Raise your hand if your 15 minutes are almost up (Jason Reed/Reuters)
about the
$80,000 settlements that were paid out to keep two different women quiet about their sexual harassment claims against him.
When he was accused of sexual assault, his best defense was to launch a website attacking his accusers for their financial troubles and promoting the conclusions of a crackpot "private investigator," who used his fancy machine to deduce, from watching TV, that Herman Cain was innocent of all of the many charges made against him.
And all of this was perfectly okay with conservatives.
Like John Derbyshire:
Is there anyone who thinks sexual harassment is a real thing? Is there anyone who doesn’t know it’s all a lawyers’ ramp, like “racial discrimination“? You pay a girl a compliment nowadays, she runs off and gets lawyered up. Is this any way to live?
And Laura Ingraham:
“We have seen this movie before and we know how it ends. It always ends up being an employee who can’t perform or who under-performs and is looking for a little green,” she said on her show.
And BFFs Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter:
Hannity told Coulter: “Do you realize as friends, the conversations and the things we joke about on a regular basis…do you realize in any work environment?…Because people are humorless. And I’m not saying real sexual harassment doesn’t occur. That’s not it.” Coulter replied: “But they don’t care about real sexual harassment.”
But now that one woman has claimed to have had a 13-year consensual affair with Herman Cain, those very same conservatives are tripping over themselves to toss ol' Herman under the bus:
Fox host Sean Hannity, a prominent Cain booster, said the renewed scandal “chipped away at his likability” and “created doubt in people’s mind whether or not, quote, another shoe will drop.”
And of course they're throwing in a little revisionist history while they're at it:
Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham – who initially called the disclosure that Cain had been accused of harassment an attempt to “put this man in … the back of the bus” – said on Fox Tuesday that the 2012 race had “passed him by.”
“The campaign seems to have passed Herman Cain by, right? He’s slipped precipitously in pretty much every poll,” Ingraham said, adding that Cain “never really set up the kind of organization” needed to win the Republican presidential nomination.
Republicans were only too happen to brag about Herman Cain when he was riding high. The multiple accusations from multiple women were the fault of the liberal media. Or Rick Perry. Or humorless gold-digging women. Anyone but Herman Cain.
But now? Now that his numbers are down and the oh-so-fickle base has moved on to the next Not Romney, those allegations of sexual assault may have been easily dismissed, but a consensual extramarital affair is just too much.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee declared on Fox News that White’s charge was “the most damaging allegation that has been made, to date” about Cain.
Ah, yes. An allegation that Herman Cain tried to force a woman to blow him in exchange for a job is not nearly as bad as an allegation that he had an extramarital affair. Besides, we all know Republicans hate to make a federal case out of one innocent blowjob, right?
Obviously, sexual assault is just a joke among friends, but a consensual affair? Totally unacceptable. It's the other shoe, the nail in the coffin, the bridge too far. Sure, Republicans were willing to stand by Herman when it was "just" a little inappropriate groping between a powerful CEO and the women who worked for him, but adultery between two consenting adults is too low, even for Republicans.
Which is why they're finally ditching sexual predator and wife-cheater Herman Cain to flock to their next savior: sexual predator and wife-cheater Newt Gingrich.
