Via Mediaite. She’s arguing that harassment claims are now the left’s go-to smear when targeting black conservatives like Cain and Clarence Thomas because they play on old racist tropes, but the Cain and Thomas cases aren’t the same. No one’s suddenly coming forward now, in the heat of a campaign, to allege improprieties that went unremarked upon at the time. The charges against Cain were made 15 years ago and went far enough to be settled by the NRA. Doesn’t mean he’s guilty, but the story isn’t suddenly emerging out of nothing.
At Newsmax, Tammy Bruce issues a reality check:
In 2003 I served on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s transition team and many people were reminded recently that no matter how much we despise the lamestream media, it’s important to not blindly dismiss everything reported simply because it involves someone we support.
As the front-runner in multiple polls, Cain is being targeted, investigated, and vetted. It’s called the heat of the political kitchen. It’s happening because he’s a leading politician running for a job many others want. It’s not happening because he’s black.
For respected conservative leaders to move the meme that racism is somehow at the heart of what is happening to Cain is not only incorrect, it’s dangerous as it feeds into the left’s putrid thought police loop.
Conservatives must reject the false argument meant to keep Obama specifically free from critique — that asking questions of or criticizing a politician who happens to be black must be based in racism.
Neither Tim Scott nor tea-party rock star Allen West has been accused of personal impropriety by the left, as far as I know. If harassment was the sort of blanket smear of black conservatives that Coulter suggests it is, you’d expect them to have been smeared too by now. As for Politico’s alleged double standard towards Cain, as much as it might pain the media to have to cover Democratic sex scandals, they do cover them — usually reluctantly, as in the cases of Weiner and Edwards, but sometimes more enthusiastically, as with the NYT’s investigation and takedown of Spitzer. They want the Democrats to win, but they also want to sell papers and rack up page views. All of which is to say, does anyone really believe that if Politico found documents from the 90s at Bain Capital alleging that Romney had “busy hands,” they wouldn’t have run that story? With a banner headline?
Here’s the clip. Incidentally, “Red Eye” is now drawing more viewers in the 25-54 demographic at 3 a.m. than Piers Morgan, Erin Burnett, Chris Matthews, or Nancy Grace during primetime.
