Herman Cain Has Gone Viral, and the Republican Party Has Caught Pneumonia

Funny thing is, Herman Cain's troubles are bigger than a sexual harassment scandal. Sure, if it turns out that these charges don't "stick" -- which is odd because I think I can almost guarantee that they'll never be "proven" -- then Cain can eventually be a good, solid conservative "victim" of the liberal media (?) and get a job at Fox.

But his problems are bigger than these charges. His problem, I've always felt, was that he was essentially -- and I do mean in the true sense of that word -- unserious. No, not in the way hippies are punched for being "unserious" by the Beltway Villagers, the Very Serious People that control the centers of power, but rather in that he was making it up as he went along, and his speaking skills and presence gave him more traction than his ideas deserved.



And so Herman Cain's probably short-lived success has debased the very party he contrived to lead. Andrew Sullivan is not well-regarded in a lot of liberal blogging circles, but I have always relied on him as a gauge of the intellectual right. And if we lend David Frum that kind of credence, then that's two leading conservatives that recognize the silliness if not the batshit craziness of the current Republican canon.