filed under: move on

I have written several posts recently discussing Herman Cain's bid for the presidency.  His case interests me because it is one of those cases that come along once in a while in American politics that muddy the usual partisan waters.  Think Terry Schiavo or Monica Lewinsky.  Folks are trying to find a way to line up so that their glaring hypocrisies do not show and they can still get the outcome they desire.  In the case of Schiavo, liberals who argued that women have an unassailable right to decide what to do with their own bodies suddenly found themselves having to find a way to justify allowing a husband to pull the plug on his vegetative wife's life support so that they could get at the real nut, which was opposing the nuts who believe in the sanctity of life.  In the case of Lewinsky, it came down to conservatives who had spent the better part of a decade arguing that sexual harassment was a trumped up political wedge issue suddenly trying to use that wedge to bring down the Clinton Administration.  For better or worse, the liberals won both of those arguments.

Which brings us to Mr. Cain.  I will say here that I do not support Cain for President -- not because he is, as has been claimed by the pundit class class recently, an Uncle Tom, but because he seems to me to be the crazy uncle in the corner.  He simply doesn't make much sense.  He is incoherent.  And I don't think he is what we need right now.

That said, I am unwilling to live in a society where there is one set of rules for one class of people and another for everyone else.  So I would take a moment here to ask a very simple question:  Even if Mr. Cain was involved in a suit for sexual harassment in which his organization paid out, as has been reported, a $35,000 settlement to a woman who claimed he made her uncomfortable with his advances... so what?

Didn't Bill Clinton put the nail in this coffin once and for all?  Didn't the fact that he paid out $800,000 to Paula Jones in a settlement over the very same issue without ever for one moment, according to the left, losing his credibility and legitimacy as President, set a hard and fast rule that settling on a sexual harassment claim is not a preclusion to serving as President?

If you want to oppose Cain, oppose him, as I do, on policy grounds.  But sexual harassment?  Move on, America.  One is tempted to say... Move on dot org.

(See also here: link)