Herman Cain’s Faithful

More than with other candidates, Herman Cain supporters seem to know very little about the guy or his positions. This video demonstrates very well the level of ignorance regarding Cain on the part of those who would vote for him. He’s become quite popular with Tea Partiers, who appear to know nothing of his time as chairman of the Kansas City Fed, his endorsement of Mitt Romney in 2008, or his support for TARP. All these issues, particularly the latter two, are especially important to the Tea Party. Opposition to TARP practically serves as a litmus test for this crowd.

This afternoon I heard a gentlemen call into a local talk radio show expressing his support for Cain, saying that it was his consistent stance on the issues and lack of flip-flopping that attracted him. He wasn’t joking either, he meant it. The hosts were quick to point out Cain’s recent back and forth on two issues.

The first was the hypothetical prisoner exchange question on Wolf Blitzer’s show. Cain said he would make the trade of AQ prisoners at Guantanamo Bay for a captive U.S. soldier. He switched during the debate, clarifying with Anderson Cooper afterwards that he misspoke. His second bout with cognitive dissonance occurred during an interview with John Stossel where he came out both for and against abortion.

How someone is willing to vote for a guy and not pay enough attention to learn these kinds of things is beyond me. Equally unsettling, is that when the folks in the first video learned the truth, they found all manner of ways to rationalize his positions, and convince themselves they were doing right to stick with him. I would be remiss not to mention Cain’s ridiculous campaign ad, which of course, Cain fans are trying to rationalize as well.

Re: Stockton SWAT Raid

William Grigg posted this on Lew Rockwell’s blog this afternoon. In it he tells the story of Joann Rice, a woman whose home was vandalized by a San Jose SWAT team searching for a gang member. Despite her invitation for them to search her home, police officers instead “detained her in a vehicle for four hours, and then took her to jail. They then unloaded several rounds of tear gas into the house, leaving it with shattered windows, perforated walls, and a dense, suffocating chemical mist. The residue of the tear gas attack is now infused into the carpets and the furniture.”

He then drew a parallel between the damage to Rice’s home and the destruction brought to Iraq by the U.S. government. He finally suggested that in the spirit of Michele Bachmann, the property owner should be required to pay for some of the damages, instead of the police department covering 100% of the cost, as Rice now claims. All in all, I found it to be a rather fitting comparison.

However, I did take issue with one aspect of this: Rice should not be required to cover part of the expense for rebuilding her home, but instead should bear the full cost, along with compensating the police for their expended ammunition, fuel, labor, etc. That would be a more fitting analogy to Bachmann’s recent demands.