I never really got the Herman Cain thing.
From what I could tell, he was a guy who looked up one day while making a pizza, and decided he wanted to be president. That part I could sorta understand. For I’ve made pizzas. And I wanted to be president. When I was 14.
But why he was ever taken seriously as a presidential candidate: that was the puzzlement.
Now, it is true that Cain was not as dumb as the farm animal, or as crazy as the Minnesota loon. On the issues, however, he was less informed than a stump, and he always seemed a little pissed off about something, as if he’d just been served a pizza with fish eggs as a topping.
Then, in the final days of his would-be campaign, his brain went into lockdown. When asked a simple question about Libya, it became clear that Cain was wholly unfamiliar with that nation, and, after some dozens of silent seconds had passed, possibly the rest of the planet as well.
Because the farm animal had earlier suffered a similar brain stoppage—failing utterly to count to three—I immediately became Suspicious. Because once: maybe. But twice: a pattern.
It was then that I recalled the words of a Kossack, during the most recent GOoPer debate:
It’s like Cain isn’t really from this planet. Knows nothing about international anything, quotes Pokemon, makes up names for these sentient biological units with questions he must access from memory implants. Creepy.
I believe that the truth is being approached here. My colleague and I are now working on a hypothesis involving the entire slate of GOoPer presidential candidates as pseudo-humans bred and/or assembled by extraterrestrial beings, out there somewhere having a laugh, fucking with us.
The brain seizures of both Cain and the farm animal can be explained in this way. Each was seen as unable to function as a sentient being, for nearly a minute, because those pulling their mental strings are located many light-years away, and occasionally the animating rays are interfered with by something like solar flares, or the 40 tons of cosmic dust that settle on Earth each day.
That I observed that Mitt Romney, when he is not speaking, appears to have had all the bones sucked out of his arms, is explained by the fact that he has no bones in his arms. His other-worldly assemblers neglected to include them. It has also become increasingly apparent that Romney’s nether regions experience greater problems than mere Mormon underwear. For his ass was placed where his crotch is supposed to be. Also, his peculiarly stiff walk is caused by the fact that his feet are screwed on backwards. He is like a rag doll sewn by an inebriate.
It was my colleague who discovered that Rick Santorum is a grub in a skin-suit. This explains that little puckered mouth, and the fact that he does not reveal teeth. This is because his is a grub mouth, and grubs do not have teeth, at least as we know them. Santorum’s extreme pasty whiteness and facial lumpiness also betray his grubness. If his skin-suit were unzipped, one would behold many wriggling little grub legs, lining his torso.
Galvanized by this insight of my colleague, I then intuited that Newt Gingrich is a bedbug in a skin-suit. I had initially noted that the man was extremely poorly dressed, for a presidential candidate, and later that he seemed to swell during the course of a debate. This is because it is exceedingly difficult to dress a bedbug in human clothing, and, as a bedbug, he is continuously expanding and contracting, as he digests his diet of blood. Others have noticed that the Gingrich mouth is never still during a debate, regardless of whether or not he is gibbering, and that he seems to be stealthily feeding things into it. This, my colleague and I now understand, is because his proboscis is actively moving around inside his oral cavity: it is hard to conceal a bedbug proboscis in a human mouth.
Moving along from the Men In Black-style insectile apparitions of Gingrich and Santorum, we come to the farm animal, also known as Rick Perry, who we know to be a failed Dr. Moreau-esque attempt to breed a man with a steer. Michele Bachmann is more goose than human, and Jon Hunstman was affixed by the aliens with the visage of a raccoon. My colleague and I are not yet sure what precisely was done with Ron Paul, but it is evident that he has been accessorized with an inordinate number of human organs and appendages, some of which move and melt and slide down his face while he is on television.
Back on Earth, I eventually came to understand that the appeal of Cain was that he could comfortably, conveniently serve as Pet Negro to the racists who are the raison d’etre of the Tea Party and who define the Republican Party as a whole.
As Jill Lepore documented in The Whites Of Their Eyes, the vision of Tea-time, once and future, possessed by the teabaggers, is of a world exclusively white. And that to the baggers, to a man (and woman), “everything about Barack Obama and his administration [is] somehow alarming, as if his election had ripped a tear in the fabric of time.”
The bag people cannot stomach the Reality of a black man in the White House. They want him out. Now, and by whatever means necessary. That is all that teabagging is about. Has ever been about.
But Herman Cain was black man as minstrel. For which he has been exposed and excoriated across the black blogosphere for months. He was a tame, accommodating black man, one that racist baggers could clutch and say: “see, we ain’t racist.”
That it is all bollocks, that the baggers supporting Cain were ever some new and evolved form of race-neutral GOoPer, is exposed by the fact that as soon as Cain dropped out of the race, his supporters immediately flowed to Gingrich. Who, besides being a bedbug in a skin-suit, revivified by extraterrestrials determined to fuck with us, is a mean Georgia asshole, who’s ridden racism ever since he entered national politics. And does so today.
Cain was required to retire from the presidential campaign because his wee-wee went a-wanderin’. And what this says about Americans is Not Good.
First came news that two women had parted ways with an organization overseen by Cain after it was determined that he had harassed them sexually in the workplace. Then it was learned that another woman, Cain had sexually assaulted—assault, remember, defined as “an unwanted touching, however slight”—when he attempted to force her head to the realm of his wee-wee, apparently in exchange for a job.
For a time it seemed that Cain would weather these tempests. Boorishly forcing oneself on women, either criminally, or to such an extent that they received a non-judicial form of civil damages, would apparently stand as no obstacle to the Cain minstrel show continuing to tap-dance across the land.
But then it developed that Cain had immersed himself in a 13-year love affair with a woman not his wife.
That did it. This was behavior consensual, and involving love at that, but, somehow, it Could Not Be Borne. And so out of the race he did go.
So. What do we learn.
We learn that you can still run for president if you sexually harass a woman out of her job, or suddenly reach out and grab the head of a woman you’ve just met, and shove it into your crotch. But if for 13 years you have a paper bonding you to one woman, but engage in a love affair with another, you’re presidential toast.
We also learn that those teabaggers who once clutched Cain, but couldn’t stand by him for this one, don’t know their history. Because here is a little mini-history of some of the sexual variations of some of the baggers’ beloved “founders”:
George Washington, known as “The Father Of Our Country,” although he was sterile, married his wife for her riches, and then proceeded to share his Clenis with at least seven other women, including, during the Revolutionary War, a woman who was a British spy.
Thomas Jefferson fathered out of wedlock a child with Sally Hemings, a slave. Benjamin Franklin also produced several children without benefit of clergy.
The father of Alexander Hamilton was not the man who was married to Hamilton’s mother. And Hamilton’s own Clenis caused him to succumb to blackmail, levied by the husband of one of his lovers. Hamilton eventually got himself killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, after Hamilton had whispered about that Burr engaged in sexual congress with his own daughter. Martin Van Buren, the nation’s eighth president, was secretly sired by Burr.
Gouverneur Morris lost a leg in a fast high-dive out a second-floor window, needing to get away quick before a man coming up the stairs found Morris with that man’s wife. Later, in France, Morris escaped the rage of a Paris mob—bent on bloodying aristocratic powderheads—when he unbuckled his wooden leg, waved it over his head, and thundered that he had lost his limb in the struggle for American liberty.
Then there’s the Santorum problem. Not, this time, that he’s a grub in a skin-suit. But that the national brain seems to find it perfectly normal that Cain be made to exit the presidential sweepstakes because he loved a woman, while Santorum is not even questioned about his sexual views and proclivities. Which are literally medieval. And then some.
Thus spaketh the grub:
One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is the dangers of contraception in this country. The whole sexual libertine idea[.]
Many in the Christian faith have said: “Well, contraception’s okay.”
It’s not okay, because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They’re supposed to be within marriage, for purposes that are, yes, conjugal, but also procreative. That’s the perfect way that a sexual union should happen.
We take any part of that out, we diminish the act. And if you can take one part out that’s not for purposes of procreation, that’s not one of the reasons, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women.
And all of a sudden, it becomes deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure.
And that’s certainly a part of it—and it’s an important part of it, don’t get me wrong—but there’s a lot of things we do for pleasure, and this is special, and it needs to be seen as special.
Got that? If you involve your organs in an act intended to create a child, all’s well. But any and all other than that, and you wantonly enter the realm of pure Evil. You roil lasciviously round the very bowels of Hell, having demonically “[d]econstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure.”
“Pleasure!?” gums the grub. “We can’t have that!“
Ye gods. Cain goes back to the pizza, condemned for a love affair, while this grunting grub’s antediluvian assinitiy is considered so non-controversial that no one even talks about it.
The horror. The horror.
No wonder aliens are fucking with Americans. Shoving dim-bulb farm animals and mutant rag-dolls and big blood-swollen bedbugs, out on stage, as presidential candidates. Americans, too many of them deserve it.
(This piece, illustrated, originally available in red.)