The Soap Opera that came to stay in the 2012 presidential campaign

With Entertainment now masquerading as News, it didn’t take long for the Soap Opera to come to stay in the American presidential race. “Celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, in an appearance on Piers Morgan's CNN show tonight, said that Herman Cain has claimed five different women are lying about him - including her client Sharon Bialek - and said it goes to issues of "character." (Politico, Nov. 28, 2011).

You can make that “character assassination,” Gloria. If anything, the assassination of the character of Herman Cain proves is that you can make a silk purse out of any old sow’s ear, especially if the silk purse is dropped off to the team work of astroturf meister David Axelrod and a still giddy from a killing off-Sarah mainstream media. Where is the proof in the scene-stealing sexual harassment charges against Herman Cain? Who needs the proof when innuendo is getting the job done? Just like its first cousin the truth, the proof was the first casualty in this War of Gossip Mongering Game of Killing Off The Candidate. This is one emperor who was stripped of his clothes in the public square.

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That the fundamental character assassination of a 2012 Republican presidential candidate would go down so deftly in the era of Man from NoWhere Barack Hussein Obama underscores the hypocrisy of contemporary politics. Herman Cain, who started out as The Man Who Would Be President wasn’t looking for Viagra Man Of All Time status. Had Cain done all that he is accused of in the past 15 years, there would have been little, if any time for building the success of the National Restaurant Association, Godfather’s Pizza, not to mention fathering and raising two children and on-the-job surviving prostate cancer. Cain’s sin is not the ‘inappropriate behaviour’ of which he has been so publicly and thoroughly accused, Cain’s big sin is that he is precisely what Barack Obama so falsely claimed to be in 2008, an articulate, compassionate black man promising Hope and Change for the yearning masses. It all comes right down to there would be no room in Dodge for both Barry Soetoro and Herman Cain. One of them had to go, and when you’re a David Axelrod with a ravening media at your full command, we all know which one was going to get to stay after sundown. Successful character assassination’s a given when there’s no burden to provide the proof on the part of the gun slingers nesting in the gossip trough. But the charges against Cain leave lots of niggling doubts when you contemplate the lack of irrefutable proof. They come with a storyline through which you can shoot better hoops than the perpetually practicing Obama. Start with sincere contemplation how one of the two named victims of alleged sexual harassment lived in the same apartment complex as David Axelrod. Then jump ahead of Sharon Bialek and Gloria Allred to the soap opera’s latest segment. A mistress of 13 years comes forward three weeks after the Big Event because she didn’t like the disdain being shown the sexual harassment victims? The demon Dems didn’t have to look too far down in the bottom of their bag of dirty tricks when compiling their evidence. Bialek’s lawyer just had to be flamboyantly fancy Gloria Allred. Ask people who have actually been through it. Do all victims of sexual harassment come looking like harlots? Do all ex-mistresses come packaged for the news as petulant, pouty-lipped and curvy? A quick check among actual court records and among betrayed wives would soon prove that they don’t come with a certain look. As talk show radio giant Rush Limbaugh pointed out on his show today in order to toss Herman Cain’s campaign in the trash heap all that would have to be done would be to put enough doubt in the minds of his campaign contributors. Once the money dries up there is no Herman Cain For President campaign. Why do we not demand proof when accusations pose as truth? We live in a world where hypocrisy rides untrammelled; a world where an unqualified First Lady who forces herself on society as a nutrition expert takes time out for an unscheduled restaurant pitstop where chocolate sculpture is the dessert; a world where the only sexual activity linked to Obama is what we assume are conjugal couplings with his own wife. With Cain being harassed by sexual harassment charges all the way to the finish line should he choose to remain in the presidential race, the Karl Rove rogues will see to it that it’s down to the every-hair-in-its-place Mitt or news-neutered Newt against the America-hating Obama. Meanwhile, while it’s impossible to put genies back in their bottles, the Soap Opera that came to stay in the 2012 presidential race should be stuffed back into the boob tube.