I haven’t had much to say about Herman Cain’s sexual harassment of a couple former subordinates, because frankly, nothing I could say would be more damaging to Cain than his own…er…”evolving” statements have been. Protip: When denying a sexual harassment settlement, it helps for there not to have been a sexual harassment settlement, and no, nobody outside of the fringe is buying the “it was an agreement, not a settlement” line.
Still, because Herman Cain is a Republican, Republicans have felt compelled to come out and defend him against those joyless women who obviously hate men. I mean, those ugly feminists should be grateful that a powerful man would demean and sexualize them in the workplace, amirite?
Leading the charge is Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who’s proving yet again that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree:
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has an interesting take on Herman Cain’s growing scandal: honestly, he says, these days it seems like women can’t take a joke.
“There are people now who hesitate to tell a joke to a woman in the workplace, any kind of joke, because it could be interpreted incorrectly,” he told the National Review. “I don’t. I’m very cautious.”
Well, yeah. I mean, you kidnap one girl, and the next thing you know, she’s mad at you! Women. Amirite?
Words fail me.
Those of us who were actually around, and adults, during the Watergate scandal (I was in law school) learned or should have learned a very basic fact about reality in the 20th Century, which is even more true now in the 21st:
If documents, statements, anything, exist anywhere, someone can find them, and probably someone will.
And also the second, which is like it:
There are no secrets.
And this was all before the invention of the internet, which has made it all too precise and too clear that what we were supposed to learn in the 1970’s from Richard Nixon’s discomfiture is doubly true now in this year of 2011.
So…..Mr. Cain is guilty of, probably, sexual harassment, but even more to the point, he is apparently as dumb as a post driven into the ground, and demonstrated this by making a statement (“there was no sexual harassment settlement”) which was so easily proven incorrect.
The man is too stupid to be trusted with a vegetable push-cart, let alone public office.
I encourage all progressives to assume Herman Cain is stupid as a post, and act accordingly.
Rand Paul didn’t say women couldn’t take a joke; he said what he said, which I would not find surprising to hear from a thoughtful progressive hellbent on extending sexual harassment law into every corner of society. People ARE more cautious these days. Much of that caution reflects an improvement in consideration for other peoples’ feelings; some of it reflects a fear of being persecuted by opportunists over innocent mistakes.
I have to say that I find this post by Mr. Fecke to be singularly valueless. It adds nothing to the discussion of whether Cain did or didn’t sexually harass anyone, and it eschews furthering the discussion of some of the interesting issues that the whole situation raises in favor of pointless and irrelevant bashing of a different conservative on the basis of mischaracterization of his statement.
I’m waiting to hear what happened. So far we haven’t heard anything along the lines of someone getting cornered in a hotel room, nobody’s got a busted lip, there’s no allegations of rape and there’s no blue dress.
Now, of course none of that has to occur to sustain a charge of sexual harassment. My point is that so far there’s nothing that’s actually come forward. Apparently someone filed a complaint, and some relatively minor payment was made to make the person go away; the simplest explanation for that was that the settlement was cheaper than going to court – which tends to get expensive even if there’s no merit to the charges being adjudicated.
I’m open to changing my mind if something substantial comes out. But from what I’ve seen so far there’s nothing in particular remarkable here. The usual suspects are straining to stir up controversy, but up to this point it seems that there’s nothing really to work with.
OK, except that Herman Cain said there had been no sexual harassment settlement when actually there WAS a sexual harassment settlement. Which he knew or should have known, but for some reason thought no one would check up on.
Was it well-founded, this settlement? That we do not know, I agree. I was focusing more on the untruth. He made a statement in public which was a lie and which can be (and was) easily checked. Mr. Cain seems to think that the media is as dumb as he apparently is. This is not an assumption which will serve him well. The media may be a pack of hounds, but you don’t tell them obvious lies about factual matters and get away with it. Mr. Nixon would have been much better off to tell the whole Watergate truth immediately, as would Mr. Kennedy at Chappaquiddick.
This is absolutely true in my experience. I started practicing law in a big firm in 1977, one of the very few women to do so. I was the target of a lot of inappropriate behavior (which I steadfastly ignored, on the theory, proven right at least in my case, that if you ignore it it tends to go away), but we young lawyers also kidded around a lot in ways no one would dare to do now. One guy had me into his office to feel his pecs (he was so proud of working out with free weights!) and another to view pictures of himself almost naked on a canoeing trip. (Vain.) Neither of them meant anything bad by it, and I was hugely amused when the first guy bragged that he’d had to buy all new shirts because his pecs had become so large. (Smile. We were all so young!)
I talked to this same guy recently on the phone, and we agreed that he certainly, and maybe me too, we’d be hung up upside down if we behaved that way now. Which is kind of too bad, but the innocent joking came along with a lot of stuff that maybe wasn’t so innocent.
My experience with employment discrimination law tells me that employers and insurance companies never pay quickie settlements for truly frivolous and fabricated claims. Even in the event of meritorious claims, employers and their carriers fight like hell (to discourage others), and they win more than they lose. The way I see it, the fact that the organization paid off quickly and had the women sign a non-disclosure agreement is strong circumstantial evidence that they were, in fact, harassed to a point where it violated the law.
What Amused @5 said. I would really love to practice law in this world where you can simply make a claim, no matter how silly, and get a fast payout. Maybe that’s Earth Prime?
Assuming for the sake of argument that Cain is and was completely innocent of all claims against him, he still behaved like an idiot. “These accusations were all completely false” (or even, if there was a confidentiality agreement that such a statement would open up, “I am not permitted to discuss that particular case, but I can speak to the others and they are completely false”) is very different than belligerent I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I, or lying about whether there were settlements, or claiming not to have known about them at all.
Robert @2: there’s a third type of caution, which is the drama-queen reaction from people who can’t, or choose not to, understand that behavior is not a binary choice between “appropriate conversation if overheard by 3-year-olds” and “telling your secretary what you think of her tits”.
even in the event of meritorious claims, employers and their carriers fight like hell (to discourage others), and they win more than they lose. The way I see it, the fact that the organization paid off quickly and had the women sign a non-disclosure agreement is strong circumstantial evidence that they were, in fact, harassed to a point where it violated the law.
This, so very, very much this. Organizations have much more money available than private individuals, which they use to pay giant, scary firms of lawyers and support staff to dig through your life and try to do everything possible to make you look like a whoring trollop who is just out to squeeze some money out of them. If you actually do get the money instead of the public humiliation scare treatment, well.
So. I read in the papers this morning that it isn’t just an anonymous “settlement” any more, a real woman has come forward with allegations, so we’re now at he-said-she-said.
Of course it’s going to be nearly impossible to know for sure who’s telling the truth, but in the absence of certainty my money is on the Amused/mythago/Elusis analysis: employers and carriers fight like tigers to avoid paying settlements in these cases. That they paid off and imposed a confidentiality agreement strongly implies that, (1) something seriously inappropriate actually happened, and (2) they’d like to hide the whole discussion.
This underlines Mr. Cain’s stupidity, which was my first point. Dumb as a post driven into the ground. Surely everyone who’s heard the word “Watergate” and who doesn’t think it’s just a big hotel in DC knows that in the long run there are no secrets?
Apparently not, at least not at a certain level of intellect.
Just for accuracy, the woman who came forward yesterday is not one of the three who entered into settlements with the restaurant association. She didn’t work for the restaurant association at the time (in fact, I think she’d been fired and was unemployed at the time). This woman is just coming forward now, though her boyfriend at the time said she told him about it when she returned from her trip. As far as I’m concerned, that alone doesn’t make her *not* credible, but it’s not quite the same as if she were one of the other three.
Fair enough, chingona, and I think the three are bound by the aforementioned confidentiality agreements.
Back when Bill Clinton was fooling around with Monica Lewinski, I went to lunch with an older colleague, and I said that what really fried me was the allegation, common at the time, that “everyone is doing it.”
I said, “Everyone is not ‘doing it’.”
My buddy said, “Depends on what you mean, are you talking about adultery?”
Me: “NO. I’m talking about molesting 20 year old file clerks. Everyone is NOT ‘doing it’.”
Most of these guys, I’ll go so far as to say almost every one of them, is a repeat offender. It’s not like just this one time he lost his head: it’s a world view, in which women are sort of there for whenever you feel the urge, regardless of her opinion.
If Mr. Cain is, as the evidence indicates, one of these types, there are probably and entire platoon of women off in the weeds who have been snarked by this guy but who haven’t come out into the open for a variety of reasons.
Just what we need for a leader.
Certainly, there is an awful lot of smoke here for there to be no fire.
Given the season and the weather and all the wet leaves I see on the ground when I look out the window, I’m minded that sometimes there’s a lot of smoke when someone is trying to light a fire but doesn’t have their hands on anything that will burn.
The Chicago Sun Times has a columnist named Michael Sneed who generally covers the scene around town – who’s been up to what, who’s been seen talking to who, etc. It’s mostly social but covers the local politicians as well as the society types. She says that someone she knows personally (who she names in the column, I just don’t remember and am too lazy to look it up) saw the latest accuser hobnobbing with Mr. Cain at a Tea Party gathering in Chicago a month or so ago, going backstage and going to some lengths to seek him out. She was whispering in his ear and snuggled up to him, not objecting as he put his arm around her while they were talking. Seems like odd behavior to me in this context.
What kind of frys me right now is that so many people who are trying to run Cain to the ground on this were supporters of a man who was flat out accused of rape and settled for $800K, and who took advantage of someone half his age under his authority – both times while married.
That doesn’t mean that Cain isn’t accountable for his actions. I’m not particularly enthusastic about seeing him as the GOP standard bearer to begin with, and this sure doesn’t help. But there seems to be a pretty strong double standard here. Cain isn’t exactly Mr. Smooth. But no one’s accusing him of rape or even having had consensual sex with anyone, or that he didn’t stop when he was told to.
I can’t figure out who you’re talking about here, but if it’s Bill Clinton be assured that I think, and thought then, that he’s a pig wallowing in the mud. Ugh. To say that I was not a “supporter” is substantially to understate the case.
But pointing out that the poor poor Mr. Cain (does this break your heart or what?? my heart!!) is the ”victim” of a double standard is to endorse a sort of loathsome race to the bottom. Is Herman Cain better or worse on this scale than Bill Clinton? Excuse me now, I feel a sudden urge to leave the room and throw up in the rest room toilet.
As previously disclosed, back in the day I worked with and for creeps like this. I didn’t knuckle under, but it wasn’t for lack of trying on their part. And I never challenged any of them, and they probably never knew it, but I hold the lot of them in the deepest imaginable contempt. I cannot possibly describe how contemptuous I am, even now so many years later. God rest them, they’re all dead now.
I’d vote for a pig in the pen before I’d vote for any of this type, and that goes for Mr. Cain too, presumptively. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. The honorable men, many of them much older than I, when I started practicing law in the 1970’s? No one would ever taint any of them with such things because any accuser would be laughed out of town.
You could tell the difference. I could tell the difference. Not that much has changed.
I read that there’s “another accuser” now in the Cain case.
Why am I not surprised. This type…. they’re almost always multiple offenders.
Or…maybe they’re all ganging up on him, poor guy! [sheds tear]
@ Ron … The witness to that encounter is an extremely disreputable journalist who was fired from her TV station job for hanging out in her bathing suit at the home of a man suspected of murdering his wife while she was covering the investigation.
Here’s the column:
Without knowing what was said, I think there’s a lot of room for interpretation.
I know you have women in your life, Ron, so I’m guessing on some level you know that women frequently either have to or find it much easier to keep up appearances with men who have wronged them. The manager who made constant comments about my breasts when I was 18? If I ran into him today, I’d say hi and make polite chit-chat. The source who was always a little too touchy-feely and loved to make suggestive jokes? I complained to the other reporters and kept doing what I had to do to keep him as a source. If every woman made a scene every time she ran into or saw a man who had done or said something inappropriate to her, it would just be scenes all day. We have our lives to live.
Don’t forget: Three of the women reached settlements with the restaurant association. I think it’s very unlikely this is nothing but a bunch of wet leaves.
What kind of frys me right now is that so many people who are trying to run Cain to the ground on this were supporters of a man who was flat out accused of rape and settled for $800K, and who took advantage of someone half his age under his authority – both times while married.
Before Cain ever gets to make his case to anybody who supported Clinton, he’ll have to get through a Republican primary process. It’s the people who impeached Bill Clinton who will have to weigh these accusations against whatever else it is they like about Cain. (What that would be, is beyond me, but clearly he has supporters.)
AFAIK, there was never any settlement in the Juanita Broaddrick case.
I agree with you that there are doubtless some democratic hypocrites who made excuses for Clinton but are now attacking Cain. OTOH, there are also some republican hypocrites who did the reverse.
I think Ron conflated Broaddrick and Jones. He settled with Jones for $850,000.
Thank you for this, chingona.
Not only do most of us have lives to live, we have jobs to do, and if we call every one of these creeps out we can’t do them. The client who hit on me? I smiled and changed the subject. The referral source who wouldn’t quit propositioning me (“commona my house, baby!”)? Smile smile and be sure you’re never alone with him. So often these men are in positions of power (they’re cowards, they don’t hit on any woman who could ruin them, at least according to their pointy-headed analysis): they’re managers or bosses or news sources or clients of your boss.
Sure, we could throw fits, and maybe more of us should, but I had a family to support back in the day, and I had to think about them, not about myself.
RonF, so we know the accusations are BS because:
1) The gossip columnist of the Chicago Sun-Times heard a rumor that proves it’s so.
2) ZOMG CLENIS
3) It wasn’t, like, rape rape.
Am I missing anything? Because, seriously, it’s certainly a fair argument to point out that these are accusations or to suggest that Cain be given the benefit of the doubt until there is more evidence, but “he stopped right after making that quid pro quo threat” does not make it totes OK.
As for Clinton, I suppose one might use the same whatabouttery if one was a Clinton supporter to claim one was steamed at all the finger-waggers who had previously rushed to defend Clarence Thomas; but let’s assume, for the moment, that everybody here is just as quick to condemn sexual harassment by a political figure they agree with as one they despite.
On the political front, I’d also note that in much more recent history, plenty of Democrats were pissed off at John Edwards and Anthony Weiner, and I think Weiner resigned in large part because of pressure from his own party.
On the “it was a clumsy pass” front, okay, it was certainly better that he stopped when she said no than the alternative, but … I have been the recipient of a clumsy pass or two in my life, and none of them involved someone GRABBING MY HEAD AND PUSHING IT TOWARD HIS CROTCH!!! This is not normal mating behavior.
It’s disgusting is what it is, and I cannot think that such a thing is intended to woo. (Are men really that dumb? It passes belief.) It feels like a threat to me, and I imagine it would to most women (except women who have made a financial deal over the transaction ahead of time).
I’m back to my original argument. Here we have a man who tells the press an obvious lie – and one which can be easily debunked, which they of course run off and debunk, making him look like (no!) a liar, and then we learn that grabbing my head and pushing it towards his crotch is his idea of seduction.
On this showing he’s a dumb as a post driven into the ground, and in every way unqualified on the grounds of stupidity for political leadership (leaving the sexual allegations per se out of the calculation even).
It’s more than just a rumor, it’s attributed to a specific person. But even on that basis – no, we don’t know they’re BS. But if allegations with regards to Mr. Cain are fair fodder to evaluate him, so then are allegations towards his accusers.
?
It wasn’t rape, period. Not based on any allegation that’s come forward so far.
I would like to think that’s true, but I can’t say I know that it is. Not that I am interested in hearing from everyone to come up with an explanation of what they think of Bill Clinton now, or thought then. My point was broader. At that point, Democrats in general and their supporters set the bar as far as what level of sexual misconduct was acceptable to them in a President and in a Presidential candidate. From what I’ve heard so far, Cain doesn’t come anywhere near it even if all these allegations were true. Whether these allegations are true is something worth investigating. But if they’re true I don’t see that the Democratic party and those who support it have much high moral ground to claim that on that basis Cain would be unsuitable for the Presidency.
chingona:
Yes, I do have women in my life. I have a wife and a daughter and a number of female friends. Based on what I know about them, though, I must say I don’t believe that your average woman sees so many men every day that have said or done something inappropriate to her that it would be scenes all day. Also, in this instance it is reputed not that she ran into him but that she sought him out.
It occurs to me that my life has fewer women in it on a day-to-day basis than many of you. I work in a highly technical field. When we moved my group from one building to another they posted a map of who was going to sit where in our new cubes. There were 33 people moved. Four of them were women. Two of them are the only two admins in the group, the other two are network engineers. One of those is the only black person in the group. The other is an Eastern European immigrant. We have a few other immigrants from various countries. When she attained her citizenship a few of us put a few bucks together and bought her a 3′ x 5′ American flag. She pinned it up on the outside of her cube wall (she’s on the end of the row) at the time and when we moved she did the same in our new location.
Now, we work in a building with marketing people and databases analysts and project leaders and such and there are numerous women around, but I’m guessing that the building is still majority male, just not as extreme as my group.
Susan:
I don’t usually do “me too”s, but just to make it clear – if these allegations are true I’d have a real hard time on that basis alone (never mind anything else, there’s a lot of problems there) pulling the lever for Cain.
I would like to think that’s true, but I can’t say I know that it is.
Oh, well, okay then. We can turn that around. I regret to inform you, RonF, that while I would like to think you would be just as critical of an accuser who pointed the finger at (say) Nancy Pelosi as at Herman Cain, I can’t say that I know it’s true that you would.
Don’t pretend that you’re deserving of the benefit of the doubt you’re not interested in extending to others here.
As for allegations against the accuser, the accusations against Cain are not “a gossip columnist says this guy she knows saw Cain doing X”. They are specific accusations against Cain by women who claim to have been on the receiving end. Somehow, I’m guessing if they were at a couple of removes and in a gossip column you’d be jumping to condemn that with both feet.
And indeed, RonF, it’s not rape; but neither is it “hey baby, wanna go out? oh, okay, no worries”, and you’re continually minimizing it by saying, golly, it’s not like anybody got a busted lip. Apparently short of using violence or being a Democrat, you don’t particularly find anything wrong with sexual harassment.
Here’s a more detailed account of the encounter between Bialek and Cain:
I don’t see anything here that makes Bialek look less credible or Cain more credible (rather the opposite). It sounds like characterizing it as an affectionate encounter would be inaccurate.
As I’ve been reflecting back on various instances of harassment in my life, I realized that I almost never told any men about them. Certainly not my father, my brother, my boyfriends at the time or my husband. I’m thinking that many men may genuinely not realize just how pervasive this shit is. Well, let me say now, for the record, it’s pervasive.
Dude, even *I* don’t realize how pervasive it is. I tend to mow over the experiences once I have them. I have this sort of concept in my head that I don’t get harassed (and I genuinely don’t think I get harassed as much as other women), and it’s not until we have threads like this that I start actually parsing events. Oh, yeah, that happened… and that… and those things… hey, and I forgot about that…
I was like 16 when the Clinton stuff happened. I was not particularly exercised over the issue as sexual harassment, but then I don’t think I even heard anyone frame it that way for a few years after it happened.
Oh, yeah, that happened… and that… and those things… hey, and I forgot about that…
Exactly.
I was not particularly exercised over the issue as sexual harassment, but then I don’t think I even heard anyone frame it that way for a few years after it happened.
Agreed on this front, as well. I think it’s only in retrospect that I really grokked the power-imbalance issues, particular because the story was that she had come on to him to a certain extent. Maybe because at the time it broke, I was the same age that she had been when the … whatever it was … happened, I was a bit invested emotionally in her having agency. Also, she always maintained publicly that it was an affair. Most of it, though, is that I didn’t hear it framed that way. I do remember being pretty angry at Clinton for not controlling himself for the limited time he was president when he knew full well that there were people who wanted to take him down.
We’re back to the “gross stupidity” point.
I mean, there’s dumb, and then there’s dumber. William Clinton was an adult, no 17 year old either driven by hormones, a mature man. No one was asking him to take a vow of celibacy for cryingoutloud, but even if he wasn’t having sex with his wife (what do I know) all he had to do was control himself for a few years, eight to be exact, and he was in the last stages of that time when he started molesting a White House clerk.
The man never heard of pornography on the internet? Plain brown wrappers? Simple fantasy in the privacy of your palatial bathroom? He tarnished his reputation and compromised his political effectiveness to bonk a young girl in the Oval Office?
I’m a “liberal” and I by and large supported a lot of what he did in his presidency (take note, all you who think I’m criticizing Mr. Cain on political grounds, this means you, RonF) but this was just plain stupid. Inexcusable and unexplainable.
I think there should be an intelligence test for public office, and that all candidates and office holders who score in as “borderline retarded” or below should be asked some hard questions. Better if we find out ahead of time (Cain) than later (Clinton).
I think there should be an intelligence test for public office, and that all candidates and office holders who score in as “borderline retarded” or below should be asked some hard questions.
Clinton would have passed any intelligence test with flying colors. Hell, for as much as Cain comes off as a clown to me, he probably would too. He has a master’s in computer science and worked as a ballistics analyst for the Navy. He can’t actually be stupid.
There are LOTS of people who are smart about plenty and really dumb about sex. Or, more complicatedly, who get off on having power over other people but aren’t always smart in how they abuse their power or simply get caught abusing it in the wrong circumstances.
My son has an answer for this. He says, “These people test well. Don’t confuse that with intelligence.”
It is the year 2011. The internet has been invented. You’re running for president. A news organization comes up with the “information” that there has been a money settlement in your past on account of allegations of sexual abuse on your part. You say, “There has been no such settlement.”
But there has been such a settlement, and this is an easily discernable fact, and you knew very well that there has been such a settlement. Was it well founded? Did you do it whatever it was? That’s irrelevant. There was a settlement payment. (Three, actually.) You said in public that there were none. It was easy to prove that you were lying. (So then of course the hounds of the media did just that.)
This is what is called – and this is the technical term – stupid. This has nothing to do with sex, really. It has to do with….stupid. Lying in public when there was a 100% chance you’d be caught.
This is not being dumb about sex. (What happened to provoke the settlements, that’s about sex maybe, who knows.) This is being just plain dumb, and arrogant into the bargain.
…intelligence is not unidimensional?
Anyway, this topic does not strike me as even slightly helpful… open thread if you must, but not this one please.
“Lust makes you stupid.” —Nicole Hollander
I take it all back. What I said about Herman Cain being stupid.
I read in the papers this Sunday that Mr. Cain has “suspended” his alleged campaign for President, not quit, so that he can continue to use the money he has collected and hopes to collect for his own purposes, to wit, to fund his self-propelled rise to stardom as some talking head or radio host or something of the sort. This is far from stupid: very clever, really.
Now on this theory, he knew perfectly well that his candidacy for president was dead on arrival, if for his sexual sins if for no other reason, and he was apparently willing to throw his family and any reputation he had for integrity under the bus (but this willingness is almost a requirement for public office anyway).
I apologize. I underestimated his intelligence, and overestimated his sincerity.