I don’t know about you, but I see the fine hand of Karl Rove in the surfacing of these sexual harassment charges right now. I don’t doubt there were allegations, nor do I doubt that Cain’s employer at the time paid settlement money to make the charges go away, but I doubt if the Obama campaign dug them up.

Remember, Rove is the guy who smeared an opponent (see page 3) by claiming he was a pedophile, using as a prop a picture of the opponent holding hands with abused kids.

“What Rove does,” says Joe Perkins, “is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark [Kennedy] is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin’, tobacco-chewin’, pickup-drivin’ kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take.”

I guess. Who was Mark Kennedy?

Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children’s Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization. At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect.

Anyone who would slime a man like that would certainly use accusations of sexual harassment to smear a guy like Herman Cain.