I wrote recently about Herman Cain’s apparent cluelessness about foreign policy (among other things). He derided so-called “gotcha questions” like “who is the president of Uzbekistan?” He basically said he didn’t know, didn’t need to know, and didn’t even need to know how to pronounce Uzbekistan.
Now, in Cain’s latest interview on Meet the Press, he exhibits further ignorance about foreign policy (don’t mind the gratuitous Boeing advertisement leading into what we’re supposed to think of as an independent news show):
It honestly seems Cain is unable to elaborate on these supposedly lots ” of other reasons we needed to go to Iraq,” and the lots “of benefits that have come out of Iraq.” And what’s this talk of Iran planning to attack Iraq if the US withdraws? Hasn’t the Maliki regime developed rather close ties with Iran? What has Cain been reading?
Well, he says he has been “reading” people like John Bolton, Henry Kissinger, and KT McFarland. So then, does he consider himself a neoconservative? Huh? What’s a neoconservative? Cain isn’t familiar.
Total, utter ignorance of international affairs and US foreign policy vis-à-vis places like Uzbekistan apparently is not a disqualifier for running for President of the United States. And now, neither is being completely unfamiliar with one of the central ideological movements affecting American foreign policy in recent years.
Guys like Cain get into office and are basically puppets for the imperial technocrats in career spots in the Pentagon and national security apparatus. He is a blank slate. He is not simply uninformed; he is dangerous. And he is rising in the polls.
Part of the reason these huge swaths of ignorance about some of the most serious societal and political issues facing us fails to disqualify a candidate for the highest office in the land, and part of why he is rising in the polls, is because Americans are even less informed than Cain. Democracy has developed such that they feel justified in paying exactly zero attention for four years straight and then popping up at their local elementary school to vote in another imperial psychopath. A Pew poll released at the beginning of the month found that almost half of the American electorate cannot name a single Republican candidate for President. Sigh.
