This Is Herman Cain?:
Hey, kids, the Rude Pundit knows that now that a bunch of idiots in Florida sat around and thought, "Well, shit, we like that Godfather's pizza" and gave him the win in their caucus or straw poll or whatever the fuck it was, Republican presidential candidate is now America's Next Great Negro, but Herman Cain is kind of nuts. Oh, sure, he'll put on a good face of sanity, but it's way more fun to look at the shit he said back before he decided this whole running for president thing looked like a good racket. What's most fascinating is to see his engagement with issues of race.

Like on April 20, 2005, when, in his "column" (if by "column," you mean, "a pathetic attempt to exploit the novelty of being a conservative black guy for fun and profit"), Cain compared Democrats who opposed privatizing Social Security to Jim Crow-era racists who made blacks drink from separate water fountains. No, really: "[C]ongressional Democrats do not want all Americans to drink from the same retirement fountains. They insinuate that we are not smart enough to ride in the front of the retirement bus with them." And that includes the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP: "[B]lack Democratic leaders," he wrote, "are willing to see the next generation of Blacks remain in economic slavery on the Democratic plantation." Dude, that's not just playing the race card. That's keeping a few race cards up your sleeve to win every trick. (Boo-yah - bridge reference, motherfuckers.)

Throughout his columns, Cain is one analogy-making son of a bitch. From an April 23, 2007 column: "During the early half of the 1900s, Democrats discouraged black people from voting for Republicans with physical intimidation, including lynches by the Ku Klux Klan, a Democrat-inspired organization. Today, instead of a rope and a tree, Democrats try to deny black people from voting or running for office as Republicans using a keyboard and racially inspired media moments." (You gotta love the timing of that one, coming so soon before Barack Obama became one of the main Democratic candidates for president.)

It's big fun that a black guy who keeps using metaphors from America's racist past to condemn Democrats also writes about how it's time to get beyond race and that he can't understand why people concentrate on it, as when he said, "Isn’t it funny that it is the liberals who are obsessed with Obama’s race?" (He had just quoted Stanley Crouch, hardly a raging liberal.) And other times, he just says things about race that are just weirdly, obviously wrong, like "The unfortunate snapshot of poverty exposed by Hurricane Katrina is not an accurate portrait of the equal opportunity available all across America." So, wait. Katrina just happened to hit the one place in America where black poverty is endemic? And it's all cool elsewhere? Imagine the luck.

What's Cain about? Oh, that's right. He's an executive from corporate America. It's pretty goddamn easy to figure out his goals.