Sexual Harassers, Adulterers, Animal Abusers, and Crooks! OH MY!

The party of Culture Warriors sure knows how to pick them!  It seems that all you have to do is say that you’ll sign into law things that the American Taliban demands and leave your own morality at the door, and you’re on top for the race for the world’s number one leader!

IMMorality Play Refresher:

Herman Cain:  Serial Sexual Harraser

A doctor who once dated Herman Cain accuser Sharon Bialek came forward today to say that he remembered Bialek telling him in 1997 that Cain had “touched her in an inappropriate manner,” and that he was the one who urged her to contact lawyer Gloria Allred and go public with her accusation.

Dr. Victor Zuckerman of Shreveport, Louisiana, who appeared at a Monday afternoon press conference with attorney Gloria Allred, said he had decided to go public himself in order to rebut Herman Cain’s public statement that he had no idea who Sharon Bialek was and couldn’t recall ever meeting her. “I’m here to shed light on whether or not Herman Cain knows Sharon Bialek.” Zuckerman also admitted that he, like his ex-girlfriend, had experienced financial difficulties, but said he was not coming forward in order to profit.

Four different women have accused the Republican presidential frontrunner of sexually harassing them while they worked at the National Restaurant Association. Karen Kraushaar and a second woman filed internal complaints with the trade group and received financial settlements. A third woman told the Associated Press she had considered filing a complaint against Cain but decided against it because a coworker had already filed.

Newt Gingrich:  Crook,   Serial Adulterer, and  Cad

Leaves Speaker position because of numerous ethics violations

Gingrich and foundations he was associated with were under investigation for numerous ethics violations, primarily concerning using tax exempt status for organizations designed to further his political goals and making misleading statements to congress. In December 1998 he paid $300,000 of his own money to settle the last of these charges.

Cheats on two wives

But the most notorious of them all is undoubtedly Gingrich, who ran for Congress in 1978 on the slogan, “Let Our Family Represent Your Family.” (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair’s Gail Sheehy: “We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, ‘I never slept with her.'” Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.

Serves wife #1 divorce papers while she’s in hospital for cancer surgery while having affair with future ex wife number 2

Here’s how Mother Jones recounted Newt’s hospital visit with Jackie, who was her husband’s former high school math teacher:

Jackie had undergone surgery for cancer of the uterus during the 1978 campaign, a fact Gingrich was not loath to use in conversations or speeches that year. After the separation in 1980, she had to be operated on again, to remove another tumor While she was still in the hospital, according to Howell, “Newt came up there with his yellow legal pad, and he had a list of things on how the divorce was going to be handled. He wanted her to sign it. She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it.

The source was Lee Howell, a former Gingrich campaign press secretary who had been the editor of the student newspaper at West Georgia College, where Gingrich was a history professor. As Osborne told me this week: “Most Gingrich staff people felt burned by the time they left. Howell was one of those people. But I also got [the story] from Jackie.”

Says ‘Passion for the country’ made him do it

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich gave an interview to the Christian Broadcasting Network to speak about his past indiscretions, the coming presidential race and what he calls the threat to “Judeo-Christian society.”

“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate,” said Gingrich during an interview with CBN’s David Brody. “What I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them,” he continued, going on to say that he had sought “God’s forgiveness. Not God’s understanding, but God’s forgiveness.”

Mitt Romney: Animal Abuser,     Positions on things = f(target voters)

Thinks it’s just fine to tool down the highway with his pet dog caged on the roof

The reporter intended the anecdote that opened part four of the Boston Globe’s profile of Mitt Romney to illustrate, as the story said, “emotion-free crisis management”: Father deals with minor — but gross — incident during a 1983 family vacation, and saves the day. But the details of the event are more than unseemly — they may, in fact, be illegal.

The incident: dog excrement found on the roof and windows of the Romney station wagon. How it got there: Romney strapped a dog carrier — with the family dog Seamus, an Irish Setter, in it — to the roof of the family station wagon for a twelve hour drive from Boston to Ontario, which the family apparently completed, despite Seamus’s rather visceral protest.

Massachusetts’s animal cruelty laws specifically prohibit anyone from carrying an animal “in or upon a vehicle, or otherwise, in an unnecessarily cruel or inhuman manner or in a way and manner which might endanger the animal carried thereon.” An officer for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals responded to a description of the situation saying “it’s definitely something I’d want to check out.” The officer, Nadia Branca, declined to give a definitive opinion on whether Romney broke the law but did note that it’s against state law to have a dog in an open bed of a pick-up truck, and “if the dog was being carried in a way that endangers it, that would be illegal.” And while it appears that the statute of limitations has probably passed, Stacey Wolf, attorney and legislative director for the ASPCA, said “even if it turns out to not be against the law at the time, in the district, we’d hope that people would use common sense…Any manner of transporting a dog that places the animal in serious danger is something that we’d think is inappropriate…I can’t speak to the accuracy of the case, but it raises concerns about the judgment used in this particular situation.”