A forensic expert says Herman Cain is telling the truth while Sharon Bialek is lying.
Florida is a closed primary state, so although I am an independent, I registered as a Republican so I can vote in the primaries. I have yet to make up my mind as to who I will support in Florida’s January primary. I find Rick Santorum to be by far the most consistent pro-life candidate. I also consider Herman Cain, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry to be acceptable candidates who I would support in the general election. Alveda King (Atlanta pro-life activist and niece of Dr. Martin Luther King) stated that in the Palmetto Freedom Forum, Cain, Bachmann and Gingrich all supported applying Personhood status in the 14th Amendment to preborn children from conception. Ron Paul has made similar statements.
As a Massachusett’s native, I know that although it’s definitely one of the most liberal states, six of the last nine governors have been Republicans, and even Ed King (1979-1983) was a supporter of Reagan and later joined the GOP. That is suprising to many people who don’t know that Massachusetts went for Reagan twice in the 1980s. That being said, the type of Republican that can make it to the governor’s office in Massachusetts must appear to be fiscally moderate and socially liberal. Romney was no different. I have grave concerns that lead me to believe that Romney is a political chameleon and is only pro-life and pro-family in word. On fiscal concerns, every Republican president since Nixon has promised to cut spending and shrink the size of the federal government. All Republican presidents since Nixon have broken that promise once they were elected. I am almost certain Romney will be no different.
Further, we see a sad cycle in the Republican primary process in which either the runner-up or a former vice presidential canidate will get the nomination. This is the case mainly because of Republican governors’ endorsements coupled with the “winner-take-all” rules in many of the later primaries. This has been true for every election cycle since 1960 with only two exceptions.
1960 – Nixon – sitting vice president
1964 – Goldwater – senator from Arizona (exception)
1968 – Nixon – former vice president
1972 – Nixon
1976 – Ford – sitting president and former vice president
1980 – Reagan – runner-up to Ford in 1976 primaries
1984 – Reagan
1988 – George Bush – sitting vice president
1992 – George Bush
1996 – Dole – Ford’s vice presidential running mate
2000 – George W. Bush – governor of Texas (exception)
2004 – George W. Bush
2008 – John McCain – runner-up to Bush in the 2000 primaries.
2012 – ?
Note that the two exceptions were George W. Bush, the son of George H.W. Bush and governor of Texas. Barry Goldwater was a Senator from Arizona. Even here we see a pattern because John McCain was also a Senator from Arizona. So other than the case of Goldwater, the process seems more like a coronation ceremony than a fair process.
In 2008, I was certain that the next Republican nominee for President of the United States would be either Palin, Huckabee, Romney or Jeb Bush. With only Romney declaring his candidacy, I am certain that the rule will hold true unless the pattern of history is broken and another exception to the rule wins out. There is a way that this can happen.
In the early fall, a Florida conservative policy advocate, John Stemberger, wrote an article for Newsmax stating that Rick Perry was the “best hope for a solid conservative in 2012.” Stemberger stated that there were six solid conservative candidates running for the GOP nomination, which I assume are the six I listed above. He mentioned that no one of them is likely to win unless Christian conservatives unite behind one candidate in order to defeat Romney. He then quoted William F. Buckley who used to say that he was not for “the most conservative” candidate, but “the most conservative candidate that is electable.”
In priniciple, I agree with this strategy as long as the “conservative” candidates are true Christians and have upheld biblical principles in the civil sphere.
However, Stemberger went on to say that Rick Perry was the best and most electable conservative. My immediate reaction at the time was that he said much the same about Fred Thompson in the 2004 presidential primaries and supported Bill McCollum in the 2008 primary race for Florida governor — even attacking and damaging Rick Scott, who eventually won the governor’s seat by a narrow margin. However, Perry is another governor from Texas who sounds a lot like George Bush.
I thought, “Well? … Hmmm …”
Since that time, due to abysmal mistakes in the debates, Perry has plummeted in the polls and the “non-Romney” heir apparent is Herman Cain. I began to look more closely at Cain’s 9-9-9 Plan. I am a big fair tax advocate, so at first I was skeptical at having both flat tax on income and a fair tax in the form of a national sales tax. But I soon saw that this was the first phase in getting rid of the tax code on income and that the second phase in 9-9-9 is a fair tax. In fact, the more I learn about it, the more I like about it. It takes a pareadigm shift in thinking to see the beauty and simplicity of this tax code, but I encourage all to check it out at: www.hermancain.com/999plan.
That sold me on Cain as an accepatable candidate. He’s also given over a million dollars of his own money to pro-life campaigns and made his biblical ethics a centerpiece of his 2004 run for Georgia Senate.
Then came several sexual harassment allegations, mostly anonymous, and Sharon Bialek’s claim that Cain sexually assaulted her in a car after a dinner. In watching Bialek’s news conference, my first impression was that she seemed not credible as she batted her eyes and smirked while reading a prepared statement. In contrast, Cain forcefully denied all allegations and seemed to be telling the truth with foreceful conviction.
Someone is a pathological liar. Either it is Cain and he is very good at it or it is Bialek and she is less polished.
Even MSNBC’s Hardball host, Chris Matthews admitted that the allegations were so specific that they are knowable. It is possible to go back and either confirm or disprove Herman Cain’s position. Matthews stated that there would have to be something in the body of evidence: “… if this happened, that it did happen. Hotel records, restaurant records, eyewitnesses, people like that, anything that comes along and says he did know her, did have dinner with her, did have drinks with her, did go for a ride …”
On the same program, one of MSNBC’s pundits quipped: “But I`m also talking to pollsters who are doing checking and already starting to hear now that his poll numbers are starting to shift.”
One wonders what “inside information” MSNBC had two days ago that contradicts every new poll in the last two days.
The media has assumed that even if many of Cain’s accusers are proved to be liars, that Cain will never be able to prove a negative. In the meantime, they can endlessly predict that Cain’s poll numbers are suffering as a result. They can tell the same lie over and over again until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The narrative that the liberal media has concocted is that it does not matter if the charges are true. The real story according to the pundits is how the Cain campaign has mishandled it and how it has damaged his reputation among those who are sympathetic, but don’t want to see a tainted candidate go against the “clean” Barack Obama.
The fact is that Cain’s poll numbers have remained steady – effectively tied with Romney nationally – and have even gone up in some early primaries. He has also surpassed all past donations to his campaign. But facts don’t matter when you are concocting a high tech lynching. The object is not to prove or disprove the allegations, to lay out the facts and discover who is telling the truth. The object is to damage Cain so much that his candidacy is doomed.
So why do Cain’s poll numbers remain strong and even stronger snce the sexual harassment allegations were launched?
CBS Atlanta ran a story yesterday about a forensics expert who analyzed both Bialek’s and Cain’s statements. Cain had earlier said he’d take a “lie detector test tp refute the charges “if it becomes necessary.” The problem with polygraph lie detector tests is that they are only 50 percent accurate. The results are not permissible in a court of law for that reason. However, this text is based on five separate criteria and is considered to be 95 percent accurate. The report specifically cites that this is not a polygraph test rather a VSA test, a method that is used by the FBI and by crime investigators in 43 states.
Cain remains strong as long as the allegations remain unproven simply because he appears to be telling the truth – at least to those inclinced to support him.
In the early 1990s, I videotaped and repeatedly studied Clarence Thomas’ masterful defense of similar charges from Anita Hill. I found it hard to believe that Anita Hill, being a lawyer, did not have the strength to stand up to an alleged attack that consisted of dirty words.
I also remember the joke: Did you about the new Anita Hill doll? You pull her string and ten years later she talks.
In the Senate Judiciary hearings prior to his confirmation, Thomas was asked how he viewed Anita Hill’s story. If it was a lie, how did it originate? He advanced the idea that liberal feminist groups nervous about the overturn of Roe v. Wade concocted a story that would play into “negative white sterotypes” about black men being oversexed. Then they went looking for a willing “witess” who would tell the story. In Anita Hill, they found a woman who had a pattern of pressing sexual harassment charges against employers who once worked in the EEOC with Clarence Thomas.
This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee. It was then leaked to the media. And this committee and this body validated it and displayed it in prime time over our entire nation.”
He then called the hearing a high-tech lynching.
This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.
Thomas wrote a later column that underscored the “reckless media” and what they will do to stop a black conservative.
I often felt that the media assumed that, to be black, one had to espouse leftist ideas and Democratic politics. Any black who deviated from the ideological litany of requisites was an oddity and was to be cut from the herd and attacked. Hence, any disagreement we had with black Democrats or those on the Left was exaggerated. Our character and motives were impugned and challenged by the same reporters who supposedly were writing objective stories.
Unfortunately, it must have been apparent to the black liberals, and those on the Left that conservatives would not mount a positive (and I underscore positive) civil rights campaign. They were confident that our central civil rights concern would give them an easy victory since it was confined to affirmative action – that is, being against affirmative action. They were certain that we would not be champions of civil rights. Therefore, they had license to roam unfettered in this area claiming that we were against all that was good and just and holy, and that we were hell-bent on returning blacks to slavery. They could smirk at us black conservatives because they felt we had no real political or economic support.
Is something similar now happening to Herman Cain?
The argument that Thomas advanced in 1991 was that since liberals were sure that conservatives would never be champions of civil rights, they felt that their character assassinations of blacks who dared to break ranks would succeed. The liberal assassins believed that – once tarred with a broad brush to the extent that their reputation was damaged beyond repair – few white conservatives would rush to their defense. The character assassination – however unfair or unsubstantiated – could be leaked to a constitutionally protected media in such a way that even if proven to be false, no one could be impugned for libel or slander.
And outrageously, they even had the audacity to openly admit this strategy.
In July 1991 at a conference of the National Organization for Women in New York City, feminist Florynce Kennedy addressed the conference on the importance of defeating the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. She said, “We’re going to Bork him. We’re going to kill him politically … This little creep, where did he come from?” (John Fund. “The Borking Begins.” The Wall Street Journal. 1/8/2001).
The National Restaurant Assocation had thousands of employees. It’s likely that someone in the organization over the years when he was CEO had a beef with Herman Cain. The fact that out of those thousands of employees there were two who made such claims in not remarkable. In fact, sexual harassment claims, both valid and baseless, were rampant in the years after the Thomas hearings. It is good that this came about because it forced American corporations to set policies. But as a negative effect, it also gave unstable personalities the idea that they could ruin someone’s career with a mere claim.
One thing for certain is that someone is lying here. Either it is Cain’s accusers or Herman Cain himself. If Cain is lying, he has painted himself into a corner. He has created a balck or white scenario with no shades of gray.
He claims that in all his years as a CEO, he never said anything inappropriate to anyone. Period.
As a fan of Cain’s success story, I am confident of one thing. The main difference between the Thomas hearings of 1991 and the GOP primaries of 2012 is time. And this time, time is on the side of truth. In the Thomas hearings, there were two days of public testimonies and then a quick vote by 100 Senators. In Cain’s case, there are still two months to go before the first primary vote on January 10th.
If Herman Cain is telling the truth, then the lies of his accusers will be exposed in time. There are enough details given in the testimonies now that there is some record somewhere, some hard evidence among the specifics of the allegations that will show the truth once and for all. It may very well be an attempt at a high tech lynching, but the good news for Herman Cain is that communications technology has made it easier to spread the truth.
Mark Twain once quipped: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” The good news is that Herman Cain still has two months to put on his shoes. Then the Internet can do the rest.
If Herman Cain is proven innocent, and he survives one of the most malicious smear campaigns in American political history, it will add to the force of the argument that he is suited to the pressures of the presidency as one who has not only survived opposition and adversity all his life, but as one who has triumphed over it.
