Herman Cain announces 2012 run

Thread Hop: Didn't he quote Pokemon2000 as an inspirational poem? Amongst other satirish stuff

edited 7th Nov '11 11:09:43 PM by Sandbylur

Why yes, he did.

What kind of hypnotic powers does this man have where he can sexually harass people and have it go unreported until he tries to do something like become president.

In fact, it seems like a lot of presidential candidates past and present seem to have this power...

Uh, duh, this kind of dirt-digging media circus happens to everyone who makes a plausible presidential run. This particular media circus just welcomed Gloria Allred into the stadium, for crying out loud.

(And FWIW, administrators in my old school district seemed to love disposing of their more maverick teachers by trumped-up charges of sexual harassment. It's not a crime that tends to leave physical evidence, which gives a lot of leeway for smear-jobs.)

I'm well aware of that. I'm just an idealist who wishes people would report crimes when they happen, not years after the fact.

For the sanity of our more OCD tropers, I fixed the thread title.

Some of those harassment charges were reported when they occurred and the accusers paid off. They're being brought up now specifically as a smear job. Unreported harassment, on the other hand, could still have legal as well as political consequences.

Sexual harassment is one of those sticky tricky issues to deal with. There's no question that it happens, and a great deal of the time goes unreported (for a variety of reasons), and frequently causes emotional distress that lasts for an extended period of time. It's also unquestionable that it's a very difficult thing to prove or disprove, and as such makes for an excellent political cheap shot.

The thing is that a man like Cain — powerful, wealthy, firmly believing in his own infallibility — will have a history of this kind of behavior if he's done it at all. This is because he genuinely believes himself above common morality; he deserves to do these things because he's Herman Cain and anyone who calls him on it is an enemy out to drag him down. So it is entirely unsurprising that more allegations are surfacing; it's also consistent with a man with a pattern of such actions who's gotten away with it precisely because nobody has dared to make it public before.

I don't believe that this is pertinent to his ability to run the country, however. It's not because we've had great Presidents who were also womanizers, though. It's because he's so singularly unfit to run a country that these charges are irrelevant. It's like spraying a gilded turd with skunk juice — it just makes the horrible smell even more obvious.

edited 8th Nov '11 6:48:30 AM by Fighteer

Sounds like the "pattern" of anyone with the chutzpah to run for President. They're not all womanizers.

My point is that if Cain has a history of sexual harassment, the fact that these allegations are causing more allegations to surface is not only unsurprising, but entirely expected, and well within the pattern of such things. The fact that some people are coming out and making it public emboldens others who were also victims but lacked the courage to say anything. The more allegations emerge, the harder it is to pin them on a deliberate smear campaign.

Of course not all Presidents have been womanizers, but you may notice that those who were had a trail of public allegations during their campaigns and their Presidency. Clinton comes to mind — his predilections were something of an open secret, wink wink nudge nudge style.

edited 8th Nov '11 6:56:34 AM by Fighteer

The conveniently vague allegations that Cain wasn't let in on. And this "new victim", again, is being championed by Gloria Allred. She's to publicity bandwagons what most civil lawyers are to ambulances.

(Hell, even Clinton was falsely accused by Juanita Broaddrick. When a scandal wagon gets going, every attention hog with a claim to the periphery wants to hop aboard.)

But anyway: what makes him less fit for office than Obama?

edited 8th Nov '11 7:12:15 AM by DomaDoma

The more important scandal regarding campaign financing, for me.

His total ignorance of and lack of interest in how to be respectful of foreign powers, his feelings that poor people are poor because they deserve it in a country with third world levels of wealth disparity, and his desire to enact a tax plan that would raise taxes on the middle and lower classes while reducing taxes for the wealthy?

Come on, at least ask a hard one next time. ;)

Cain has also professed ignorance of things he really should know about regarding his own personal history, so I wouldn't put much stock into what he 'wasn't let in on' from his pov.

edited 8th Nov '11 7:23:25 AM by Karkadinn

@Doma: His sim city tax plan, for one. His complete lack of understanding how laws work and why short bills would be a very bad idea.

edited 8th Nov '11 7:24:39 AM by thatguythere47

Third-world disparity, right. The disparity that began with the Great Society, and is furthermore totally forcing you to get your drinking water boiled from the river. Hey, did you know that the people comprising the top 1% in 1996 have had a 26% mean reduction in their earnings since? Selling a nice house is enough to make you a one-percenter for a year.

(Though I guess that's better suited to the OWS thread.)

Also, the 9-9-9 deal would get rid of all those corporate loopholes you've been complaining about. It would, in fact, treat people equally under the law. And finally... Obama as master diplomat? I have to admit, I laughed a bit there.

EDIT: Why would short bills be a bad idea? Yes, politicians technically have the expertise to close loopholes with mounds of verbiage, but when has a politician ever used copious verbiage to close a loophole, compared to the times they've created loopholes, or added poison pills, or festooned the thing with pork and pay raises and pet policies? And the end result is that it keeps lawyers' billyclubs in full threat mode, since testifying for your own defense is pretty laughable within the current legal labyrinths.

edited 8th Nov '11 7:38:28 AM by DomaDoma

Doma, as much as this has come up before in other threads, you ought to know the numbers by now. I"m not interested in rehashing them and why the current state of affairs for wealth distribution isn't normal or healthy for the nth time. Thirty seconds with Google is all it takes to prove how your entire first paragraph is bullshit.

Also, newsflash, we want to get rid of loopholes in large part because they give wealthy people and corporations unfair taxation advantages. Taking them away only to give them back in the form of raw tax breaks is completely missing the point.

edited 8th Nov '11 7:44:13 AM by Karkadinn

Any lawyer worth his salt can use vagueness to their advantage, that's why laws always get bigger, because some asshole found away around something vague enough to be almost legal.

Somehow, I doubt the net output to government for incumbents' darlings like Monsanto is more than nine percent.

EDIT: Well, one thing politicians have needed for a while is a style guide to conciseness...

Anyway, politicians abuse that shit way, way more often than they use it properly. There is no reason any law needs to make the later work of Neal Stephenson look like Roald Dahl by comparison. Even the Speaker of the House can't stay on top of behemoths like that.

edited 8th Nov '11 7:56:56 AM by DomaDoma

I don't see the point to all this since romney is obviously going to win. Seems like a lot of work for nothing.

Because Romney is an ambitious, hollow mannequin who wants power more than he wants to do anything in particular with it, and the only person I've ever seen to express any enthusiasm for him was Orson Scott "I'm So Mormon I Won't Even Insult Stephenie Meyer" Card?

Doma, simplifying legislative language is a laudable concept but you have to ask yourself what, exactly, it is designed to accomplish. Laws aren't written for laymen, they're written for lawyers. If your objective is to get Congressmen to read each and every piece of legislation they vote on, in full, well, again, why? You're throwing out ideas without citing what the net benefit would be.

As for taxes, I think we are in agreement that corporations paying no effective taxes is a serious problem but reducing the corporate tax rate fails to address said problem. In the end it comes down to numbers: who pays what portion of taxes, and Cain's plan would massively reduce taxes on the rich while increasing them on the middle class. Only the most hardcore of Koch brothers-sponsored economists would say that's a good thing.

Also, real studies have shown that the share of after-tax personal income in this country has increased for the top 1% while decreasing for the bottom 80% over the last several decades, and it has massively increased for the top 0.1%. This is not a healthy distribution of wealth — it's a travesty of social justice.

Cain is on the side of the rich, lock stock and barrel. He is bought and paid for and if I voted for him I might as well be voting for David and Charles Koch.

edited 8th Nov '11 8:06:21 AM by Fighteer

...You don't think it's an issue that even the legislators can't keep track of what the laws say? Hell, you don't think that being beholden to lawyers is bad for society?

So do the rich get unfair tax exemptions or don't they? Can't have it both ways.

EDIT: Would it be okay if I invoke the Mighty Demon Soros at the end of every post? It's exactly as irrelevant.

edited 8th Nov '11 8:09:51 AM by DomaDoma

The rich get massively unfair tax exemptions and we need to increase their effective tax rate back to the pre-Reagan numbers as soon as is legislatively possible.

As for being able to read the laws... I don't know, is it a problem? You tell me why, since you seem to be so concerned with it. If a law has 100 pages of fine print detailing the precise effect on this, that, and the other thing, I'll be satisfied with the executive summary.

And while I'm all for excising the lawyer class, that strikes me as a tangential goal, especially since Cain just loves him some lawyers.

He loves lawyers so much that he settled a case out of court rather than pay them, like most business owners confronted with a civil shake-down.

Yes, it's a problem. If legislators don't know the specifics of the law, you can be damn sure enforcers and jurors won't.

edited 8th Nov '11 8:13:27 AM by DomaDoma

Settling harassment cases out of court is par for the course for businesses. It has nothing to do with paying lawyers or not; these folks retain legal staff specifically to handle these situations.

With regard to the laws, people make it their jobs to read and interpret all the fine print. That's why we have lawyers, judges, etc. You're making an assertion that complex legal language is bad without offering any reasons that go beyond "it's bad."

Elaborating: There's a difference between not understanding the particulars and not reading the nitty gritty. An executive summary can cover all the salient points without getting into the "subsection 23, paragraph Q" nonsense. I program computers for a living. I don't need my end users to read the source code; that's my job. I tell them what it does and how to use it.

Anyway, all these "simplify the laws" promises are just that, empty promises. Cain's blowing smoke if he thinks he stands any chance of getting Congress to take meaningful action on them.

edited 8th Nov '11 8:22:23 AM by Fighteer

Unless you're in charge of the DRM software - which I know you aren't, as TV Tropes doesn't have any - then it's not really analogous to the relationship between lawyers and the public.

So you support Cain for an impossible promise made on a feel-good, ultimately meaningless campaign issue, never mind that his economic policies will utterly screw over 99 percent of the country's population in favor of his corporate masters? Nice to know you have your priorities straight.

edited 8th Nov '11 8:31:44 AM by Fighteer