Is This Guy Just Another Dumb Black Man or What? Herman Cain's Refined Embrace of Ignorance

Gots all this stuff twirlin' about in my head.

Herman Cain needs to hurry up and book his guest spot on Tyler Perry's new age race minstrel show The House of Payne.

Anyone can have a system crash moment where their mainframe goes down and needs to reboot.

But, this newest epic fail by Herbie Cornbread Cain is part of a pattern of failure regarding basic knowledge about matters of public policy. He clearly is not prepared to be President of the United States. This fact is clear.

As I was with Sarah Palin, another triumph of Tea Party GOP anti-intellectual mediocrity, I do not understand the hubris and arrogance which leads a person to believe that they can be President, or hold a senior leadership position in government, when they have little if any interest in matters of foreign or domestic politics.

There is no set formula for what makes a successful Chief Executive. Certainly, intelligence helps. But instinct, charisma, and the ability to select competent people to help you in a collegiate, consensus-based model of decision-making, can work around this gap. A President can be fully degreed, with paper from the country's best institutions, but they can be a dullard who is manipulated by their advisers and handlers. There are educated fools; there are fools who are educated.

However, a successful leader cannot be intellectually "incurious." As Palin's handlers learned in trying to brief her for the 2008 Republican campaign, you cannot cram a lifetime of information into a few months of studying and preparation. While I will never be President, and most certainly do not have the competency for such a role, I remember watching the news in elementary school and reading newspapers and magazines. I liked talking about politics, history, philosophy, and other such matters, with friends and family.

Like you, I picked up a narrative about politics that I take for granted. This is the matrix, an invisible superstucture upon which other, more particular and intentionally learned and acquired information, is built upon.

Herman Cain is a technician who knows how to do math about the movement of objects.

Herman Cain is a technician who can follow a profit maximization rubric that helps him decide if he should shut down pizza franchises.

Herman Cain is no Renaissance man.

Moreover, he, like the anti-intellectual set on the New Right, does not have a basic understanding of current events that is empirically grounded, with breadth, and that goes beyond a talking point, fact-free nation, of Right-wing bloviating and epistemic closure that is coloured for the professionals by the propagandists at the Heritage Foundation, and fingered painted in the dots for the rank and file upright walking knuckledraggers by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

Herman Cain said that God told him to run for office, for he is Moses. Apparently, God is a trickster who also told the other Republican candidates to run for office too. Funny, I don't recall Cain, Perry, Bacchmann or the other Tea Party GOP candidates sharing if God told them that they would win (or not).

Fate is a trickster, maybe he/she/it wanted Herman Cain and company to run because America needs a good laugh, and the Republican field, which months ago became a national joke, is providing a gut-buster of laughs for the reality based community.

But please again, help me understand. How can someone as incurious as Herman Cain sincerely believe that they are qualified to be President?