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Herman Cain: Horn Dog?

There are a lot of phrases you could use to describe Herman Cain, and now it seems you can add “sexual harassment enthusiast” to that list.

The story goes that when he was the head of the National Restaurant Association in the early 90s, Cain sexually harassed a few of his female employees. Ultimately those women were given severance packages of varying sizes and were not permitted to speak about the incident. At the time of this writing, there are three women speaking out against him, which is about three more than a would-be candidate would like to have accusing him of sexual misconduct and abusing a position of power.

The story surfaced this past month with Cain initially denying just about everything. As the story failed to fade away as his campaign hoped it would, Cain miraculously got his memory back and vaguely recalled something about something: at first he was completely unaware of the claims against him, then he flat-out wouldn't comment, then he was aware of payouts made to a few employees over something or another, then he recalled that maybe he signed some paperwork. Or maybe he didn't. That depends on what your definition of the word “is” is. He's been running in so many circles that Wolf Blitzer had to add a race track to the Situation Room just to accommodate him.

In the past few days we've learned that Cain may be a sexual deviant, but more importantly, we've learned that he is absolutely terrible at damage control, a skill that comes in quite handy when you're under the eye of the entire nation. While those who worked with him in the NRA at the time allege verbal and physical harassment, he's managed to somehow forget something as meteoric as a series of sexual harassment charges while trying to become the president of the United States of America. Riiiiight. I'd totally buy that if I didn't have a functioning brain in my skull.

Since I sometimes pretend to have integrity, I'm not going to come out and definitively say the charges are true. However, that doesn't really seem to matter at this point because Cain's reaction to the charges has shifted so much in the past few days that, true or not, his honesty has to be called into question now. If Cain manages to overcome this and win the nod, then either he's the most charismatic man on the planet or his opponents have literally stopped trying.