Tracking the spread of sexual-harassment denialism beyond the Derb, Dahlia Lithwick worries that the Cain contremps reveals fundamental hostility to women in the GOP:
The real lies here are the claims of millions of frivolous suits in which jurors award liars with pots of money and television contracts. The legal standard for proving a hostile work environment is high and usually requires showing a pattern of bad behavior. If anything, experts say that the current system under-punishes as opposed to over-punishes, and that most victims of sexual harassment on the job will never come forward at all…[T]o claim that they must be false because all women lie and all harassers are just joking is a terrifying proposition. Even more than the outright antagonism of so many conservative pundits, what’s worrying to me is the indifference of so many Republican voters: New poll results show that 70 percent of Republicans say the sexual harassment scandal makes no difference in their vote. It’s no longer just a Republican war on women. It’s a war on the idea that any woman might ever tell the truth.
It’s particularly odd since so many of them spent so much time in the 1990s piously reminding the rest of us that Paula Jones had a case (she did), and that a president could be impeached for it (completely bonkers). At some point, between the “illegals” and the gays and the women, the GOP is going to run out of large segments of the society to fear and/or despise. It’s a strange strategy for a wannabe majority party.
The Dish 