Ha Ha Herman!

That Herman Cain - what a sense of humor.  He somehow managed to become the rarest of birds - a black front runner for the Republican presidential nomination - and now he's joking about putting up an electric fence on the Mexican border to discourage and possibly electrocute illegal immigrants.  Here's a man whose father who worked at three jobs to own his own house and whose mother was a cleaning woman, and he's telling the unemployed and underemployed Wall Street occupiers that it's their fault, not the fault of greedy banks, if they're not well-off or gainfully employed.  Even Ron Paul was aghast at Cain's remarks. (Cain is a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Missouri, something you don't hear about because the media keep playing up the fact that he was the chairman of a pizza parlor chain.)

Cain has shot up to the top of the Republican field for the same reason Michele Bachmann  and Rick Perry did - he's seen as a "conservative" alternative to the likely nominee, Mitt Romney, who's seen as more "moderate" (until you look at his record).  His "9-9-9 plan" - a nine percent national sales tax, a nine percent flat tax, and a nine percent business flat tax - seems reasonable enough until you realize that it will raise taxes on 95 percent of Americans making an average of 35,000 a year while lowering taxes on those with an a average annual income of $350,000.

But he's sure to do some damage to the body politic while he's around.  Cain is getting the bulk of his economic ideas from the greedy Koch brothers, who hope to turn America into one big strip mine, and his effect could force Romney, as the nominee, to move so far to the right that the Tea Party will be able to write the entire 2012 Republican platform.

Oh yeah, I didn't want to bring it up, but Cain was instrumental in sabotaging President Bill Clinton's 1993 health care reform plan when he challenged the President at a town hall meeting in Kansas City.  Cain told Clinton that a proposed employer mandate would hurt small businesses, and that subsidies to help such businesses guarantee health insurance to workers were inaccurately calculated.  Cain, according to Bob Cohn of Newsweek, "transformed the debate" on health care reform, which went down in flames for Clinton in 1994 and was never revisited in the remainder of his Presidency.

So how much do Republican voters like Cain? They love him.  At a Republican debate, they applauded his assertion that the unemployed have only themselves to blame for their plight, just as they cheered Rick Perry's executions in Texas and booed at a gay soldier in earlier debates.