THE HERMAN CAIN SCANDAL IS OVER -- HE JUST BLEW THE WORLD'S LOUDEST DOG WHISTLE

Is the wingnut electorate going to abandon Herman Cain just because of reports that he has a history of sexual harassment? Not after this:

Herman Cain may be the only presidential candidate in history to actually benefit from a sex scandal.

Just hours after Politico broke a story about accusations of sexual harassment against Cain, the former Godfather's Pizza CEO killed it during a luncheon speech at the National Press Club. And then to top it all off, he SANG.

... Cain launched into a surprisingly beautiful rendition of the hymn "He Looked Beyond My Faults" — an interesting choice given the sex scandal.





Oh, this is genius. It's not just that he sings a gospel song -- and not just any gospel song, but a gospel song that both acknowledges personal sin and proclaims that God has already forgiven that sin (implication: so what's your problem, Mr. Godless Humanist?). It's that he picks one of the the best-known songs written by a gospel legend who died tragically in a bus crash a few years ago -- which means the song is a huge classic hit for a lot of people, but is virtually unknown to disgusting urbane sophisticates like you and me, which just goes to prove that we liberal scum have contempt for cultural genius and for people of faith. Like Herman Cain!

I've been pondering a response to Dave Weigel's post "Why Cain Won't Get a 'High-Tech Lynching' Sequel." One of the reasons Weigel gives for his assertion that Cain can't push the Clarence Thomas analogy is the following:

Thomas had no enemies to the right, because his ideological allies wanted him on the court -- no exceptions. Four years after the Bork disaster, they would not let a young African-American court candidate go down. Cain has lots of enemies on the right -- fellow candidates, movement diehards who think he'd lose the general election.

But I'm not sure there are any "movement diehards" who will abandon him. That's for two reasons: first, every other possible purist candidate for president has either refused to run (Palin, Christie, Ryan, Daniels), expressed conservatively incorrect views (Perry, Gingrich, Paul), flamed out (Trump, Bachmann), or failed to catch fire (Santorum). The wingers still run everything else, but when it comes to the presidential race, if they want to save themselves from Romney, Cain's all they've got left. The second reason is that you never want to be caught on the wrong side of any ideological fight, so non-Rovebot righties have immediately gone into wingnuttier-than-thou mode (see, e.g., Rush Limbaugh's defense of Cain).

The two people who might be hurt by this are Karl Rove and Mitt Romney. This is going to make a lot of wingnuts really feel their tribal loyalty -- which is to conservatism as they understand it. They think Republicanism is whatever they stand for. If Karl and Mitt don't live up to their standards, and if Mitt wins the nomination, enough of them may decide that some fringy candidate is the "real" Republican -- maybe as many as decided that Nader was the real Democrat in 2000.