Two Day Magazine

Welcome to your Friday edition of The Hollywood Outsider.

This is twodaymag’s weekly musings about newsworthy events in the world of pop culture (not just Hollywood).

This week appears to be scandal week in the USA, which is like Shark Week except scandal week involves a little less biting and a lot less awesome.

This week there have been two major scandals in the news. One incredibly serious (which has been excellently covered on this site) and the other incredibly ridiculous.

Let’s talk about the fun one.

Herman Cain Accused Of Some Form Of Sexual Misconduct In The ‘90s And Has Deep Enough Pockets To Interest Gloria Allred

Let’s get something out of the way: the Outsider will not endorse a political candidate, that’s a job for his cousins The Republican Outsider and The Democrat Outsider (Thanksgiving totally sucks every year with them around). But when scandal strikes a politician or political candidate, it’s important to try to look at it as politically objectively as possible.

With the recent accusations surrounding Herman Cain, it’s especially important because the whole thing has now becoming a major distraction from serious issues and is further tarnishing an already ridiculous process.

This week, Sharon Bialek has come forward after attacking Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain anonymously for weeks. She says that he fondled her in a car after she went to see him about a job during the 1990s.The accusation has attracted the attention of celebrity attorney and professional bullshit-smith Gloria Allred.

For those who are blissfully unaware, the celebrity lawyer uses the vail of “defending the rights of women” to peddle her brand of self-promotion.

It’s possible that Allred might have done some good at one point in her career, but she is now what industry insiders refer to as a “Troll.” She goes around and says infuriatingly stupid things to promote her own self interest. Think Fred Phelps but with less incest.

The outsider personally finds true gender discrimination deplorable, but Allred does not defend woman so much as use the word “discrimination” as a club to beat opponents into submission, thus cheapening the claims of real abused women and getting rich in the process.

Hypothetically, if a woman crashed her car into a tree while drunk and texting, Allred would most likely sue the tree owner for discrimination. If you tried to point out that her client was drunk and texting she would just scream, “No object has the right to hurt a woman! That tree stood for hundreds of years and never caused damage to a drunk texting man!” over and over again until her opponent reached a settlement just to get her to go away.

It’s a nice little business and the Outsider wishes he didn’t have a soul so he could try it.

So the two gave a press conference this week calling out the the presidential candidate for his alleged transgressions and promoting Bialek’s courage for going public with the whole thing.

If this allegation is true, then Cain has owed her a serious apology for some time and the courageous thing to do would have been to file a complaint against him when it happened and help him learn that what he did was wrong so that other women wouldn’t become victims.

OR the courageous thing is to do nothing and wait 12 years until the man is relevant on a much bigger stage and call a press conference - not to announce a law suit or formally charge him with anything - just to get a bunch of reporters together and bash the guy on TV for an hour for something that didn’t seem important enough to do anything about at the time, but NOW she can’t let other women be victims.

The Outsider sometimes gets courage and flatulent self promotion confused. You can decide which one is which.

Allred continued by saying that Cain, in her opinion, is using tactic designed to “crush women who come forward.”

Allred needs more women to come forward because the case she has right now sucks. If it didn’t suck, she’d be suing as it has been made very public that Bialek doesn’t have any money and Allred hasn’t gotten as far as she has by working for free.

Let the Outsider be perfectly clear here. He is not endorsing any form of crushing women, especially women who have been truly wronged or abused in some way.

As for these “women crushing tactics” used by Cain? It appears most of these tactics consist of him publicly denying the allegations and alluding to Allred being full of shit (Outsider’s words).

Let’s assume there are two possibilities here. The first is that the allegations against Cain are true as stated. In this case then Cain needs to apologize and do what he can to make the situation(s) right. And if he’s been lying, he absolutely needs to be held accountable for that too. After that, the voters will have to decide if he is the right guy to represent them.

The second possibility is that these allegations are false, which until we get something a little more substantial---like say a picture of Cain’s frank n’ beans sent out from his twitter account---is not an entirely unreasonable assumption. If the whole thing is not true, what else could you expect him to do in this situation? How do you prove a negative?

If hurting Herman Cain’s chances at being elected president is a goal of yours, might the Outsider suggest a different tactic:

You’re better off pointing out that he has no true political experience. The private and public sectors are so different that success in one would not necessarily translate to success in the other. Argue that his inexperience will eventually surface and cause him to make a costly mistake either on the campaign trail or in office. In other words, stick to the actual issues and the machine that takes Cain down will be called the television.

We are trying to choose the leader of the free world and the process is ridiculous enough as it is.

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Find John Dupra on Facebook and ask him what he would do if a tree sexually harrassed him.

Find twoday magazine on Facebook and let's continue the conversation there. Should political sex scandals play such a big part in our media or is it just distracting us from the real issues? (Just ask Bill Clinton...)