We’ve been a geek since age 15, although we took a decade off to explore other things before being dragged back in. (We used to blame it on buying an answering machine, which ended our Luddite Interval forever.) These days we earn a serious part of the rent by developing and maintaining websites, which means we’ve spent a serious amount of time thinking about passwords.

About which, we discovered last night, we’ve been seriously wrong.

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“That is not a practical, top-tier alternative and here’s why. If you look at the topography of Iran. Where are you going to strike? It’s very mountainous. That’s what makes it very difficult.” —Herman Cain!, also from Monday’s interview, explaining why he wouldn’t attack a nuclear Iran. [ThinkProgress]

“I’m not supposed to know anything about foreign policy. Just thought I’d throw that out.” —Herman Cain!, defending his Libya answer by arguing that a president’s job is to listen to “commanders on the ground”. [JSOnline, via Political Wire]

This is going to get very ugly very quickly. We’re going to quote a passage at length from the Penn State grand-jury report — the part that describes what then-graduate assistant and now-assistant coach Mike McQueary saw in the locker-room shower, and what he did about it. Especially the latter.

We’re quoting the passage because McQueary’s been — in our judgment — too casually condemned for his response. Andrew Sullivan, in particular, has been all over it. And, to jump ahead to our point, we’re not sure we would have handled it any better. Or, more precisely, we have no fucking clue how we would have handled it. Hindsight not only distorts perception, it distorts the facts.

Here’s the relevant passage, from page 6:

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Demonstrating why we haven’t been fans of Occupy Wall Street, ThinkProgress chose this morning to highlight a statement from Occupy Portland (attn. Brent Musburger: “Orygun”) after the Rose City cops provided them some valuable baton-wielding publicity:

By camping outside the city hall, we gave you a choice to decide to stand with us and with working class Americans. Instead, you made the choice to protect unjust social and economic policies that are leading our nation into a state of financial ruin and institutionalized oppression.

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We haven’t been fans of Occupy Wall Street — to say the least — but we have to give them partial credit for changing the national conversation. When’s the last time you heard about the deficit?

The rest of the credit goes to various police departments in Our Exceptional Nation, starting and — late last night — apparently ending with the NYPD, which forcefully cleared Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.

Without the NYPD — ably assisted more recently by Oakland’s Finest — the movement would have labored in the obscurity under which it began. But move some riot cops into a bored crowd of unarmed hippies, and you have ratings gold.

Police Begin Clearing Zuccotti Park of Protesters [NYT]

Photo: @JoshHarkinson

Herman Cain! rolls out his hilarious! James Stockdale impression: “President Obama called for the removal of Gaddafi. Just want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing before I say, yes I agree, I know I didn’t agree. I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reason — no, that’s a different one. I gotta go back to… Got all this stuff twirling around in my head. Specifically, what are you asking me, did I agree or not disagree with on what?” [Political Wire]