Just watched as much of the Lawrence O'Donnell interview with Herman Cain as I could. Normally, I love watching Republicans appear on MSNBC prime time as much as I like seeing real Democrats appear on Fox News. They're such rare moments, and I relish them. But Lawrence O'Donnell, in what could have been an enlightening interview with this week's GOP frontrunner, really dropped the ball.
Embarrassingly so. Now, granted I didn't watch the entire thing, but in two areas of questioning, he went where he needed not have.
1) When you think of Herman Cain, do you ever find yourself thinking, "gee, he was a black teen in the early-1960s. Why didn't he participate in civil rights movement?" I'm not an African-American and wasn't alive in the '60s, but so what if he didn't? I am not sure what the implication is there, but was it incumbent upon ever African-American to march? And does not participating in the civil rights movement imply ... what? I suppose it might be a fairer question to ask a white person who was around in that era, but only slightly.
I'm going to go out on a limb and presume that Herman Cain was opposed to segregation.
2) Out of nowhere, O'Donnell asked Cain, who worked (but did not serve) in the Navy, whether he was qualified to be Commander-in-Chief after not serving in Vietnam. Really?! Is this still a thing? I have a hard time believing that O'Donnell genuinely cares about Cain's lack of military service (Clinton and Obama never served), but was possibly trying to posit him as a hypocrite. But that's kind of hard to do when, while not exactly serving, he was working in ballistics for the Navy.
Seemed like a completely disingenuous line of questioning on O'Donnell's part, and made me cringe. There's much to criticize Herman Cain for, and Lawrence does a good job going over some of those areas. But when he got weird, it got weird.
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