Please forgive me for visiting yet again the clown car that the Republican Party has become, but I can’t help myself. Writing about these wackjobs is like shooting fish in a barrel, although I have to occasionally remind myself that this is not a political version of The Office but a bunch of . . . er, clowns who will stoop as low as it takes to try to deny our Islamofascist president an encore.
I initially welcomed Herman Cain’s entry into the race for the GOP presidential nomination knowing nothing about him other than he seemed to be a smart guy who had made millions selling pizzas. And huzzah huzzah huzzah! An African American was taking on the first African-American president. Now that’s progress!
Well, no its not.
This is because the right wingers who have the keys to the clown car have embraced a man who happens to be black (and in fact argues that he’s “blacker” than Obama) who is utterly and absolutely unqualified to be president but can spew out vapid policy ideas with a toothy Cheshire cat-like grin.
That the serial allegations that Cain came on to women in unwelcome ways and in one case groped a woman in return for the promise of a job have hardly affected his standing in the polls speaks volumes about the GOP’s disdain for women just as the Penn State students who rioted after Joe Paterno was fired spoke volumes about how the axing of a geezer in a blue and white windbreaker was more important to them than child rape.
I speak specifically of the white Southern men who pretty much represent the GOP’s shrunken base.
Many of them are career racists who become apoplectic at the thought of blacks getting near their woman folk but think that Cain’s alleged sexual assault of a white woman is okey-dokey. (And don’t give me any guff about calling it sexual assault.) To think that only a generation ago they wouldn’t let Cain use the same water fountain or lunch counter and only a few generations before that would have lynched him for even looking at a white woman.
This is not progress, its a pathology.