- We're living through an interesting juncture in history.
On one hand, there's the amazing bottom-up Occupy Movement, and no one
knows quite where and how far it will go. Then, there's the field of Republican
neo-Know-Nothing, nativist candidates with each one tripping over the other
to be more divorced from facts, history and reality. The strutting, cock-of-the-walk
Herman Cain is currently the most interesting of this pack.
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- For a week now, Cain has been denying the obvious, that
as leader of the National Restaurant Association he "sexually harassed"
-- ie, hit on -- three women who worked under him who were offended by
the attention and wanted nothing to do with him. Despite all his vague
and contradictory dismissals, his prurient assertiveness was persistent
and obnoxious enough that the Restaurant Association felt it had to pay
a total of $80,000 to two women -- who are now legally silenced from telling
their side of the story.
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- Instead of adhering to what seems his usual instinct
of waving off questions as politically-correct, liberal nonsense, in this
case Cain has followed the more traditional route of denial and cover-up,
which as we've all learned only makes the press hungrier.
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- At this point, Cain and his Campaign Manager Mark Block
-- he of the bizarre You Tube smoke-break commercial -- have
decided to drop the cover-up and, instead, have declared it's time to move
on "to the real issues impacting this country." That is, issues
like Cain's famous "9-9-9 plan," which has been shown to be corporate-friendly
and to increase taxes for the poor, and his lethally-electrified fence
along the Mexican border, a program that was serious, then a joke, then
serious again.
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- As far as any pain and suffering he may have caused his
three silenced women accusers, at least one of whom is married, his new
tack is: Never look back. The past is what it is, and it's more important
for the nation that he look to the future.
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- Cain knows the polls suggest his right-wing, Tea-Party
base doesn't give a damn about sexual harassment charges, or at least they
don't give the charges much credence and see them as a liberal conspiracy
to smear the man -- a "high tech lynching," to slip Clarence
Thomas' famous race card from the bottom of the deck...
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- For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT in ThisCantBeHappening!,
the new award-winning independent online alternative newspaper, please
go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/886
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