Was The Hillary Clinton Shoe-Throwing Incident Staged? Herman Cain, Rush Limbaugh Raise Possibility It Was Faked [POLL]

Former Republican presidential contender Herman Cain suggested Tuesday that the Hillary Clinton shoe-throwing incident may have been staged, piggybacking on thoughts most recently expressed by conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh and pundit Arthur Louis.

On his personal Twitter account, Cain retweeted a tweet sent from an account for his radio show that said, “That Hillary shoe-throwing thing does look kind of fake, huh?”

The tweet links to a story published on Best of Cain that points out that Limbaugh also theorized about the possibility that the shoe-throwing incident may have been faked. Limbaugh noted on his show that he never saw the whole clip of the shoe being thrown, and he said he only viewed Clinton’s reaction to the incident.

“I haven't cared enough to go try to find [the video.]," Limbaugh said Monday on his radio show, according to a transcript of the program posted on his website. "I really haven't. Somebody threw a shoe at Hillary. Big whoop. Maybe it's because in my subconscious I think it was staged or set up or whatever.

“Look, folks, I know these people so well that I do not attach much genuineness to them [the Clintons] at all, and I don't know why anybody would be throwing a shoe at Hillary unless maybe it's an attempt to make the Benghazi people look like nuts and lunatics and wackos. That's if it even had anything to do with that, which I don't know. But apparently it's not just me, folks.”

But as Talking Points Memo noted, other conservatives have gone a step further and suggested that Clinton staged the whole incident, which led to the arrest of Alison Michelle Ernst of Phoenix.

Pundit Arthur Louis, in a piece posted on right-wing commentator Bernard Goldberg’s site, was one of those who said they believed the incident was faked.

“There is a political axiom, I believe first posed by Euclid or Archimedes, that when Hillary does something, or when something happens to her, she has carefully calculated it beforehand," Goldberg wrote. "This is almost always true, the one trivial exception being the nomination and election of Barack Obama in 2008.

“So it would not be stretching logic to suppose that Hillary arranged to have the shoe thrown at her. Remembering the Bush incident, she may have calculated that this would make her seem presidential. This would explain why Ms. Ernst was not pounded to a pulp by Hillary’s bodyguards, and why she seems on the verge of getting off scot free. Don’t be too surprised, the next time you visit Phoenix, if you see her sitting at a table in a downtown Hillary for President store front, stuffing and sealing envelopes.”