch — to stop mostly older men in positions of power from coercing younger women to acquiesce in sex in return for, at worst, keeping their job, or, at best, getting a promotion. One then wonders why Ms. Bialek did not simply lodge just such a complaint against Cain 14 years ago — since his supposed efforts to force himself on her would clearly have been a violation of her person, a criminal assault well beyond sexual harassment.
Sexual assault is what Ms.Bialek (however you pronounce her name) alledges. That is a serious thing, but she has treated it most unseriously. 14 years? Was she too traumatized to call the police? Yet now she shares it with the masses, courtesy of a compliant Media machine that wants to destroy Conservatives with the mindless voracity that Napoleon wanted to conquer Russia.
He continues, a little down the page:
In Phase III of the evolution of sexual harassment, sex was sometimes absent altogether — as we see in many of the latest Cain charges. Mere inference, attitude, or a single word was enough to destroy a career. I have also seen sexual-harassment charges in academia hinge on the strong odor of a male colleague’s cologne, or a supposed overhearing of what was meant to be a private conversation. In both cases, the supposed victims were not required to come forward and be identified. They filed their complaints “to put on notice” a dean or department chairman of “a potential problem” — a fallback position should a publication record not quite earn tenure.
The power of such inferences is based on the transformation of a subjective female response into an unanswerable “Guilty until proven guilty” charge of, essentially, being male in a world that the female of the species wishes to dominate.
Read the whole thing. As usual, VDH tears them a new one. He doesn’t hold out much hope for Herman Cain, though. Neither do I, really. My hopes for this election are few, and my regrets many. Obama is the most vulnerable President since Hoover, but we may prove to have a weaker field than Hoover faced.
Tags: Herman Cain, VDH
