Posts Tagged ‘liberal media hit piece’

This is what Rush Limbaugh means by “Drive-by-Media.”

Here’s the ridiculous piece in POLITICO. No specifics at all on what might have occurred, who is making the allegations, or even what the allegations are.

POLITICO: During Herman Cain’s tenure as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior by Cain, ultimately leaving their jobs at the trade group, multiple sources confirm to POLITICO.

The women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable, the sources said, and they signed agreements with the restaurant group that gave them financial payouts to leave the association. The agreements also included language that bars the women from talking about their departures.

Read the rest of the POLITICO piece here >>>

BEN’S ANALYSIS:

So, according to POLITICO, this is the blockbuster charge against Cain:

‎There were also descriptions of physical gestures that were not overtly sexual but that made women who experienced or witnessed them uncomfortable and that they regarded as improper in a professional relationship.”

Good grief. Is this all they have?

POLITICO also claims:

The women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable.

But POLITICO gives no specifics on what any of this was.

Did he wink at them and smile? Did he stand up and tighten his belt? Did he pat them on the back and say “Good job”? Did he say “Nice outfit”? Did he make an off-color joke?   Did he laugh when someone made a fart noise?  Did he forget to zip up his fly when he came out of the men’s room? Did he walk around the office in his underwear blowing a horn?

What specifically did he supposedly do to make these women feel uncomfortbale?

We don’t know. We aren’t even given a clue. There are no specifics whatsoever in this piece.

And is it Herman Cain’s job to make sure everyone feels comfortable at all times?

POLITICO uses the term “sexual harassment” to describe Cain’s conduct in the piece, but then does not provide one example of “sexual harassment.”

The article reports a rumor that he might have invited one of the women up to his suite.

To do what? To pick up some file folders? To take dictation? To go over some reports? To attend a party? To watch Monday Night Football with the gang?

POLITICO doesn’t tell us.

This article goes on interminably for page after page, but it’s all fluff, no facts, just innuendo.

This doesn’t even rise to the level of rumor.

This is laughable.  And this (whatever it was — Cain’s fart joke, or whatever) supposedly occurred sometime in the 1990s. That’s more than a decade ago.

Even if these so-called allegations are true, they don’t amount to anything.

There are, in fact, no specific allegations made in this piece.

Then, at the very end of the POLITICO article, they report (admit) this:

Ron Magruder, Denise Marie Fugo and Joseph Fassler, the chair, vice chair and immediate past chairman of the National Restaurant Association board of directors at the time of Cain’s departure, said they hadn’t heard about any complaints regarding Cain making unwanted advances.

“I have never heard that. It would be news to me,” said Fugo, who runs a Cleveland, Ohio, catering company, adding such behavior would be totally out of character for the Cain she knew. “He’s very gracious.”

Fassler, who helped bring Cain on board as CEO of the restaurant association, said that any inappropriate behavior was not brought to his attention and that he would be upset to learn it had gone on and he was not made aware of it.

“That’s a shock to me,” Fassler said. “As an officer during all of Herman’s years there as a paid executive… none of that stuff ever surfaced to me. Nobody ever called me, complained about this, nor did I ever hear that from Peter Kilgore, nor did I ever hear that from Herman Cain.”

Fassler – who ran a Phoenix food-service company and finished his term as chairman the month before Cain’s June 1999 departure but remained on the board’s executive committee – described Cain as treating men and women identically and asserted it was “not within his character” to make unwanted advances. “It’s not what I know of him,” Fassler said.

Much like Fassler, almost all board members remember Cain fondly and say he left on good terms.

Cain was “extremely professional” and “fair” to female staffers at the restaurant association, recalled Lee Ellen Hayes, who said she “worked fairly closely with” Cain in the late 1990s, when she was an executive at the National Restaurant Association Education Fund, a Chicago-based offshoot of the group.

Cain’s treatment of women was “the same as his treatment of men. Herman treated everyone great,” said Mary Ann Cricchio, who was elected to the board of the restaurant group in 1998. She said Cain left such a good impression on the organization that when he spoke at a group event in January of this year, as he was considering a presidential bid, “he had unanimous support in the room.”

In other words, this is much ado about nothing.

No one on the Restaurant Association board had ever heard anything about this before now. And they have nothing but good things to say about Cain and his treatment of women.

Looks like a couple of women are looking for a big payday from the National Enquirer or Larry Flynt.

Moreover, if there was a financial settlement of some kind, that also means nothing.

Businesses and organizations settle issues with disgruntled employees all the time.

It’s just cheaper and easier to pay some people to go away amicably with a nice severance package than to continue rolling around in the mud with them, rack up a lot of legal bills, possibly resulting in negative publicity. It’s not any kind of admission that the disgruntled employee is right.

Of course, there’s no way to have any clue what happened because the POLITICO piece is so poorly written and so lacking in specifics.

So the “electronic lynching” has now started. It’s Clarence Thomas Part Deux.

The liberal media sure had no qualms that Bill Clinton was actually having sex with an intern at the White House, destroying her life, committing perjury in the process, and then losing his law license because of his perjury.

But the liberal media will stop at nothing to destroy Herman Cain by smear and innuendo — no facts needed — because he’s a black conservative. And black conservatives cannot be tolerated.

Legal Expert: What Politico is Alleging is Not Sexual Harassment

Attorney Curt Levey, Executive Director of the Committee for Justice, a 1997 graduate of Harvard Law School, an expert on issue of racial and gender discrimination, says what POLITICO is alleging does not constitute “sexual harassment.”  Here’s what Levey says:

CURT LEVEY: In light of last night’s Politico story about allegations against Herman Cain, it is important to clarify the legal meaning of the term “sexual harassment.” Specifically, Politico reports allegations that Herman Cain made an “an unwanted sexual advance” and engaged in “innuendo or personal questions of a sexually suggestive nature.”

Politico suggests that this amounts to sexual harassment, using the term at least six times.

The truth is that the reported allegations, even if true, do not constitute sexual harassment under the law unless — as the Supreme Court has stated — they are “sufficiently severe or pervasive” to “create an abusive working environment,” among other requirements. Even the guidance of the decidedly liberal U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cautions that “sexual attraction may often play a role in the day-to-day social exchange between employees” and that

“[S]exual flirtation or innuendo, even vulgar language that is trivial or merely annoying, would probably not establish a hostile environment.”

The “severe or pervasive” requirement is not a legal technicality. Sexual harassment in the workplace is an important problem and trivializing the term undermines the seriousness with which cases of severe and pervasive harassment are taken. There is no suggestion in the Politico article that Cain’s alleged behavior was either severe or pervasive, so at least for now, the suggestion of sexual harassment is unsupported.

Politico places a lot of weight on the report that “there were financial settlements in two cases in which women leveled complaints [against Cain].”

In fact, without knowing more about the details of the settlements, it’s impossible to draw any conclusions from them. Corporate America is very risk averse when it comes to negative publicity, and in-house settlements often occur even when the evidence of harassment falls far short of the threshold needed to be taken seriously by a court.

Read here >>>

Ann Coulter rips POLITICO’s below-the-belt hit piece on Cain that’s based on unnamed sources and innuendo