So Many Jokes, So Little Time ... An Adventure of the Eternally Tasteless Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! To Kill a Brother? Punch lines abound. Speaking of the eternally tasteless, it's worth reminding that Herman Cain is the former CEO of Godfather's Pizza, a chain I haven't seen much of in the Pacific Northwest since probably before Pillsbury hired the man to save the brand. To the other, their website tells me there are four of the restaurants left within fifty miles of me, the nearest being thirty miles away as the crow flies, in Port Orchard, Washington. According to Wikipedia, Pillsbury wanted Cain in charge of Godfather's because he had such success reviving the Burger King chain. Godfather's Pizza and Burger King: right there are two strikes against Herman Cain. The GOP presidential candidate first stepped onto the political stage in 1993, as president of the National Restaurant Association, challenging the Clinton health plan. He later served as senior economic advisor to Sen. Bob Dole's failed 1996 presidential bid. In 2004, Cain sought a U.S. Senate seat for Georgia, aiming to replace infamous Democrat Zell Miller. While his opponent tagged him for supporting affirmative action, Cain boasted his conservative credentials by opposing abortion even when pregnancy results from rape. His 2012 presidential run is already stumbling. Some liberal critics are even comparing him to Sarah Palin: Herman Cain looked startled when Chris Wallace of Fox News quizzed him about the Middle East. “Where do you stand on the right of return?” asked Wallace on his Sunday-morning show of May 22, referring to the idea that a peace agreement could allow Palestinian refugees to make claims on Israeli land. “The right of return? The right of return?” sputtered Cain, who is running for president as a Republican. Wallace prompted him again — “The Palestinian right of return” — but it didn’t help. “That is something that should be negotiated,” replied Cain. Then he repeated himself, which apparently he does when he’s flummoxed: “That is something that should be negotiated.” Cain’s advisers knew they had a problem. Within hours, they were working on a statement. It went out that evening as a “clarification” in which Cain expressed his “unwavering” support for Israel. But the subject dogged him through the week. “Chris caught me off guard,” said Cain in a follow-up interview with Fox News. “I didn’t understand the right of return. That came out of left field.” (Miller) He even borrows her lines: He’s even managed to turn his lack of experience — unlike others in the 2012 field, Cain never has held elective office — into an asset. When the issue came up during the South Carolina debate, Cain responded with what has become one of his signature quips and perhaps the most notable line of the still-young presidential race. He channeled anti-Washington sentiment, suggesting that the habit of relying on politicians with traditional pedigrees doesn’t guarantee wise leadership: “How’s that working out for ya?” (ibid) Cain is something of an extremist, invoking Martin Luther King, Jr., to describe his potential presidency, that upon his election, America will be "free at last". His view of liberals is simple enough: "The objective of the liberals is to destroy America," he told CPAC earlier this year. And according to Cain himself, President George W. Bush only made two mistakes—failing to restructure Social Security, and failing to keep Karen Hughes on staff. Really? There's nothing else? "That will do it," said Cain. Yet while many insist that Cain is strongest when talking employment, it turns out he is also clueless about free trade: It’s an odd critique. Many conservatives have no trouble coming up with lists of Bush-era disappointments: the runaway spending, the approach to immigration, the near-disaster of Harriet Miers as a nominee to the Supreme Court, etc. A good number might even include the failure to tackle the looming crisis of Social Security. Yet few would think to fuss over the absence of Karen Hughes, the onetime White House counselor and undersecretary of state. Her personal devotion to Bush was admirable. Her devotion to conservatism, however, was at best an open question. So is Cain’s familiarity with any number of issues — not just the fine points of negotiations in the Middle East. What does he think of Bush’s immigration proposals? “I don’t recall what was in it.” How about the free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea — negotiated by the Bush administration and possibly going before Congress soon? “I don’t know the details.” Not even on the pact with South Korea which, if approved, would become America’s largest trade deal since the passage of NAFTA? “I can’t say whether I’d vote yes or no.” (ibid) He has also explained that he would have handled the Libya crisis differently, though he cannot say how, and claims ignorance as his defense. The best clue we have is that his "foreign policy is not an instant-grits policy". Meanwhile, Cain's appeal to the conservative "small government" crowd is about as simple as his outlook on liberals: "Don’t try to pass a 2,700-page bill," Cain said to a responsive audience in Pella, Iowa, on Monday. "You and I didn’t have time to read it. We’re too busy trying to live — send our kids to school. That’s why I am only going to allow small bills — three pages. You’ll have time to read that one over the dinner table," Cain said. But as Marie Diamond of Think Progress wrote, "Cain wouldn’t have signed such landmark pieces of legislation as the Civil Rights Act, the Social Security Act or the Patriot Act. In fact, he wouldn’t have even been able to sign the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which ran 114 and 18 pages, respectively." (Malcom) Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Stylin': Herman Cain at a tax day Tea Party rally in New Hampshire. (Photo: AP/Jim Cole, via Los Angeles Times) From the outset, the stylish Republican is setting himself up as a controversial figure. Paul Constant considers one of the potential problems with that: He insists that as a black Republican, he's "Obama's worst nightmare." He's one of those annoying "run America like a business" douches who insists you can apply lessons learned from running a crappy pizza chain to being commander in chief of the armed forces. He's widely regarded as the best speaker in the field, though it's unclear if Republicans just say that because they're shocked a black guy can form complete sentences on conservative subjects .... .... Cain was the first person to announce a presidential exploratory committee for 2012, so you could say he's the most serious candidate to date, but his main goal right now seems to be winning online polls on conservative sites. The Fox News focus groups chose him as the winner of the first Republican debate, which could mean that Republicans are dumb enough to think that the only reason Obama is president is because he's black, so they'll vote in a black guy in order to confuse and disorient Democrats. This is known in politics as "The Michael Steele Stratagem." But it's a hard argument to make regarding race. Cain has not yet fully tipped his hand on that count. To the other, many liberals recall wondering if the RNC had elected Michael Steele its chairman because he was the best candidate, or as a black face to counter President Obama. In Steele's case, one can argue it is still an open question. But he was a divisive figure even in his own party, facing a recall attempt in 2010. But for liberals wondering about Steele, the question was largely answered in 2009, when the chairman appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe: You [Brzezinski] wear your hat one way you like to wear it, you know, kind of cocked to the left, you know, 'cause that's cool out West," Steele said. "In the Midwest, you guys [Scarborough] like to wear it a little bit to the right. In the South, you guys [Buchanan] wear the brim straight ahead. Now the Northeast, I wear my hat backwards, you know, 'cause that's how we roll in the Northeast. (Kleefeld) It was an awkward attempt at hipness, to say the least. But plenty of white people say, "That's how we roll," too, so it's hard to accuse Steele of attempting to pander to blacks, especially when he sounds, well, as Eric Kleefeld put it: "He often sounds like a middle-aged man attempting to talk to his kids and sound cool, and not exactly being successful at it." Herman Cain, on the other hand, sounds quite a bit like an evangelical preacher, and with good reason. He has served before as an associate pastor in a Baptist church, and even held a television pulpit in lieu of Hour of Power preacher Robert Schuller, formerly of the Crystal Cathedral—and whose children have run the opulent church into bankruptcy. As far as the race issue is concerned, the ball is presently in the conservatives' court. Cain, for instance, thinks that by playing the race card, he can take it off the table: "We need a realistic candidate to run on the Republican ticket who can beat Barack Obama – not just beat the Democrats," Herman Cain, an Atlanta radio talk-show host, former CEO of Godfather's Pizza and 2004 Senate seeker, told WND. "We've also got to beat Barack Obama." He added, "Obama is a master of rhetoric. He is a master of deceptive language. And any white candidate who runs against him will be up against the race card. I take the race card off the table." (Schilling) In other words, "Vote for me—I'm black!" The view from the left wing is that Herman Cain has great potential to become 2012's rolling sideshow, though with the possibility that Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann might also run for the Republican nomination, we could end up with a three-ring circus. Meanwhile, if Cain expects to be taken seriously, he might want to develop more comprehensible policy statements instead of claiming ignorance as his guardian. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I think he's serious: Illustration by Danny Schwartz, via The Stranger. Looking ahead, I'll predict that Herman Cain's main role in the GOP nominating process will be as part of a comic-relief chorus. In 2008, conservative voters are said to have flinched over Mitt Romney's religious faith. In 2012, they might well have a smorgasboard of minority considerations to figure: the black Christian versus the white Mormon versus two guano crazy women. We shouldn't be surprised, then, if the Republican nomination goes to a white male like Pawlenty. And in this case, it wouldn't have anything to do with his sex or skin color. In the end, the nominee might end up being the one who is the least incomprehensible, and that certainly won't be Herman Cain. ____________________ Notes: Schmader, David. "The Cain Train Gets a Bumper Sticker". Slog. June 7, 2011. Slog.TheStranger.com. June 8, 2011. http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/06/07/the-cain-train-gets-a-bumper-sticker Wikipedia. "Herman Cain". June 7, 2011. En.Wikipedia.org. June 8, 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain Miller, John J. "Is Cain Able?" The National Review. June 20, 2011. HeyMiller.com. June 8, 2011. http://www.heymiller.com/2011/06/is-cain-able/ Malcom, Andrew. "Herman Cain promises he wouldn't sign any bill over three pages long". Top of the Ticket. June 7, 2011. LATimesBlogs.LATimes.com. June 8, 2011. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/was...n-cain-wont-sign-a-bill-over-three-pages.html Constant, Paul. "Are They Serious?" The Stranger. May 24, 2011. TheStranger.com. June 8, 2011. http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/are-they-serious/Content?oid=8309380 Kleefeld, Eric. "Steele: I Wear My GOP Hat Backwards, 'That's How We Roll In The Northeast'". Talking Points Memo DC. April 30, 2009. TPMDC.TalkingPointsMemo.com. June 8, 2011. http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/...kwards-thats-how-we-roll-in-the-northeast.php Santa Cruz, Nicole. "Crystal Cathedral plans to open bidding for its property". L. A. Now. June 2, 2011. LATimesBlogs.LATimes.com. June 8, 2011. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lan...edral-bankruptcy-to-be-opened-to-bidding.html Schilling, Chelsea. "Is this man Obama's worst nightmare?" World Net Daily. July 21, 2010. WND.com. June 8, 2011. http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=181961
I like Herman. He's charming in a lot of ways, even inspiring. However, like Palin, he seems to have an aversion to getting prepared. That might be from being at the top of one organization or another for so long. They get so used to being agreed with, and telling people what to think, they get a little lazy. Force of will usually isn't quite enough. If the tea party can become his "machine" he might get some momentum, but that crowd is way split. But I like him.
He couldn't even remember who he was being interviewed by the other day and called the man a totally different name than who he was so I don't think that he has a very good chance of ever getting anywhere close to the POTUS.
Herman Cain looked startled when Chris Wallace of Fox News quizzed him about the Middle East. “Where do you stand on the right of return?” asked Wallace on his Sunday-morning show of May 22, referring to the idea that a peace agreement could allow Palestinian refugees to make claims on Israeli land. Chris Wallace. Didn't he used to work for Fox?
Blacks aren't going to vote for him because he's Republican, Teapers aren't going to vote for him because he's black. Independents won't vote for him because he's an idiot.
The Conservative Appeal to Ignorance This is the sort of thing that dogged Sarah Palin in 2008. The argument goes something like this: Right of return is a term that comes up eventually if you follow the Israel/Palestine debate long enough. One generally expects a presidential candidate to be familiar with the basic principles of the issues that will challenge them. According to Sarah Palin, of course, this expectation is unfair, a product of the "gotcha" liberal media. Paul Constant at Slog points to a conservative blogger who finds Cain's ignorance "refreshing" to the point that the former Godfather's CEO "has gone up a few more notches in [his] book". "Shorter version," replies Constant, "We want an idiot, just like us!" And that's sort of the problem. The idea that "99% of Americans wouldn't know what 'right of return' meant either", as blogger Sam Gonzalez put it is not in itself unsettling. But how many of those would assert to have a relevant and informed opinion regarding the American role in Israel? Bill Maher pointed out in 2008 a similar problem with Sarah Palin. Do we really want the people we hire to run the place to be folks we feel smugly smarter than? It's just that when one gets to the point of actually deciding to run for the office of President of the United States of America, I don't think it too much to ask that a candidate should have, at the very least, enough understanding of a major political question he will face both on the campaign trail and in office, to hold his own in a tavern discussion. Meanwhile, Cain seems to be playing to and posturing for the birthers and xenophobes: Herman Cain, the beguilingly personable pizza mogul and Tea Party sweetheart who is showing well in the so-far uncompelling Republican presidential nomination campaign, threw a flag early in an interview I conducted with him last week. I had made the dire mistake of referring to him as African-American. “I am an American. Black. Conservative,” he said, punctuating each aspect of his self-identity. “I don’t use African-American, because I’m American, I’m black and I’m conservative. I don’t like people trying to label me. African-American is socially acceptable for some people, but I am not some people.” What is it about the word “African” that the candidate doesn’t particularly appreciate? “Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America,” he said, hitting those last four words with a hammer. “And then it goes back to slavery. And I’m sure my ancestors go all the way back to Africa, but I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I’m a black man in America.” This statement came shortly before our discussion turned to another politician generally understood to be an African-American. “Barack Obama is more of an international,” Cain said. “I think he’s out of the mainstream and always has been. Look, he was raised in Kenya, his mother was white from Kansas and her family had an influence on him, it’s true, but his dad was Kenyan, and when he was going to school he got a lot of fellowships, scholarships, he stayed in the academic environment for a long time. He spent most of his career as an intellectual.” (Goldberg) That effort to establish himself as American, versus the "international" Barack Obama, came only a few months after he explained that he can't say whether or not the president was born in the United States because he never bothered to review the evidence, but the fact that people are talking about it does give the whole idea credence. It's a surprising combination of elements at first glance, but the variability of nature is such that we should eventually witness this nexus of identity politics. Herman Cain is the man who intends to take the race card off the table by playing it. He also, in order to wave his blackness at Barack Obama also must wave his domestic blackness at Barack Obama's scary "international" blackness. In playing up his real American credentials, he must portray himself as an idiot. I don't actually expect him to get far enough in this contest to become a human disaster in real time as Sarah Palin did, but this cynically superficial conservative appeal to ignorance would be entertaining but for its potential to do real harm. Cain is eminently personable in the manner of a grinning televangelist, but I'm not certain the appeal to ignorance is a good long-term strategy. ____________________ Notes: Constant, Paul. "Let Us Celebrate All the Things Herman Cain Doesn't Know". Slog. May 26, 2011. Slog.TheStranger.com. June 14, 2011. http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/ar...ebrate-all-the-things-herman-cain-doesnt-know Gonzalez, Samuel. "Herman Cain comes clean admits on Hannity to not know what 'right of return' meant. Scores big on honesty meter". The Last Tradition. May 25, 2011. TheLastTradition.Blogspot.com. June 14, 2011. http://thelasttradition.blogspot.com/2011/05/herman-cain-comes-clean-admits-on.html Goldberg, Jeffrey. "Herman Cain on Why 'The Black Guy Is Winning'". Bloomberg View. June 12, 2011. Bloomberg.com. June 14, 2011. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...he-black-guy-is-winning-jeffrey-goldberg.html Green, Joshua. "Herman Cain on CPAC, Sarah Palin, Birtherism, and Topless Pics". The Atlantic. February 11, 2011. TheAtlantic.com. June 14, 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...arah-palin-birtherism-and-topless-pics/71136/
I would think that if you were serious about running you would get a team of poly sci geeks together and go to a hotel suite and get tutored and quizzed for about a month, just like when you study for the Bar or the Board Certification exam. You still wouldn't know everything, but you would know a whole lot more than just reading what the media thinks is information. I guess the trick is to know more than reporters. Which really shouldn't be all that tough if you put your mind to it. Are they all that lazy? OTOH, Heck, I'm 58 years old and a little bit of a news junky and still never heard of the "right of return". You have to study to find that kind of stuff out. With all the Israel/Palestine specials and coverage I've seen over 40 years, not one mention of it. 60 minutes really fell down on the job. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
How.. How can any adult with access to what you obviously have access to not know about one of the fundamental issues in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians? It actually defies logic and understanding.
I"m not Jewish or Palestinian and no one ever even once mentioned it by that name or explained it. Sorry.
Something something, Burt Ward Something Something, Burt Ward Joshua Green profiled Herman Cain for The Atlantic in March: Are we doomed to a dull campaign? Not if the Hermanator has his way. If you don't attend Tea Party rallies or listen to political talk radio, the name Herman Cain may not register. Cain intends to rectify that. He's planning to seek the GOP nomination, so he's spreading his blustery, relentlessly upbeat right-wing social and economic message, which can be heard weeknights from 7 to 10 on WSB in Atlanta. Cain is so exuberantly confident of his message that he has upgraded its status: he bestows upon audiences not speeches or talking points but "The Hermanator Experience." He's even trademarked the phrase. (Boldface accent added) It's also worth noting that Cain also said, "From the standpoint of our conservative beliefs and values, Sarah Palin and I are probably identical." "Baby on board, something something, Burt Ward .... This thing writes itself!" —Homer Simpson____________________ Notes: Green, Joshua. "Herman Cain, the GOP Wild Card". The Atlantic. March, 2011. TheAtlantic.com. June 14, 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/herman-cain-the-gop-wild-card/8367/
Grays A Note for Bells That's an important phrase, "by that name". The thing is that our neighbor Regular0ldguy is an American, and yes, there is actually a gray area where he's trying to stand on this. But let me be clear that I question the dimensions of that gray area. Questions of right of return are already settled in Americans' minds. The closest you'll ever hear of it is sometime around Columbus Day, when someone inevitably gets offended that some people find Our Hero something of a loathsome chap. "What do you want us to do?" someone will ask. "Give it back?" You're familiar with the question. I mean, the one solution that isn't going to come in Australia's troubled Aboriginal issues is that the British subjects should pack up and disappear. In the U.S., with our tribes, it's pretty much a settled issue. We've even moved onto, "What? A treaty? But that was, like, the 1800s!" So the very idea of right of return actually sounds, to some American ears, suspiciously like some Euro-socialist, one-world guv'mint sorta thing. I really couldn't tell you when I first heard the phrase right of return as the official name of the concept in the public discourse, though I see it's been around for a while. To the other, and this is where I start to question the gray area, there was never any question about what it meant the first time I heard it. Well, I take that back. I've been confused before, but only because a Zionist explaining to me why right of return is a bogus concept and therefore the Palestinians shouldn't use it also decided to try to rub the point in by claiming that the Jewish right of return to the region trumped that of the Palestinians, who weren't really anyone who would have a claim to begin with, anyway. So, yes, I can see someone hesitating long enough to say, "Now, whose right of return are we talking about?" But that's the thing. If we take the ignoramus sucking up all the beer nuts at the end of the bar, all pumped up on conspiracy theories and shitty beer, well, I'm just of the opinion that the one person in the room he shouldn't have more of a clue than would be the guy who's running for president. I'm just sayin' .... And the other thing is that I can only offer so much sympathy to Regular0ldguy because, at some point, I'm certain it would sound snide if I said, "So, let me guess, that was mostly American news sources, right?" But, yes, the American media balance has long been blatantly pro-Israel, so the Palestinian right of return generally isn't on the radar. Circumstances, obviously, can bring it into the buzz, but if you are going to run for president, then it ought to be a good idea to at least have some clue what questions you're going to face.
Sounds fair. And you see I'd be just one of those guys who said who's returning and to what? I have heard just enough history of the middle east to be absolutely confused about who did what to who first. And the spin from both sides makes you doubt everyone's story, especially since it is apparently older than the bible. And of course American news. That's what you hear here. I'm not going to move to watch the news. Satellite helps now though. The world is getting smaller, but I guess that just makes this particular problem worse.
Herman Cain Pitches a Bigoted Tent Herman Cain and the Big Tent The good news about the big tent Herman Cain is pitching is that it's not hanging around Anthony Weiner's pole. And when that's the opening gag, you know the rest of the story has to be a joke of its own. Politico's Roger Simon brings us the overview: Let's start with Cain's comments in a March 21 article in Christianity Today. “And based upon the little knowledge that I have of the Muslim religion, you know, they have an objective to convert all infidels or kill them,” Cain said. On May 26, a blogger for ThinkProgress.org asked Cain: “Would you be comfortable appointing a Muslim either in your Cabinet or as a federal judge?” “No, I will not,” Cain replied. “And here's why. There is this creeping attempt, there's this attempt to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government.” A few days later, Cain went on “Your World With Neil Cavuto” on Fox News. “A reporter asked me, would I appoint a Muslim to my administration. I did say, ‘No,'” Cain said. “And here's why. … I would have to have people totally committed to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. And many of the Muslims, they're not totally dedicated to this country.” Then, in Monday's CNN debate, moderator John King accurately asked Cain about his statement that he would not appoint a Muslim to his Cabinet. Cain replied that he never said that — only that he would not be “comfortable” appointing a Muslim to his Cabinet. This contradicted Cain's statement to Cavuto. “And I would not be comfortable because you have peaceful Muslims and then you have militant Muslims, those that are trying to kill us,” Cain said during the debate. “And so, when I said I wouldn't be comfortable, I was thinking about the ones that are trying to kill us, No. 1. Secondly, yes, I do not believe in Sharia law in American courts.” To the one, there is nothing strange about a politician—especially a Republican—trying to deny past statements that might be embarrassing while simultaneously attempting to reiterate their essence. To the other, though, the Republican race-baiter has managed to put his party in an awkward position. For instance, Alan Keyes—the perennial loser and, well, there's really no polite way to describe Mr. Keyes—has actually come out to blast Cain's extremism. For the former Godfather's Pizza CEO and savior of the Burger King brand, one might wonder what they've done wrong if Alan Keyes is complaining about you and sounding like the sane person: Former Ambassador and perennial losing candidate Alan Keyes has long been the gold standard for right-wing extremism. Keyes sued President Obama in a birther lawsuit claiming the Obama was born in Kenya. He called the president a “radical communist” and a “usurper.” And he once called embryonic stem cell research the “moral equivalent of Nazi medical experiments on the inmates of death camps during World War II.” Yet, in a column published at the birther website World Net Daily, Keyes slams GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain for saying he would require Muslim federal employees to swear a loyalty oath: Herman Cain is certainly aware that the First Amendment withholds from the U.S. government the power lawfully to prohibit the free exercise of religion. But has he thought at all about the connection between that provision and the one that says that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification for “any office or public trust under the United States”? Mr. Cain apparently believes that in today's world Americans have good reason to distrust any follower of Islam. But the Constitution explicitly prohibits officials of the U.S. government from applying religion as a criterion for public trust, whatever their individual inclinations. This means that whatever his personal predilections, as president of the United States Mr. Cain (and anyone else elected to that office) would be required to set aside his personal views. He could not as a matter of public policy take the position that an office or public trust under the U.S. government (including a seat on the Supreme Court) would be withheld from someone of the Muslim or any other religion until they dispelled to his satisfaction some prejudice (however justified it seems to him, to me or to anyone else) as to their loyalty. (Millhiser) And yet, as entertaining as it might be to watch two black Republicans vie for a disgraceful title that cannot be named in polite company, it is perhaps more interesting to consider that the mainstream GOP has felt little need to distance itself from Cain's bigotry. Florida religious studies professor Julie Ingersoll explains: Neither Herman Cain nor Newt Gingrich will win the Republican primary, but the manner in which both jumped on the anti-Muslim bandwagon in Monday's New Hampshire debate is instructive. Cain waffled on what he had said, what he hadn't said, and what he meant. But Gingrich's more troubling comments arose from the systematic, orchestrated effort to foster widespread suspicion and hatred toward Muslims that Sarah has called “a cottage industry.” Interrupting to answer a question he hadn't been asked, Gingrich said: I just want to comment for a second. The Pakistani who emigrated to the U.S. became a citizen, built a car bomb which luckily failed to go off in Times Square was asked by the federal judge, how could he have done that when he signed—when he swore an oath to the United States. And he looked at the judge and said, “You're my enemy. I lied.” Now, I just want to go out on a limb here. I'm in favor of saying to people, if you're not prepared to be loyal to the United States, you will not serve in my administration, period. The story actually made no sense, since there's no way to know who's prepared to be loyal if, as in Gingrich's own story, the person lies. But Gingrich wasn't trying to argue for a position. While most of us just heard a story about someone lying, Gingrich was actually invoking one of the most effective tropes promoting Islamophobia: the concept of taqiyya. For most Muslims, taqiyya is the withholding of information about one's faith in a dangerous situation; when Muslims are being persecuted it is permissible to deny being a Muslim. Like some Jews hid their identity as Jews during the Inquisition. However, in the hands of Islamophobes, taqiyya becomes the legitimation of lying to any non-Muslim at any time. It makes Islamophobia unchallengeable, as inconvenient evidence can be dismissed as lies and idea that not all Muslims are terrorists becomes impossible to maintain because “they all lie.” Or, as Simon put it: But you want to know what's worse? As an excellent editorial in The New York Times pointed out Tuesday, “None of the other candidates took [Cain] to task for this. Mitt Romney, a Mormon who has himself been the subject of religious slurs, at least mentioned the nation's founding principle of religious tolerance and respect but missed an opportunity to include Muslims. Newt Gingrich tumbled over the historical cliff with the idea, announcing some kind of loyalty oath to serve in his administration, similar to that used in dealing with Nazis and Communists.” I don't know if Monday's debate will be quickly forgotten, replaced in our memories by a jumble of other debates, but I am going to remember it as the debate in which the entire Republican field to date refused to speak out for Muslim-Americans. They refused to speak out for the ones fighting for America in our armed forces, for the ones serving in Congress and for the ones living peaceful, productive and, yes, American lives. The silence of these candidates was an act of cowardice. We can certainly chuckle at yet another Republican willing to pander to bigoted attitudes in order reject from the outset the very oath of office they hope to take. And while Ingersoll is correct to point out that Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, among others in the GOP, now tread in the realm of televangical extremism, we come back to the question of why Mondays debaters did not attempt to distance themselves from Cain. It's not like there aren't ways to address the issue. One can even chuckle and say, "Well, hell, a Muslim can figure it out," except nothing suggests conservatives will comprehend the irony. But, as M. Zuhdi Jasser explained for the conservative Daily Caller: Make no mistake, the threat posed by radical Islam — domestically and internationally — has never been greater. As an American Muslim who has dedicated my life to defending the Constitution and founded an American Muslim organization to do just that against the threat of Islamism, I know that for our political leaders and policymakers to be visibly confused about the strategy necessary to counter the insidious ideology of Islamism (political Islam) is a major liability to our nation's security. We surrender our strongest messaging as leaders of the free world if we approach Muslims as guilty of being Islamists until proven otherwise. If Mr. Cain had simply said he would not hire an Islamist into his administration, just as our government was justifiably wary of hiring Communists during the Cold War, then that would have been perfectly understandable and appropriate from a national security perspective. But all Muslims are not Islamists and comments like Mr. Cain's that intimate that our nation will consider my co-religionists to all be Islamists do not help the fight against Islamism. None of the Republicans onstage Monday night felt like addressing the issue. One starts to wonder if maybe the problem is that such rhetoric strikes the candidates as the proper tone when pitching to "real America", "middle America", and "values voters". That is: Are Republican politicians just a bunch of bigots, or are they well-intended, good people who think they need to sell themselves to morons in order to succeed? What does that say about the GOP? What does it say about Americans? ____________________ Notes: Simon, Roger. "Today, Muslims; tomorrow, you". Politico. June 15, 2011. Politico.com. June 16, 2011. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/57075.html Millhiser, Ian. "Birther Alan Keyes Slams Herman Cain’s Unconstitutional Assault on Muslims". ThinkProgress. June 10, 2011. ThinkProgress.org. June 16, 2011. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/06/10/242070/alan-keyes-slams-herman-cain/ Ingersoll, Julie. "Gingrich's Stealth Islamophobia and the Christian Double Standard". Religion Dispatches. June 16, 2011. ReligionDispatches.org. June 16, 2011. http://www.religiondispatches.org/d...lamophobia_and_the_christian_double_standard/ Jasser, M. Zuhdi. "Herman Cain's Muslim comments are misguided". Daily Caller. June 10, 2011. DailyCaller.com. June 16, 2011. http://dailycaller.com/2011/06/10/herman-cains-muslim-comments-are-misguided/
Obama Been Hermanated Cain Hermanates Obama How about we start with Catalina Camia of USA Today: GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain says President Obama is "not a strong black man" in the mold of Martin Luther King Jr. .... .... "A real black man is not timid about making the right decisions," Cain tells the [New York Times Magazine]. As for Obama, Cain goes on to say "it is documented that his mother was white and his father was from Africa. If he wants to call himself black, fine. If he wants to call himself African American, fine. I'm not going down this color road." When pressed if he's saying that Obama is not really a black man, Cain responds "not in terms of a strong black man that I'm identifying with" and cites the civil rights leader and his father, Luther Cain Jr. Cain said his dad didn't have a lot of formal education but had a "Ph.D. in common sense. Such posturing is starting to show itself as a staple of Herman Cain's playbook, almost a trademark routine, if you will. The Hermanator keeps appealing to the simplistic idea that the only reason Barack Obama won the White House is that he is black. It's sort of like he wants conservatives to move past racism by voting for him specifically because he is black. Blacker'n Obama, at least. "And any white candidate who runs against him will be up against the race card. I take the race card off the table." —Herman Cain As Conor Friedersdorf explains: He gets rightly offended by the idea that all black people should think about politics in the same way. But he "plays the race card" all the time as a politician. More specifically, he uses his blackness to alleviate the racial anxieties of Republican voters, to score rhetorical points, to summon argumentative cred, even to imply that his opinion of certain racially fraught matters deserves greater weight because he is black, and can therefore offer the allegedly dispositive "black opinion" on racism or dog whistles. Again, it's easy to forgive all of this. It isn't as if running in a race blind world is an option for him.____________________ Notes: Camia, Catalina. "GOP's Herman Cain: Obama 'not a strong black man'". On Politics. June 30, 2011. Content.USAToday.com. July 2, 2011. http://content.usatoday.com/communi...man-cain-barack-obama-black-man-/1?csp=34news Schilling, Chelsea. "Is this man Obama's worst nightmare?" World Net Daily. July 21, 2010. WND.com. July 2, 2011. http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=181961 Friedersdorf, Conor. "How Herman Cain Succeeds in Spite of Racism". The Atlantic. June 30, 2011. TheAtlantic.com. July 2, 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...rman-cain-succeeds-in-spite-of-racism/241260/
I strongly disagree with your charaterizertion of the right of return. in the future could you use more neutral language in describing it.
Sadly Not the Last Pizza Bit Sadly Not the Last Pizza Bit Source: The Stranger Link: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/hard-to-choke-down/Content?oid=8845058 Title: "Hard to Choke Down", by Paul Constant Date: June 28, 2011 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I mentioned earlier that the closest Godfather's Pizza restaurant to me was in Port Orchard, Washington. But the restaurant in Federal Way was the one I went to as a kid. Paul Constant took a trip down to Federal Way, and it sounds like the restaurant quite literally hasn't changed much since my time: Walking in, you're immediately struck by a horrible musty stench (possibly emanating from the browning ceiling tiles in the corner by the bathroom) and the sense that the place hasn't been renovated since the 1980s. There are outdated video games along the far wall of the restaurant, and everything is done up in some putrid shade of brown. Even the Godfather's Pizza website copy feels like it was written in a time before the discovery of nutrition: "Suddenly, salads don't seem so bad," they say, adding that their pizzas are "just like mom used to make, only much, much bigger!" A friend and I arrive half an hour into the all-you-can-eat pizza dinner buffet. The restaurant is empty. The teenage girl takes our $6.99 apiece—refillable drinks are extra—and shows us to four pizzas shimmering under bright yellow heat lamps. If you prefer your food to be cheap and in huge quantities, if health and flavor simply don't matter to you, this is your Shangri-la, a bottomless fountain of fat and carbohydrates, kept slightly above room temperature for six solid hours—from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. every day. Iceberg lettuce beckons from the salad bar, along with quivering bowls of creamy slop. Every flat surface in the place is sticky .... .... hough Pillsbury doesn't own Godfather's Pizza anymore, it's still written into the DNA of the chain: Specifically, the crust of all the pizza could have been rolled out of a Pillsbury tube. It's flabby and pale and tastes like a few drops of artificial baked-bread flavoring were added to fifty thousand gallons of the stuff, long ago in a factory far away. Ketchup would make a better tomato sauce. The cheese is kind of cheese-colored and covered over in a greasy blanket of beef pellets, "sausage" crumbles, and off-tasting bacon. I can get only a few bites down before my gag reflex kicks in. The breadsticks, served with cold trays of "tomato" "sauce," are edible. More trays of pizza are pushed out under the lamps. Because I'm here for journalistic purposes, I feel we must sample as wide a variety of the product as we can. We hide the remains of the first round under napkins and go sample the new flavors. (When we return, the napkins will be a translucent, radioactive orange.) Somehow, the taco pizza is the best of the lot; at least the "taco sauce" tastes like something, though the towel-like dough soaks it up before I can get more than a few bites in. Worst of all is the chicken pizza with "white sauce," which my friend says tastes "like garlic took a shit." The dessert pizza-sticks (which online reviews rave about as the single best part of the Godfather's Pizza experience) are just repurposed Pillsbury cinnamon rolls without the cinnamon, basted in a chunky, lardy sugar sauce. In order to salvage something from the experience, we decide to play a few video games, but there's no fun to be had there. All the buttons and joysticks are gummy with years' worth of children's mucus, machines eat quarters indiscriminately, and we discover after feeding quarters into the air hockey table that somebody stole the puck. We leave as a large Hispanic family settles in for their meal; they're the only other people who've walked into this Godfather's in an hour. But, of course, The Stranger can't just leave it at that. The restaurant is a blight, and as far as any indicators might suggest Herman Cain's potential as President of the United States, one would think Godfather's Pizza is the last thing he wants associated with his name. There is another issue, though; the article is subtitled, "What Does the Worst Restaurant in Federal Way Have to Do with the Republican Party’s Race Problem?" It's not hyperbole, either. At least, the part about the worst restaurant in Federal Way. Perhaps it's not the most accurate, but it's believable. I have no idea what lowball establishments have moved into the neighborhood in recent years, though it's hard to think of anything that that the Health Department would tolerate. When I was a kid, the teenagers' rumor about Godfather's Pizza was that they didn't even use real cheese. Eating the stuff, one could reasonably believe it. But the question of the restaurant being in some way representative of the GOP's problem with race? That's probably more to do with Cain himself. And it probably depends on the assertion not only that the GOP has a race problem to begin with, but that it has a specific race problem: What can Cain fans possibly expect their man to do to the American economy? Will he cut costs again and again, until we're left with whatever is the national equivalent of that meal that I tried to choke down? If Cain is proud of his connection with the pizza chain, he clearly doesn't care about the lack of quality attached to his name; he's just concerned with the spreadsheets, the bottom line. Do Cain fans really want someone who would treat the economy like some sort of a video game—who'll keep working the numbers until unemployment gets as close to zero as possible, with no concern for the quality of the jobs that Americans are forced to get, or until the economy booms to never-before-seen levels of prosperity, even if the quality of life for 95 percent of the population plummets? If that's what they want, he's their guy. But I don't think that's why Republicans are excited about Herman Cain. There's something much more insidious than that about the Cain candidacy, and it's such a delicate subject that most members of the media are too polite (or frightened) to mention it. To untangle the secret of Cain's success, we first have to start with teabagger House freshman Joe Walsh, a Republican from Illinois, and his comments to Salon about Barack Obama late last month: Why was he elected? Again, it comes back to who he was. He was black, he was historic. And there's nothing racist about this. It is what it is. If he had been a dynamic, white state senator elected to Congress, he wouldn't have gotten in the game this fast. This is what made him different... [The media] was in love with him because they thought he was a good liberal guy and they were in love with him because he pushed that magical button: a black man who was articulate, liberal, the whole white guilt, all of that. Nobody is really color-blind; it would be idiotic to suggest that race had nothing to do with the man who Barack Obama has become. But some right-wing radicals really do believe that Obama became president based solely on his blackness. Consider all the right-wing jokes about President Obama's reliance on teleprompters, even though every modern president has used teleprompters when giving prepared speeches, and even though Obama has proven time and again—particularly on January 29, 2010, when he nimbly debated congressional Republicans about health care and the economy with no teleprompter in sight—to be a gifted extemporaneous speaker. Consider the conservative pundits—including best-selling right-wing mudslinger Jerome Corsi—who believe that Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father, was ghostwritten by white academic (and 1960s revolutionary) Bill Ayers. Consider the insane, and thankfully discredited, crusade to prove that the president of the United States wasn't even an American. Republicans refuse to give Obama any credit as his own man; they believe he coasted to the presidency because of the color of his skin. That's why Republicans keep pushing men like Michael Steele and Herman Cain for prominent positions. They believe that voters—especially black voters—will get confused if they're faced with more than one black guy on a ballot. (A similar line of thinking led to the fiery ascendance of Sarah Palin: McCain staffers believed that putting a woman on the ballot could confuse female voters upset over the failure of Hillary Clinton's campaign.) And not only is Cain a black guy, but he's a black guy who came out of virtually nowhere to run an outsider's campaign, couched in the language of Martin Luther King Jr. and propelled by a media praising him for the high quality of his public speaking. (The 1994 Newsweek article that credited Cain with a role in torpedoing Hillary Clinton's universal health care plan also unfortunately referred to Cain as "articulate.") Sound familiar? He's a twisted mirror image of Obama riding high on the cresting wave of a bunch of white folks who can't manage to believe they lost the election in 2008 to a black man. Cain's candidacy is ultimately powered by nothing more than ignorance and hate. Looking on the bright side, Cain's explosive popularity is good news for Democrats. Considering the volatile economy, Republicans would probably be able to take Obama on if they were willing to recognize his formidable talent, but institutional racism could conceivably prevent them from making that realization. If the party can't refute the stupid things Cain says, they will have proven that they can't get past this issue. If they can't turn their backs on a candidate as laughably bad as Herman Cain, the 2012 elections will be all about race. And when the Republican Party leads a conversation on race, the Republican Party always loses. In the end, then, the metaphor seems to suggest that Cain is a cornercut imitation of "the real thing", someone who couldn't survive in the race strictly on his credentials or rhetoric, who needs a boost of legitimacy and is perfectly willing to play on Republican fears about ethnicity and creed. Which is why, no matter how bad a candidate Cain turns out to be, the only reason he will ever lose this race, in his specific or Republican minds in general, is because he's a black man—the same reason they believe Barack Obama won.
You certainly are on a mission here. Any particular reason for the interest in this particular candidate? Is it just that you find him particularly scary as a potential president? I don't really disagree that much. He is certainly out of his depth. I felt that way about Obama too. As soon as I learned he was from the Chicago machine, I knew what we had. And, sadly, I was right.
