Yesterday John Cole asked an interesting question:

While Cain’s bizarre and shifting responses to the sexual harassment charges are interesting, I think the weirdest thing about this whole incident is what provoked it. Who fed this to the Politico, because we know for a fact they weren’t doing due diligence on Cain and just stumbled across it. They don’t do journalism, they do rumor and innuendo and fluff pieces, mixed in with planted trial balloons and horse race analysis and he said she said crap from anonymous sources and unnamed officials.

So who fed them this? Rove? The Romney team?

The allegations against Cain really do have Karl Rove’s modus operandi written all over them. Steve Kornacki walks us through the Scandal Thus Far, and while there’s a heck of a lot of smoke, the actual fire seen so far doesn’t seem to amount to that much.

I’ve been holding back talking about the allegations, partly because part of me would like to see Cain continue to challenge Romney for the GOP nomination. (I’ve been looking at Cain’s policy proposals on his campaign website and much of it is in Ron Paul territory. In other words, he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the general election.) So far, the sex scandal has been dismissed by righties as an evil libruhl plot, even as they slaver over New York Post stories about sex among the OWSers at Zuccotti Park.

There’s also been an attempt to smear Cain with the background of his cigarette-smoking campaign manager, but frankly I don’t see that getting any traction, either.

Several rightie bloggers have picked up on an interview of Cain by Judy Woodruff, in which he says he is concerned that China might get nuclear weapons in the future. WTF? It’s possible he just misspoke, as Gerald Ford did in 1976 when he said “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” That possibly cost Ford the election.

But that was 1976. Right now the isolationists seem to be shouting out the neocons over in Wingnut World, and baggers would be challenged to find China on a map, never mind have a clue about its nuclear capabilities. So I don’t know if that little flub is going to hurt him, either. We’ll see. If a Democrat were to have said something like that, that’s all we’d hear about from now to election day. And if Karl really is the one behind the sex scandal stories, this is the sort of thing he would seize upon to club Cain. However, he’s going to have to find a proxy somewhere to do the actual clubbing.

Update: “The Fringe Frontrunner.”