Not to be crude, but it’s not that hard to imagine that sexual harassment is a real thing. A women asks for a raise, and her boss asks for a sexual favor. That’s pretty straightforward, and it’s probably still not too uncommon. Or, maybe the boss doesn’t like having a personal assistant who doesn’t want to sleep with him. Maybe he finds a replacement who will. Conservatives are comfortable with these kinds of arrangements. Most women aren’t. Of course it’s true that allegations of sexual harassment can be falsely made and used as a weapon for spite, for financial gain, and for any other reason. But it has to be fairly rare that a woman will think it’s a good use of her time to make baseless allegations against an innocent party. In any case, it’s stupid to question whether sexual harassment “is a real thing.”
What’s also stupid is for Herman Cain to deploy the wives of Clarence Thomas and disgraced former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford to defend his honor. The only thing Ginni Thomas and Jenni Sanford have in common is that their husbands are creeps. And that’s their only real connection to Herman Cain, who appears to be a creep, too.
I think Steve M. might be onto something with this:
I don’t know what to make of Sanford’s decision to throw herself into this. (Does she hate Romney, or Perry, or Rove?) But the participation of Ginni Thomas intrigues me, because she’s an apparatchik, which means her refusal to throw the seemingly drowning Cain an anvil is yet another sign that the hardcore insider wingnuts aren’t going to fall in line behind Romney with anything resembling the dutifulness a lot of observers seem to expect. In fact, I’m thinking “conservative crack-up.” Maybe it’s too much to hope that the Cain affair is going to create permanent fissures on the right, but we can dream, can’t we?
We should not need to be reminded but Herman Cain is ahead in all but one of the recent national polls and he’s ahead in Iowa and South Carolina, too. If the Establishment doesn’t take him down now, they might just have to kiss Mitt Romney’s sorry ass goodbye. So, why doesn’t Ginni Thomas want to help?
