Why Herman Cain Should Not Be President

His loony 9-9-9 tax scheme, his idolizing of Clarence Thomas, his quoting of Pokemon and more

You gotta give it to Republican presidential aspirant Herman Cain. He’s one of the few politicians who had the audacity—or woeful ignorance—two weeks ago to respond passionately and assertively to a reporter’s televised question with: “I don’t have all the facts to back this up, but … ” He continued, “ … I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration.” No kidding. He actually prefaced that by saying he didn’t have all the facts. In-effing-credible. And it wasn’t in response to a throw-away question like who he thinks will win the World Series. It was in response to a substantive question about the biggest political movement in the country today, Occupy Wall Street.

Despite that, he does have a way with words. In fact, he’s a philosopher. At the close of several speeches and, most notably at the end of a debate in August, he looked wistfully into the camera and waxed eloquently with this profound statement: “A poet once said, life can be a challenge. Life can seem impossible. But it’s never easy when there’s so much on the line.” What? That shit’s from Pokemon, man! Pokemon! It’s from the movie’s theme song “The Power of One” by Donna Summer. Un-effin-believable.

And while we’re quoting Mr. Cain, the man with a net worth of over $6.5 million, let’s listen to what he said during an interview with the Wall Street Journal earlier this month: “Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and (if) you’re not rich, blame yourself.” Yep. He really said that. So obviously each of you 14 million unemployed lazy bums out there enjoy being unemployed lazy bums and enjoy having your mortgage foreclosed and enjoy being evicted and enjoy being homeless and hungry and without health insurance. And since there are only about nine million millionaires, meaning rich people, out of a total population of over 310 million citizens in the U.S., then apparently more than 300 million—around 99 percent—of you are shiftless moochers who are quite happy to be so. So blame yourselves because it’s all your fault, damn it.

And you African Americans are really at fault. Wait. Let me rephrase that since Cain doesn’t like that term, as he said on Meet the Press, because “the roots of … (his) heritage are in the United States of America,” not Africa. So allow me to change from the term African American to Americans with visible melanin. It’s definitely your fault as he explained on CNN in September when he said that you’re “brainwash(ed) … pure and simple” and you need to “get … off the Democratic plantation … (and be) open-minded.” To be completely fair to Cain, I must concede that he didn’t say all of you, um, colored folks are brainwashed, are on the plantation, and need to be open-minded. He said two-thirds or 66 percent are. And those are the ones who protest, demonstrate and petition for rights from the government. You know, lazy troublemakers crying for handouts. You know, deadbeats like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, and their ilk. You know, whiners who looked to the federal government for constitutional protections to combat that tiny slavery inconvenience, that insignificant lynching bother, that minor Jim Crow business, and that annoying discrimination thing. You know, beggars who thought that maybe the federal government should step in to end slavery, to extend voting privileges, to offer protection from the KKK, and to enforce fair housing.

But wait, maybe none of that was or still is necessary. Maybe the Kings, the Parks, the Marshalls, and the rest of them should have waited and waited and waited some more for Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the rest of those pre-21st-century southern racist bulwarks to miraculously have a rainbow coalition epiphany. And maybe activists of today should continue to sit by and wait for osmosis to bring about justice in the courts, the schools, the workplace, the housing market, the healthcare industry and elsewhere. That’s obviously what Cain believes. That’s why he sat on the sidelines during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. He claims he was too young to participate. He said he was a high-school student unable to act on his own. As he made clear a week ago on MSNBC, “If I had been a college student, I probably would have been participating.” Well, he was a college student. In fact, he was in college from 1963-67 when some of the major civil rights battles were taking place. And he wasn’t in just any college. He was at Morehouse—a bastion of civil rights activism in the ’60s. It’s Dr. King’s alma mater for god’s sake. It’s where Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the renown dean of activism, was the president from 1940-1967. But Cain didn’t march. He didn’t sit-in. He didn’t sign a petition. He didn’t make a phone call. But he certainly reaped the benefits when he graduated and went on to earn a Masters Degree from Purdue University in 1971, a university that today is less than four percent black. Yeah, I’m sure that the work of the civil rights pioneers had absolutely nothing to do with schoolhouse and corporate doors finally being opened to qualified black students and employment applicants. Yeah, Godfather’s Pizza is an African—I mean colored—brand, not an Italian one. Simply stated, Cain is Uncle Ruckus of The Boondocks. (For more on that, see here on Avenging the Ancestors Coalition’s website.)

While the activists were laying the groundwork for him, he was probably out somewhere playing footsies with his political and cultural soul mate Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice whose silent (i.e., deaf AND dumb) decisions have objectively set blacks back more than those of any single justice since the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling. Thomas hates civil rights, affirmative action, workers’ rights and prisoners’ rights, but loves the death penalty, corporations, guns and George W. Bush’s theft of the 2000 presidential election. Cain said on Meet the Press that Thomas is “one of my models” and an ideal Supreme Court justice. He said that with a straight face.

Cain supports the rights of communities to ban mosques. And he supports a tax scheme that’s both loony and counterproductive. To paraphrase Flava Flav’s “911 Is A Joke,” Cain’s 9-9-9 plan is a laughable “distributional monstrosity” that was “exceptionally ill conceived” as explained by Bruce Bartlett, a senior financial analyst in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Also, Cain opposes the privacy rights of women, even in cases of rape and incest. In addition, he opposes Social Security and Medicare.

President Cain? Be afraid. Be very afraid.