Freedom Line Blog

Bill Bennett today offers what for him are prototypically thoughtful comments on the increasingly sad allegations against Herman Cain. The gist of his comments is that the growing number of allegations against Cain show that this isn’t just a “high-tech lynching,” and that Cain’s handling of it, by making utterly baseless allegations against the Perry campaign, is very disturbing:

I have watched long enough and held my tongue long enough to give him the benefit of the doubt, but can no longer say this is a witch hunt, “a lynching” to use his word, or any other euphemism. There are allegations out there that matter and they have stacked up. For we who led the charge against Bill Clinton on a number of related issues to continue to blame the media or other campaigns or say it simply doesn’t matter makes us the hypocrites as well.

To that, I add this thought: If these allegations against Cain are UNtrue, then this is one of the vilest episodes in American political history. The lady’s allegation today is so graphic that if it is a lie, it is absolutely sickening. What really puzzles me is that if these allegations ARE true, I don’t see how Herman Cain could possibly have thought he could run for president and not have these stories come out. I mean, I can sort of see Cain thinking that two vague allegations of the “you are the same height as my wife” sort would not be any reason at all to keep him from the presidency. But if he is a serial lout whose loutishness includes two official allegations of harassment of anywhere near the sort as the non-harassment loutishness described today, it makes NO sense for him to put himself in the public eye. He HAD to know these things would come out.

Oddly enough, today’s allegation of under-skirt exploration makes me more inclined, or at least WANT to be inclined, to believe Cain. This is probably a perverse psychological reaction from me: I just can’t bear the thought of somebody who seemed so admirable turn out instead to be not just a borderline serial harasser, but a serial serious harasser and groper.

Is it just me, or is today’s allegation just too “over the top” to be believable?

UPDATE: To be clear, I am not saying that I found Ms. Bialek personally to be not believable. She did not come across as a liar. I am just saying that I don’t want to believe both that Cain would have been such a serial lout and that he would run for president if he had been like that. In short, in a vacuum, on paper, its just hard to believe today’s accusation. Watching and listening to Ms. Bialek is NOT, however, a vacuum. She did not acquit herself badly.