Ben Bradlee: Cain 'Had it Coming'

An apparently well-lubricated Ben Bradlee, who had no problem in the 1950s and ’60s covering up JFK’s myriad affairs, tells Michelle Fields of the Daily Caller that Cain had his attack by the Politico “coming.” Or as Ann Althouse writes, separate and apart from the above video, “He’s black, but he doesn’t get the usual leeway black men ‘have been allowed’… why? I mean, really, why is that? What is she saying? What I hear is: He’s not the right kind of black man. He’s conservative, so he doesn’t get whatever that extra freedom is that is allowed — that the passive voice gives — to black men.”

Think of it as Punitive Liberalism meets Gentleman’s Agreement.

Regarding the Daily Caller’s video, Elizabeth Scalia responds:

[Bradlee] seems to have had a couple of drinks (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and immediately puts his arm around the pretty young Fields. Nothing sexual, of course. It’s not harassment! He’s just trying to hear her better in a crowded, noisy room, and being the avuncular old lion encouraging a youngster. Right? He gasses on about how much he loves Kennedy, too, and then when Fields ask “what about the allegations against Herman Cain,” Bradlee puts that avuncular hand on young Fields’ shoulder and says chummily, “I think he’s got it coming to him, doesn’t he?”

Let’s put aside the fact that no one yet knows anything, for sure, re the Cain allegations. “He’s got it coming,” for some reason.

I wonder if all Cain did was comparable to what Ben Bradlee did here: had a few drinks, stood a little too close — the better to hear, my dear — used the encouraging arm, put the hand on a woman’s shoulder. Maybe he was just steadying himself.

I could see it making a young woman uncomfortable, for sure. When I was a young woman, I never appreciated an older guy’s hand on my shoulder, at my back or on my waist. And post the Thomas-Hill debacle, women didn’t stand still for it or endure it the way we did in the 1970′s and 1980′s. And that’s a good thing.

In the 1990′s, women became vaporish and victimized over risque jokes, though. An over-correction.

Bradlee, unlike Woodward, has no problem with giving advice to Cain, “run for the roundhouse,” which I think means one can’t be cornered, there.

I don’t know what “he’s got it coming” means. Perhaps Bradlee knows more than everyone else? Perhaps he’s projecting on to Cain all the woman-abusing sins he’s observed in DC over all the years, when he was palling around with oh, Ted Kennedy and the like?