He knew this crap was coming. And he absolutely hits it spot on.

Herman Cain might well be a harasser. But as Levin does a great job of analyzing yesterday’s Gloria Allred circus act, it’s a great bet that he never laid a hand on Sharon Bialek.

Why? Because Gloria Allred only takes on clients like Sharon Bialek who are looking to get media attention in support of a check from somebody, or to pursue an agenda. Go back and remember Allred’s October Surprise smear of Meg Whitman in the California governor’s race last year, when she paraded a “client” in front of the cameras to say “Hey, guess what? I’m an illegal alien, and I’m on your TV to tell you I was working as a maid at Meg’s crib.”

Ever heard of a lawyer who advises her client to go on TV and admit to having committed a crime for the purposes of publicity and not to get immunity? Most people would say that Lawyering 101’s first lesson is that you tell your client who has exposure to be deported for being an illegal alien NOT TO SAY ANYTHING.

Most people aren’t Gloria Allred. Most people aren’t that shameless. Most lawyers couldn’t bring themselves to be such dirty media whores.

But Gloria has made a career of diving into sewers the majority of left-wing psychopaths wouldn’t dream of. This is her stock in trade.

And because it is, the simple fact that Sharon Bialek was willing to show up with Gloria Allred tells you all you need to know about her credibility. It’s nil. People with credibility don’t hire sleazebags like Gloria Allred to rep them.

So Sharon Bialek lacks credibility. Know what she doesn’t lack? An interesting and perhaps suggestive history. Here’s somebody who FIRST OF ALL IS FROM CHICAGO. Heavens – I wonder how THAT could possibly be significant?

There’s a good bit more…

The public record on Bialek begins in 1991 when she filed personal bankruptcy for the first time while living in Des Plaines.
Between 1993 and 1996 Bialek worked for four different companies in promotion and marketing positions.

In 1996, and part of 1997, Bialek was at the National Restaurant Association. After being let go from that job in mid-1997, she says that she went to Washington, D.C., to meet with Cain, president of the association, because she needed a job.

In 1999, Bialek’s son Nicholas was born and a paternity lawsuit was filed by the father, a media executive.

In 2001 came Bialek’s second personal bankruptcy, filed after sizable legal bills. That year she was hired by WGN radio where she worked until 2004 when she took a marketing job and then a job at WCKG radio.

Along the way, according to her attorney, Bialek also held positions with Revlon and Easter Seals.

Bialek currently lives in Mundelein with fiance Mark Harwood.

“She’s of the same political persuasion as Herman Cain,” Harwood said. “There was no money on the table to go and have an interview. This is truly about an American girl who’s got a big heart and wants to do the right thing.”

Our good buddy Quin Hillyer’s reaction was spot on with this, if not quite as strong as Levin’s dismissal though he (mistakenly, I think) walked it back.

The initial reaction…

To that, I add this thought: If these allegations against Cain are UNtrue, then this is one of the vilest episodes in American political history. The lady’s allegation today is so graphic that if it is a lie, it is absolutely sickening. What really puzzles me is that if these allegations ARE true, I don’t see how Herman Cain could possibly have thought he could run for president and not have these stories come out. I mean, I can sort of see Cain thinking that two vague allegations of the “you are the same height as my wife” sort would not be any reason at all to keep him from the presidency. But if he is a serial lout whose loutishness includes two official allegations of harassment of anywhere near the sort as the non-harassment loutishness described today, it makes NO sense for him to put himself in the public eye. He HAD to know these things would come out.

Oddly enough, today’s allegation of under-skirt exploration makes me more inclined, or at least WANT to be inclined, to believe Cain. This is probably a perverse psychological reaction from me: I just can’t bear the thought of somebody who seemed so admirable turn out instead to be not just a borderline serial harasser, but a serial serious harasser and groper.

Is it just me, or is today’s allegation just too “over the top” to be believable?

But then, the walkback…

UPDATE: To be clear, I am not saying that I found Ms. Bialek personally to be not believable. She did not come across as a liar. I am just saying that I don’t want to believe both that Cain would have been such a serial lout and that he would run for president if he had been like that. In short, in a vacuum, on paper, its just hard to believe today’s accusation. Watching and listening to Ms. Bialek is NOT, however, a vacuum. She did not acquit herself badly.

Nah, he blew it.

Bialek wasn’t credible. First of all, when your lawyer, who’s supposed to be the one presenting your story as something serious and believable, calls the tale Cain’s idea of a “stimulus package,” she all but hands out push-cards which announce that this is a blatant political smear.

And second, if you watched that press conference it looks a lot like Bialek is just reading something they’d given her a day or so ago. She’s doing a little junior-grade acting, nothing more. If she remembered the story that well, there was hardly any reason to have to read it. After all, this is somebody whose background is supposedly marketing and promotions, and she’s got to read a statement written from her own traumatic personal experiences off a piece of paper at a press conference?

Bullspit.

Bialek fits this thing perfectly. She’s broke and needs a check, she’s from Chicago, so the “right people” could easily have dug her up, she could credibly be presented as vulnerable to Cain since she apparently went to him about getting her old job back (or something), she apparently could have been in a position to credibly claim she was alone with him so as to make this a he-said, she-said thing that can’t be disproved offhand and she doesn’t particularly come from a political background (apparently) that would indicate she’d be immediately marked as a lefty. Chances are she’s the type who’ll say anything for a buck – no offense to marketing and promotions people, but in that business saying things for a buck is pretty much what you do.

So she gets approached, turns out she’s busted now like she’s been most of her life, and she gets offered the opportunity of a lifetime. Probably got a $300 haircut and a major wardrobe enhancement along with a big-time spa day in the bargain so she’d look good in front of the cameras in the bargain, and now Allred is shopping her around to ABC, CBS and NBC so she’ll get the check. And once she does, she gets to go away – except maybe she’ll get a deadhead job working for some “connected” people back in Chicago who are grateful for her role in spiking the guy at the top of the GOP polls.

This is vile stuff. Quin had that right. Quin is also the guy who has been warning the Right for over a year that Obama and his people on the Left would stoop to any level in order to win next year. Now, when there’s evidence he’s correct – for Pete’s sake GLORIA ALLRED reared her disgusting head today – and he backs down?

I feel like Keyshawn Johnson: C’mon, man.

After all, Quin’s the guy who wrote this…

Obama is, to use the vernacular, an entirely different breed of cat. He does not think in conventional American political terms, or conventional societal terms. This is problematic: While some escapes from convention are devoutly to be desired, his model of action does not even nod to convention at all, and thus not to established and valuable societal norms. We want to celebrate American civilization; Obama wants to redefine it.

Ronald Reagan famously advised Americans to “trust but verify”; when it comes to Obama, conservatives should verify without trusting. We can even give him credit for what by his own lights are noble intentions, while knowing that there really is neither nobility nor admirability in them.

To deal with Obama, then, conservatives will need to keep our cool and keep our wits. But in keeping our cool, we must not be cold-blooded. We act not in hatred for what Obama stands for, but through love for country, Constitution, and civil society. The better angels of our nature, guided by a tough-minded realism, must prevail.

Yes, it’s unfair to quote somebody’s own words. Heaven forbid somebody might do that to me once. But we already know that the Left will stoop to any level to win elections. Without political power, nothing about their ideology works; you can’t be a progressive without the ability to dictate human behavior by force of arms, and so any means by which that power can be attained is justifiable. You can work that one out for yourself as a little thought experiment, or you can just read your Alinsky and he’ll lay it out for you.

Given that, anybody who looks at Gloria Allred’s sideshow today and her well-established track record (knock yourself out if you’re not familiar with it) and doesn’t see this as exactly what Hillyer said it would be back in December of last year is simply being far too nice.

Cain’s not even my guy. I think he’s weak on policy and I can’t stand that 9-9-9 plan with the federal sales tax on it. And his campaign team stinks, frankly – the handling of this affair is evidence that he’d do himself a favor by starting over.

That said, when faced with the quality of the people on the other side of the current political divide, conservatives simply don’t have the luxury of eating our own. Cain has to be defended from this sex harassment stuff until such a time as someone CREDIBLE, without an obvious agenda, brings something specific to the table.

And don’t come to me with this “yeah, but there are so many of these allegations now that it looks like a pattern.” Really? Says who? We already know that politics in America is full of absolutely shameless liars – and that’s not limited to the Left or the Obama clan, who look at falsehood as a sacrament. And this is a culture so degraded that seemingly perfectly normal people will expose every sin, every character flaw and every ugly urge to the world just to get on reality TV; the idea that you could find a few Kim Kardashians or Michaele Salahis to gold-dig their way onto the evening news by embellishing some account of a meeting they might have had with Cain is hardly inconceivable. Think a well-funded campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars at its disposal and an army of political hit men with nothing much to do until next year couldn’t string something like this together?

I’d bet on it before I’d bet on Sharon Bialek’s fish story being true.