Fox may have gotten rid of Dick Morris but with the hire of Herman Cain, it looks like we’ll still have plenty of wacky punditry to laugh at for the foreseeable future. In fact, Cain's first appearance on The O’Reilly Factor tonight elicited the kind of O'Reilly response that I previously thought only attached to Morris: Oh, Come On. But that’s what Bill O’Reilly said when Cain argued that the reason President Obama is so popular is because “51% of the voters were misled enough to vote for him.”
The Cain segment was one of several O’Reilly devoted to his current fixation: how the country is going to hell in a handout-basket. Apparently, Cain didn’t get that memo. But, it’s more than a little ridiculous (not to mention disrespectful) to argue that Americans have been bamboozled into electing and liking a president.
So I had to agree with and even applaud O’Reilly’s candor when, after saying, “Oh, come on,” citing the “long, long campaign” plus the “billion dollars” spent by Mitt Romney on advertising, he asked, “I mean, how dumb are we?”
“We are that dumb,” Cain said. Well, not everybody, he granted. Presumably, he meant the 49% who didn’t vote for Obama were not “that dumb.” But, Cain said, there’s a “severe ignorance problems with the people who are so mesmerized by his popularity that they are not looking at the facts.”
What facts are we missing? I’m not sure. Maybe that we don’t have a real leader. Cain opened the discussion by saying that he thinks the biggest problem facing the country is “a deficiency of leadership.” We have a “politician” and not a leader in the White House, Cain opined. Any doubt about whom Cain had in mind as the right kind of leader?
Paraphrasing Martin Luther King, Cain said, “’There is nothing more dangerous than serious ignorance.’ And that’s what we have. And he (Obama) gets away with it.” Apparently, ignorance about foreign countries while you're running for president doesn't count.
But fear not, Foxies. Cain is “cautiously optimistic.” Why? Because we’re going to have four years of economic suffering and that will cause people to “wake up.” Assuming of course, they’re not further bamboozled.
But that brought O’Reilly back to handout hell (although he had temporarily diverged to the woes of public education and “machines taking over peoples’ lives”). “Maybe that’s the wake up call,” O’Reilly said. But he insisted there’s a mentality of it’s “not what we earn, but what we’re gonna get” that O’Reilly feels certain has infused the country.
Cain reiterated that after four years of suffering, people will wake up.
O’Reilly was not so sure. He noted that even after the payroll tax cut expired and people’s taxes went up, Obama’s approval rating did not go down.
I doubt that Cain will do anything to change that.
With all this talk of what ails the country and the suggestions of “makers and takers,” O’Reilly, along with most of his Fox News hosts, steadfastly ignore the plight of the working poor. As the Working Poor Families Project reported in a recent brief:
While the U.S. economy has shown some signs of recovery—the U.S. unemployment rate has dipped below 8 percent from 10 percent three years ago—the economic outlook for many working families is bleak. New data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the number of low- income working families in the United States increased to 10.4 million in 2011, up from 10.2 million a year earlier.2 This means that nearly one third of all working families— 32 percent—may not have enough money to meet basic needs. At the same time, inequality among working families is increasing, as higher-income families receive a larger share of income relative to families at the bottom of the income distribution.
If O’Reilly, Cain and their "leaders" really think that the solution is to cut taxes, cut benefits and tell these folks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps – then I think they may be whining about how dumb and lazy we are right through another Democratic administration.
Cain is talking about the sequester, and hints that Republicans will use it to create this scenario in which Americans will “wake up” and blame Obama for this disaster. This is a dangerous fantasy based on warped thinking. Cain is confused as to which group represents stupid America. Hint: it’s the ones who destroy the economy to prove a political point.
More and more I’ve been hearing this nonsensical claim about the “low information” voters – which seems to be turning into a dog whistle now. When you hear right wing pundits use the phrase, it’s a shorthand for people that want handouts, people who want a free ride, people who are too stupid to be able to vote correctly. When O’Reilly says “How dumb are we?”, he’s missing the point of what Cain and Rush are saying. From their point of view, “smart” people like O’Reilly voted for Mitt Romney but there were just too many more stupid people voting for Obama. This is a ridiculous argument, of course, and it really smacks of sour grapes. But it won’t stop the right wing from trying to establish that lie as their truth in years to come.
It’s the same way that the right wing is trying to blame the entire “sequester” cliffhanger on Obama. Which assumes that their viewers were asleep in 2011 when all of this was set up. The right wing assumes everyone has forgotten how the House GOP blew up a budget deal between John Boehner and President Obama and made noises about shutting the government down rather than doing the usual procedure to raise the debt ceiling. As a stopgap measure, Obama’s people presented the notion of raising the ceiling and establishing a bipartisan committee to work on budget cuts and new taxes. If that committee failed to do their job, then the “sequester” would kick in as an undesirable fallback for both sides. It wasn’t intended to be used – it was intended as a disincentive, to make both sides bargain fairly. The GOP then refused to bargain, asserting their Grover Norquist pledges, and the committee broke up. Leaving us with only the undesirable cuts for both the military and the domestic sides of the budget. The point was the Congress was supposed to find a real solution to the problem. Instead, the GOP decided to use the situation as another political grenade to throw at Obama. They can rewrite this all they like, but there are too many people who do know the real history.
Cain claimed those women’s claims were all lies, yet no word if he ever filed a lawsuit against them. Don’t you find that suspicious?
We encourage all the masses to ask Hermie why he failed to sue those women, if he said those claims were baseless.
NOTE TO CAIN
You speak with fork tongue, bro.
http://thepoliticalcarnival.net/2013/02/19/video-fox-news-herman-cain-belittles-51-percent-of-americans-as-having-a-severe-ignorance-problem-for-reelecting-obama/
IMHO, anyone who makes the following statement while allegedly running for president:
“And when they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I’m going to say, you know, I don’t know. Do you know?”
forfeits the right to comment on someone else’s “ignorance problem” . . .
.
Then had to find out the hard way that, even if that were the case, we’re still voting for the smart black guy. Because, unlike Republicans, Democrats and Independents vote for the guy who has more brains and common sense.
See also: Why Marco Rubio will fail so hard Romney can laugh at him in 2016.