And as for Cain

Echoing Christopher Hitchens, pm carpenter describes the sexual harassment scandal as “a hand I’d prefer not to play“:

It is for that reason I find the Cain Affair(s) profoundly objectionable as a reason to politically object to Cain. One can, and in my opinion unequivocally should, protest the man’s candidacy because of his sweeping, manifest ignorance and thus utter unsuitability for the land’s highest office — or, for that matter, one of its many lower ones. But to bombard him because of his lusty boorishness tips a remarkably transparent and rather tacky partisan hand that I’d rather not play.

Once you accept that it’s all one, the epiphenomena are a lot less annoying. It’s the completely insane insubstantiality of Cain-ism that summons forth its own seemingly insanely irrelevant (except to the accusers and Cain) negation. Yet, if we understand Cainism as the political equivalent of sexual harassment – a harassment of the national body politic, a mediatized aggression against our self-respect, then the form its dissolution is taking seems natural and inevitable. If it had ever been possible to reduce Cain simply because he says nothing and is ignorant, then he never would or could have arisen in the first place.  Our disappointment in having to turn to “this stuff” indicates that the implicit indictment or diagnosis, as expressed and confirmed in the mere existence of Cain and his supporters, will stand, whatever happens to whichever particular human vehicle for its enunciation.