"Once you get past 9-9-9 and fences to electrocute Mexicans, (Cain) really has nothing to say"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Herman Cain is flunking the world's toughest job interview

By Leonard Pitts
6:00 a.m. EST, November 26, 2011

On Monday, an editorial in the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader attacked Herman Cain for blowing off an interview with the paper. It seems that after video of Mr. Cain stumbling to articulate a position on Libya in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel went viral last week, the candidate instituted a new rule: no video cameras in newspaper interviews.

A spokesman for the Cain campaign said this was because "videos are typically used for television, and it's a newspaper." But as the editorial noted, videos are used for pretty much everything these days. It suggested Mr. Cain's real problem lay not in the presence of cameras but in the fact that "newspaper interviews tend to be longer and more in depth" and require answers that go beyond canned sound bites. Mr. Cain's refusal to engage in that sort of rigorous give and take, said the paper, "gives the impression that he's got something to hide."

Mr. Cain capitulated that same day.

But the damage is done. The attack solidifies a perception that he does, indeed, have something to hide, i.e., the fact that once you get him past his talking points ("9-9-9" and fences to electrocute unsuspecting Mexicans) -- he really has nothing to say.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-pitts-cain-201127,0,1616688.story

[Lugnut]

1. That's Herman.

If he can't call up a flash card talking point to respond to a question he becomes a mime. He has all kinds of stuff swirling around in his head but no answers. He's a farce and a bad joke.

[jberryhill]

2. I got all this stuff twirling around in my head

[Berlin Expat]

3. This only serves to highlight

the true intellectual bankruptcy of the right.

The Tea Party has emerged as a 21st Century incarnation of the Know Nothings. Despite their intellectual pretensions, they are deeply anti-intellectual. Many (though not all) are rabidly xenophobic, and I would argue, ultimately un-American in their worldview.

They are a hodgepodge of Confederate revanchists, wannabe theocrats, Birchers, conspiracy theorists, anti-tax protesters, historical revisionists, and otherwise generally deluded, woefully ignorant, and easily misled. Simply put, they represent the dark underbelly of the American body politic.

Look no further than their heroes: Rush Limbaugh, drug addict. Pamela Geller, an alcoholic, mentally disturbed Islamophobe who recycles anti-Semitic urban legends and simply substitutes "Muslim" for "Jewish"; her website reads like a modern-day "Der Stürmer". Indeed (and ironically, as she's Jewish herself) she gives active and vocal support to neo-Nazis. Jim Robinson, the owner of the Free Republic website, which is often little more than a sanitized version of Stormfront, where the posters revel in their thinly-veiled racism and express their support for the most outrageous conspiracy theories. Bryan Fischer, who routinely spews venomous hatred against the LGBT community and often cites such ludicrous notions as "homosexual recruitment". David Barton, a pseudo-historian who peddles laughable historical revisionism. Glenn Beck, a profoundly disturbed paranoid individual who has created a grand conspiracy theory that rivals the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion or David Icke's reptoids.

The right has become an obvious intellectual wasteland. That there is a sizable segment of the population that takes the aforementioned (and a good many others) seriously is a sign that something has gone terribly wrong in the intellectual life of the United States of America.

These people simply must be exposed and defeated in order for the USA to survive. If these lunatics have their way, everything good and decent that America has ever stood for will all be for naught.

[Name removed]

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