When Herman Cain reacted to the exposure of his sexual harassment past by denying it, then attacking the accusers, I thought to myself, Why? That’s just a red flag for people who know the truth to tell it, at which point he’ll be proved a liar.

Which is pretty much exactly what’s happened. We now know that one of Cain’s accusers was paid a year’s worth of severance. (Presumably the other shoe will drop soon.)

“He’s basically saying: ‘I never harassed anyone. These claims have no merit,’ ” said the lawyer, Joel P. Bennett of Washington, who represented the woman in her initial agreement. “And I’m sure my client would have a comeback to that.”

So Herman Cain’s not a statesman; no great shock there. (Really? The guy who ran a not particularly successful pizza company and then became a Washington lobbyist is the GOP’s leading candidate for president?)

More fascinating to me is the Republican reaction to the disclosure that Cain had been accused of sexual harassment. A lot of conservatives—Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Cain himself—quickly threw around that “high-tech lynching” term used by Clarence Thomas in his own defense. It all felt deeply Orwellian to me, because there aren’t many people left these days who don’t believe that Anita Hill was telling the truth, and Clarence Thomas has proved himself to be an ethically challenged, intellectually void jurist. His behavior since he’s been on the court hasn’t exactly caused anyone to increase their appreciation of his character. I found that term absurd and offensive at the time it was used, and it hasn’t gained credibility since then. And yet these Republicans were using the term as if it was established fact that we all agree that Clarence Thomas was, indeed, the victim of a high-tech lynching.

And, of course, the argument that Democrats are somehow stringing up Cain for racist reasons makes no sense. (Democrats won’t vote for a black guy? Hmmm.) The allegation that Cain sexually harassed women probably came from a GOP contender; Mitt Romney’s camp, I’d imagine. Or maybe it came from someone who knew of it and doesn’t like Cain. Or maybe it just came because a good reporter was (finally) digging into the past of a candidate who’d basically been given a free ride until he started doing well in the polls. Democrats would love for Herman Cain to be the GOP nominee! He’d be a disastrous candidate. (And who would the GOP’s racist contingent vote for?)

Perhaps the lowest moment, so far, in this fracas came when Ann Coulter appeared on Fox News with Sean Hannity yesterday.

Coulter begins by lamenting that whenever Donald Trump and the Tea Party questioned President Obama’s citizenship, they were accused of racism. But …that was racist. The implicit suggestion was that a black man was—had to be—un-American. A kind of Manchurian candidate. That he was a trickster figure who had somehow fooled everyone but those who were sage enough to now be questioning his citizenship.

Coulter continues:

….liberals detest, detest, detest, conservative blacks. I mean, they harang blacks and tell them, you can’t be Republican, you can’t be Republican, it is so hard for a black to be a Republican. And then when we don’t have that many Republicans or blacks showing up at a Republican event, oh, you have no blacks there. Well, maybe if you weren’t haranguing them so much…

So it’s the Democrats’ fault that the GOP tent contains virtually no African-Americans? A novel argument. The last 40 years of political history would suggest otherwise.

Hannity and Coulter go on to argue that liberals have a double standard: They forgave Bill Clinton but demonize black men. Here’s Coulter:

If you are a conservative black they will believe the most horrible sexualized fantasies of these white women feminists.

In fact, quite a few liberals turned on Bill Clinton because of his behavior toward women. (At George magazine, for instance, I edited a column by Naomi Wolf arguing that Clinton was guilty of sexually harassing Monica Lewinsky.) As to the “horrible sexualized fantasies of these white women feminists”—Coulter doth protest too much. She reminds me of Mayella Ewell.

Here is perhaps the most bizarre exchange:

HANNITY: Herman Cain and Lawrence Thomas used the term, high-tech lynching. Is that —
COULTER: Yes. Absolutely is. Absolutely is coming from the exact same people who used to do the lynching ropes, now they do it with the word processor.
HANNITY: The Democratic Party.
COULTER: Yes. Yes. And we had to have national federal civil rights laws to protect blacks from Democrats. As described in a full chapter in my book “Demonic,” giving the revisionist of history to their revisionist of history, of civil rights in this country. It was always Democrats.

For Coulter, who wrote a book defending Joe McCarthy, to accuse others of revisionist history takes some chutzpah. And, yes, at the time of the civil rights movement, Southern whites were generally Democrats. But Southern whites were also Democrats in the time of FDR, whose presidencies were of enormous benefit to African-Americans. (Not to say that those whites loved that aspect of FDR, but still.) And, of course, those racist Southern whites of the 1950s and 1960s subsequently left the party because of the pro-civil rights stances taken by the Kennedys and LBJ and embraced the party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

(Remember too that just moments before Coulter said that the reason there are no blacks in the GOP is because Democrats “harangue” those blacks who are Republican. So one moment they hang them, the next they harangue them for them not being Democrats. Democrats are clearly confused.)

In any event, the whole argument is based on a false premise: That Democrats are behind this attack on Cain. But the original accusation almost certainly didn’t come from Democrats, and I didn’t hear one Democrat speak a word to fan the flames of controversy. (They hardly needed to.)

Coulter concludes:

…there are many wonderful qualities to Herman Cain. But to be honest with you, I think liberals are too dense to see them. All they see is a conservative black man. Look at how they go after Allen West. Look at how they go after Michael Steel.

First: Who is Allen West? (Oh, right—he’s the black congressman from Florida who threatened a female Democratic colleague after she criticized him politically.) And second, Democrats didn’t go after former GOP party chair Michael Steele—Republicans did. They hated the guy. Steele was probably better liked by Democrats than by the members of his own party.

But it’s the Democrats who practice revisionist history.

I’m conflicted about Ann Coulter and her ilk. On the one hand, it’s futile to get outraged by her idiocy; Coulter’s like an evil villain who, when you try to strike her down, only absorbs your strength and grows more powerful.

On the other hand, some people do believe this nonsense, and it’s hard to let it go unchallenged.

From a less emotional perspective, it’s my opinion that this rhetoric is killing the Republican party—that the high-profile presence of provocateurs like Ann Coulter, who lower the level of GOP dialogue to the farcical, doesn’t actually do the party any favors. It paints the entire party as extremist (when only much of it is), and marginalizes those candidates who aren’t (John Huntsman, say). There is no premium on seriousness, which is why someone as unserious as Herman Cain can be considered a plausible candidate. You can see that immaturity at root in the GOP Congress; look at the Republicans on the super committee charged with cutting the budget, who are saying that they will support budget cuts but won’t accept a single tax hike. Not serious.

This stuff is bad for the GOP; I think they’re going to take a hit in the next election. More to the point, it’s bad for the country.

If Ann Coulter were smart, she wouldn’t say a peep about Herman Cain, but would shut up and let the facts come out. What’s best for her party now is if it rallies around Mitt Romney, the only GOP candidate who has a shot at beating Barack Obama. The longer the GOP puts off uniting behind Romney, the better it is for the Dems….