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Sexual harassment is a firing offense and a political career-killer. Rape is a criminal act. And justice is blind.
Well, unless you’re a Democrat.
The media responded with little more than a wink and a nod to Bill Clinton’s serial assaults over many years, including a very credible rape charge. They refused to report the John Edwards scandal until the National Enquirer, of all publications, embarrassed them into action.
And even when Anthony Weiner was texting pictures of his privates to strangers, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into covering it. Never mind that Clinton served as U.S. president for eight years, Edwards came very close to being vice-president, and Weiner was both a prominent Congressman and leading national spokesman for the Democrat Party.
Somehow, though, the media have no problem running like a pack of wild dogs after any allegation, no matter how trivial it may be or long ago it may have occurred, when the accused is a Republican.
Take the case of Herman Cain.
Cain had no sooner risen to the top of the GOP presidential field than all hell literally broke loose around him.
From the start, he was subjected to a series of scurrilous attacks from the media, including slurs about his blackness!
Then Politico published a report detailing ten-year-old allegations of sexual harassment. Not surprisingly, though, the hit piece failed in its primary mission, which was to derail the Cain Train. Polls show Cain hasn’t lost any ground, while at the same time donations have been pouring into his campaign.
There were some good reasons for this.
First: Politico is, of course, merely another media arm of the Democrat Party, devoted to propagating the party and its liberal positions. At the same time as this story emerged, another Politico operative was “reporting” that it helps to be a racist in the Republican primaries — because everyone knows that all Republicans are racists, of course. This kind of yellow journalism is the reason that only those on the far left take Politico and the rest of the MSM seriously, since everyone else knows these outlets represent the far left.
Second: The story itself was riddled with problems. The two women at the center of the story were unnamed, there were no corroborating sources, and even the details of the allegations were absent. Except for the admission that Cain’s supposed “sexual harassment” was not sexual in nature. It apparently constituted entirely of unspecified “inappropriate” remarks and one “inappropriate” gesture. So what exactly was it? What did he say and do? Politico’s reporters adamantly refused to answer. One thing we do know for sure, as Ann Coulter noted: “If the details helped liberals, we’d have the details.”
Sexual harassment is a firing offense and a political career-killer. Rape is a criminal act. And justice is blind.
Well, unless you’re a Democrat.
The media responded with little more than a wink and a nod to Bill Clinton’s serial assaults over many years, including a very credible rape charge. They refused to report the John Edwards scandal until the National Enquirer, of all publications, embarrassed them into action.
And even when Anthony Weiner was texting pictures of his privates to strangers, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into covering it. Never mind that Clinton served as U.S. president for eight years, Edwards came very close to being vice-president, and Weiner was both a prominent Congressman and leading national spokesman for the Democrat Party.
Somehow, though, the media have no problem running like a pack of wild dogs after any allegation, no matter how trivial it may be or long ago it may have occurred, when the accused is a Republican.
Take the case of Herman Cain.
Cain had no sooner risen to the top of the GOP presidential field than all hell literally broke loose around him.
From the start, he was subjected to a series of scurrilous attacks from the media, including slurs about his blackness!
Then Politico published a report detailing ten-year-old allegations of sexual harassment. Not surprisingly, though, the hit piece failed in its primary mission, which was to derail the Cain Train. Polls show Cain hasn’t lost any ground, while at the same time donations have been pouring into his campaign.
There were some good reasons for this.
First: Politico is, of course, merely another media arm of the Democrat Party, devoted to propagating the party and its liberal positions. At the same time as this story emerged, another Politico operative was “reporting” that it helps to be a racist in the Republican primaries — because everyone knows that all Republicans are racists, of course. This kind of yellow journalism is the reason that only those on the far left take Politico and the rest of the MSM seriously, since everyone else knows these outlets represent the far left.
Second: The story itself was riddled with problems. The two women at the center of the story were unnamed, there were no corroborating sources, and even the details of the allegations were absent. Except for the admission that Cain’s supposed “sexual harassment” was not sexual in nature. It apparently constituted entirely of unspecified “inappropriate” remarks and one “inappropriate” gesture. So what exactly was it? What did he say and do? Politico’s reporters adamantly refused to answer. One thing we do know for sure, as Ann Coulter noted: “If the details helped liberals, we’d have the details.”
Third: For the most part, sexual harassment lawsuits have become a joke in our litigious society, and the fact that one charge against Cain resulted in a cash settlement means nothing. Companies always settle these cases out of court, regardless of the facts or lack of them, just to avoid the much greater litigation costs. The serious cases of sexual harassment must be taken seriously and victims deserve justice, but all too often the “victim” is a disgruntled employee — or, say, a political adversary — looking for a pay-out, even though they never suffered anything that could even remotely be considered sexual harassment.
Fourth: There is a lot of history here. Liberals have been practicing the politics of personal destruction for decades now, going back to their ruthless smear campaigns against Judges Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas in the 1980s. So excuse me, and millions of other Americans, if we don’t take the bait every time the liberal media starts the slime machine up all over again — particularly when they’re going after a black conservative who’s at the top of the GOP presidential field.
One of the foundational principles of our justice system is the right to face one’s accusers. How convenient that the Left uses sexual harassment law to hide the identities — and, thus, the possible motives — of women making these accusations, and how helpful that the liberal media then run 50 stories attacking Cain and trying to tar him as a sexual predator (by comparison, in the same amount of time, the media ran just three stories when Juanita Broaddrick went on the record and told in graphic detail how Bill Clinton raped her, after which the media summarily buried the story).
What little we are hearing about these women should raise even more suspicions. They are being described in various press accounts as “a government worker,” “someone in politics,” “a registered Democrat,” and the like.
So the story is sounding increasingly familiar to conservatives.
Until and unless these women come forward, the details of these charges are made public and some concrete facts are provided to buttress their claims, this whole sordid affair should be dismissed for exactly what it looks like.
Cain has already publicly stated, some time ago, that he was going to be the target of “a high-tech-lynching” by the Left.
With the Politico hit piece and resulting media furor, he’s starting to look like a prophet.
e-mail: tom3264@msn.com, or go to tom’s Facebook page to send a message
