Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Hey, Rick Perry, Is This Good Enough For You?

So today Rick Perry, Dubya 2.0, said that he wanted to see the President's college transcripts. This is after he dragged out the birther nonsense again. Apparently, Perry, like seemingly most Republican politicians, doesn't know how to use "the Google," so I did a quick search to answer both questions this idiot had today:

The New York Times, Published: February 06, 1990:
BOSTON, Feb. 5— The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.
The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago's South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.

Now, Mr. 2.5 GPA with a bachelor's degree in Animal Science from Texas A&M, did you see that part about the President's mother being an American anthropologist? That means that, according to the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution you profess to be so enamored of, and by the laws of the United States, that her son, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, is an American citizen.

But please, keep talking! Maybe you'll drop even further in the polls.
 

Monday, October 24, 2011

Herman Cain Is A Lying, Self-Hating, Race-Baiting Huckster

Well, it was either that, or a handkerchief-headed lawn jockey. Either way, I was right: he's not fit to collect my garbage (I respect sanitation workers), much less be the President of the United States of America.

Think Progress reports:
  [...] before climbing the 2012 ladder, GOP presidential front runner Herman Cain served as the spokesman for the right-wing America’s PAC. The group spent millions during the 2004 and 2006 election to run political ads on black radio stations — one of which suggested that Democrats wanted to kill “black babies.” Another ad links Democrats to the “Ku Klux Klan cracker” David Duke. Not only did Cain serve as spokesman, he also performed voice-over work in several ads. 
You might remember those ads. They were so vile that even "the Bush administration called the ads 'inappropriate' and the RNC called them 'racist,' and the man who paid for them is now the leading frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination." Herman spend over $1 million of his own money supporting America's PAC and these noxious ads.

Here's Herman himself in one of those 2006 ads. Notice also how his speech lacks the country coon accent he now favors when talking to the GOP base:




I've said before that Herman was likely a race-baiting huckster, and I see that I was right. Living here in Minnesota with a small minority population, I've seen his like before. Some people of color figured out that a sure way for them to get ahead was if they would be, in the memorable words of Denzel Washington's character in the film Glory, "the white man's dog." Herman is indisputably one such cur.

As terrible as it sounds, it's not impossible for a black man to be racist against his own. Dr. Boyce Watkins, on the Your Black Politics blog, writes:
Herman Cain has become, in many ways, the perfect racist. America lives under the interesting premise that a racist can’t be black. That’s like believing that a man can’t hate his sibling, or that a woman can’t advocate for a man to beat his wife (as Whoopi did to Oprah in “The Color Purple”). The truth is that racism is typically most effective when you put a black face on it, and Herman Cain has volunteered to become the cute little political puppet which allows white America to say the things that they are afraid to say out loud.

It is their ability to put Cain out front to absorb the criticism for racist remarks that makes millions of Right Wing Americans so happy about his racial politics. Cain validates and brings security to a set of ideas that are generally unacceptable to those who understand America’s ugly racial history. In this regard, Cain is a breath of fresh air because he is the only Republican who doesn’t change the subject when the issue of race is brought to the table.

Yeah, and it increases his bank account, too.

Add to these problems Herman's demonstrated difficulty in explaining his much-vaunted, stockbroker-devised "9-9-9 Plan" (first it's "9-9-9," then it's "9-0-9", then it's "9-0-9 with a slice of ched....errrr, opportunity zones"), his total ignorance of foreign policy ("Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan"), his deficiencies when it comes to immigration policy ("a real fence. Twenty feet high, with barbed wire – electrified"), and even Karl Rove says that Herman is "not up to the task."

Personally, I think he's trying to be the next Huckabee, get himself a fat media deal with Faux and/or sell more copies of his book. Thank goodness, though, that Herman has a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning the nomination.

UPDATE: Gawker says that Herman is simply a"a stupid, stupid man." I agree, but I think it's more than that. I believe, as Dr. Watkins wrote, that "not only is Herman Cain a political gimmick, he is also a coward....He's no Colin Powell, and he's no Barack Obama.  The most he can ever be is entertaining." I'm just waiting for his minstrel show to end; I don't even think that he's that damn funny.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Hey Herman, Yo' Mammy's Callin'!

Honest to God, where did Herman Cain come from? And when is he going back? I'm sick of hearing his fake country accent, his idiotic plans to create job growth, and his criticisms of the President, black Congressional leaders, and America in general. Cain presents himself as some kind of down-home, plain-spoken country simpleton, and I honestly can't make up my mind if it's an act or not. His simplistic plans for the economy, his racist statement that he would not hire a Muslim in his administration (don't worry Herman, you'll never have to make that decision), and now, his criticism of progressive African-Americans, all make me want to take off my belt and beat the shit out of him the next time he's in Minneapolis. Cain is either a handkerchief-headed lawn jockey or a duplicitous charlatan and race-baiting huckster.


I'm not the only one disgusted by Cain's minstrel show, either. Jack & Jill Politics had this to offer about Cain's recent remarks:

Saying things like:
“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself. It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.”
is basically spitting in the face of  teachers, police officers, firefighters, librarians and nurses who have dedicated their lives to serving the public and who now find themselves out of jobs due in part to Wall Street malfeasance. It’s saying to all those who were targeted for fraudulent mortgages, you don’t deserve the American Dream of a home. It’s saying to all those who worked hard and saw their pensions taken away by employers, your work ethic doesn’t matter. It’s saying to all the unemployed, you’re stupid and you don’t deserve the dignity of a job or any help to make a contribution to your country. It’s saying to all the recent graduates out of work, you’re a bunch of jerk-offs who don’t work on Wall Street and therefore don’t deserve to earn a living.

Then again, Herman says that I'm a racist:

GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain said Tuesday that many liberal Democrats in the black community are "racist" for questioning his political ambitions as a black conservative Republican.
"A lot of these liberal, leftist folk in this country, that are black, they're more racist than the white people that they're claiming to be racist," Cain said Tuesday in a radio interview on the conservative Neal Boortz talk show.
Boortz interrupted Cain, saying he prefers the word "bigoted" to "racist."
"Ok, bigoted," Cain said. "How dare Herman Cain, first, run as a Republican? How dare Herman Cain be conservative? And how dare he move up in the polls, so that he just might challenge our beloved Obama? That's the problem they have."

Damn, where can I get some of what Herman is smoking?