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.