All the folks at Fox have written Herman Cain off. He’s finished, they say.
But in the same breath, they also say he never could have gotten the nomination anyway, as a kind of a justification for their neglect in commenting on how he was finished off.
Herman has retreated to his family to decide whether to continue with this campaign. And who can blame him?
A friend many of us like to follow, AJStrata at The Strata-Sphere has made a plea to Herman, ” don’t let the bastards win like this.”
I echo his sentiment here.
It’s like fighting for a lady’s honor or your mother’s good name, you don’t stop to count the room before you roll up your sleeves. Let the voters tell Herman No, not that crack journalistic team at Fox or RedState…or Mark Steyn.
But, what I want to do here is broaden the spectrum a bit as to just who are “the bastards,” just so we’ll be clear.
Now I realize that factual details may yet reveal that Herman Cain is indeed a horndog, but as of today no facts bear that out. In fact, the truth that has been revealed so far has worked against the believability of the women who have (sort of) stepped forward to accuse this man.
Still, his candidacy is on the brink, and possibly that may be it for Herman. In the political sense, tough toenails. But in the moral and just sense, not for me. Not knowing who is responsible for these accusations, (and trust me, they don’t want me to know), looking around me all I see is an awful lot of “professional” conservatives (I’m a professing one myself) saying “Hate that, old chap, but you never were going to be a winning candidate anyway. Let’s move along.”
Now, I expect this from Bill Kristol, a hyphenated conservative, and the girls over at Davey Jones Locker, mere parroting children, but I was saddened to hear Mark Steyn chime in, totally crossing the line from snark to cynicism.
Therein lies a teachable lesson.
The lesson:
All humans are conditioned to evaluate every event they see with a certain frame of reference. They do so with a pecking order of moral priorities. If we see a man club a puppy to death with a baseball bat, we first think of the poor puppy, then the outrage of the crime itself, as we reach for our phone…or sometimes an even bigger baseball bat.
Only somewhere down that list do we pause to consider that the man may turn that bat on us. In the end, self interest is not our first consideration when we see an outrage.
This is how moral people behave. And who are unhyphenated conservatives if not moral? Or so they say.
But this is not how amoral people behave. They have been conditioned to re-priortize those moral values so as to always consider self-interests first, and to discount almost all contrary human moral systems. This is called cynicism, which is more dangerous to the human moral condition than smoking is to the physical.
But apparently this includes conservatives who are not in Herman Cain’s camp…including their candidates. They all saw this brutal beating of a puppy dog only in terms of whose yard it was in, and in this case, it was in the yard of an opponent.
I found it startling to find how easily the normal clear-thinking Mark Steyn, subbing for Limbaugh, was able to turn snark into cynicism about the absolute rape of a man’s character and integrity, all because he didn’t think Herman had a real shot at being president.
Is that what this is all about?
If you don’t think that with a few dollars I couldn’t assassinate the reputations and character of any of you reading this, or any public conservative, trust me, it would be a breeze.
But why I won’t is because of a streak of honor in me (and no financial encouragement to do it), which by your performance over the false accusations against Herman Cain, makes you seem undeserving.
In the end one cannot be an unhyphenated conservative and also be a cynic. If you want to live by Walter Duranty’s sword, your reputations and careers may also die by it. When you see injustice you speak out…to say something other than “he couldn’t win anyway.” That’s a law of being a true conservative; to speak out against all injustice. The silence is deafening here with Mr Cain.
I would do that for Ron Paul, Joe Biden or even Lexington Concord. I actually have done that already for Bill Clinton. (It was over a parking ticket.)
This Cain Affair reminds me of ESPN during the breaking story of Jerry Sandusky at Penn State, and all the hand-wringing about the impact on the university, the athletic department, and poor old Joe Paterno. Oh, let me me, did we leave anyone out, here?
Enter Herman Cain. A few weeks ago a spate of stories broke about Herman “sexually harassing” in a non-sexual way (?) two women at the National Restaurant Association who were then terminated. Later another woman, Ms Bialek, a notorious woman with direct links to David Axelrod in Chicago, and a track record of aggressive sexual misconduct herself (at CBS), claimed Cain is a masher, and mashed her in a cab at a function.
Thirteen years ago.
Then these ladies suddenly and mysteriously disappeared, only to suddenly spring from the shadows a woman who claims a 13-year affair with Herman. The New York Times buried this little tidbit at the end of a long story advertising her claim:
Ms. White is an unemployed single mother. Before the interview, Fox learned that she had filed a sexual harassment claim against an employer in 2001. That case was settled. The station also found a bankruptcy filing nearly 23 years ago in Kentucky, and several eviction notices in the Atlanta area over the past six years.
The station also reported that Ms. White had a former business partner who once sought a “stalking temporary protective order” against her for “repeated e-mails/texts threatening lawsuit and defamation of character.” The case was dismissed, but it was followed by a libel lawsuit against Ms. White. A judge entered an order against Ms. White because she failed to respond to the lawsuit, Fox reported.
Even more tawdry facts are coming out today.
Throughout it all, along the length of the conservative back-fence gossip circuit, the comments have all been about how poorly Herman has handled this. No one has attacked the lie, and the ease with which it has been used to defame him.
Only on Tuesday I wrote here at UP that in some quarters two lies, three or four even better, suddenly can take on an air of truth along that back fence gossip circuit. It is peculiarly feminine, only, it seems, more men hang out there than do the ladies.
A cynic is a person who believes that only selfishness motivates human actions and disbelieves in selfless acts or any higher moral motives.
Conservatives aren’t supposed to be wired this way, and if this sounds naive, let me state this another way:
Hear me! We can win every election with the best conservative candidate, possible but if we allow this streak of cynicism about human values, especially on matters of truth and honor, to survive in our midst and our company, we are as doomed as if we had re-elected Barack Obama.
We are lost.
