As mistermix pointed out this morning, Herman Cain is more or less tied with Mittens for the lead right now in Iowa and very much represents the power and influence of the Tea Party contingent of the GOP. He’s gotten this far on his cadre of lies, the most pernicious and odious being his whopper in March where he espoused the notion that Planned Parenthood exists solely to murder the black community through abortions.
“When Margaret Sanger – check my history – started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world,” Cain said during a talk in Washington, D.C., at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group.
“It’s planned genocide,” Cain added. He wants the U.S. Congress to yank funding for Planned Parenthood, which receives about $75 million a year to provide non-abortion health services.
Six months or so later, somebody finally decided to call him on it, being Bob Schieffer of Face The Nation.
Schieffer also pushed Cain on his history of comments attacking Planned Parenthood as an organization that favors “genocide” in the black community — comments Cain said he still believes.
“I still stand by that,” Cain said. “If people go back and look at the history and look at Margaret Sanger’s own words, that’s exactly where that came from … What I’m saying is, Planned Parenthood isn’t sincere about wanting to try to counsel them not to have abortions.”
The Dangerman
The Powers That Be (the ones that want Romney) kneecapped Perry when he posed a threat; Cain, if he ever poses a threat, will get the kneecap job, too. Now, he’s not a threat at all to the PTB; he’s Sideshow
BobHerman.I could see him as VP, however; perhaps that’s why the PTB’s are keeping their powder dry.
Villago Delenda Est
The REAL problem that assholes like Cain have with Planned Parenthood is the planned part. As in contraception. If worthless douchebags like Cain actually gave a rat’s ass about abortion, and not punishing the sluts, they’d fully support Planned Parenthood’s programs to distribute contraception to make it so people have an option on birth control other than praying that the sperm doesn’t find the egg.
The leadership of the anti-choice movement is about controlling women’s sexuality. Period. If it was not, they’d be all in favor of preventing abortion by making pregnancies a fully planned event.
But the sex…it drives them fucking bananas.
artem1s
I’ve been hearing the Sanger eugenics argument for 20 years at pro-choice events from the AA community in NE OH. she had some pretty odious ideas about who should and should not be procreating. but genocide by skin color was not really her issue. breaking the poverty cycle was.
Chris
@The Dangerman:
I must’ve missed that part. How’d they “kneecap” him? I thought he’d just discredited himself by talking.
@Villago Delenda Est:
I do love that about them. They want to make it as likely as possible that a woman will have a baby, then they want them to have to have the baby, and THEN they want to cut any and all social services that might help her with the baby.
I mean, if this was about abortion ending a human life, then let’s talk about making condoms and other contraceptives available at every street corner, and then subsidize the shit out of the women who “choose life” (or in your scenario are forced to choose life). But it’s not. It’s just their usual manic obsession with punishing sinners, and poor people (but I repeat myself), as savagely as possible for… well, no one really knows why.
BGinCHI
Uncle Tom Cain strikes again.
No surprise, really, from a corporate-sponsored candidate. The Koch’s were smart to find this guy to go out and do their dirty work for them.
The Dangerman
@Chris:
True, but the Right Wing Echo Chamber (I sampled Fox News, then showered repeatedly afterwards) made damn sure those gaffes were repeated over … and over … and over again.
Menzies
@artem1s:
I’ve seen a lot of this stuff up here from pro-life groups. It was very common in her time – I’ve read about forced sterilization programs happening in that time as well.
barkleyg
And if Cain is one of “the good ones”, he will KNOW his place and let Buchanan become his DICK Cheney and RUN the SHOW!
Go Obama
Short Bus Bully
Cain is Sarah Palin on steroids. He and Romney are going to duke this one out repping for their various constituencies; Cain for the
Tea PartyBirchers and Romney for the Status Quo.It’s going to get bloody but don’t think for a second that that will stop their crazy or exhaust it for the primary. I’m sure that the GOP was just loving watching Obama and Hillary duke it out thinking that it was good for John McCain and look how that turned out.
Chris
@Menzies:
I don’t know much about her, but she was, what, 1920s? Age of the National Preparedness societies, the Second Klan, anti-immigrant rhetoric dominating the landscape? Everyone was racist back then – not literally, but the sentiment was widespread and pretty accepted in both parties and the populist movements as well. And eugenics were also a popular theory. I’m not at all surprised that Sanger would’ve believed these things.
(Hell, probably the only “major” political movement that wasn’t racist was… the Communist Party. Huuuhhhhh…)
The Spy Who Loved Me
Sanger was less a racist than a proponent of eugenics. She was even supportive of forced sterilization in certain instances.
Chris
@Short Bus Bully:
I don’t think he’s quite at the level of stardom Palin was.
I’ve also noticed that on the conservative blogs I’ve read, there’s plenty of praise for Cain’s ability, because he’s a Job Creator and Master Of The Universe, and besides, he proves the Republican Party isn’t racist, and he understands that America needs to be strong and… yada, yada, yada.
But you know what I don’t hear them say? “He’s one of us.” They said it all the time about Palin: Sarah Palin, Average Joe (or Jane), full of good small-town values, Real American in touch with Middle America, was practically the only thing they could talk about. I don’t hear any of that with Cain.
(I can’t imagine why).
Joel
Frankly, I hope they nominate him. And then we destroy him in the general. Scorched earth, leave no trace.
Menzies
@Joel:
I almost wonder if it wouldn’t profit them more to let him get all the way to the RNC, then get brokered out of the way for Romney or some more acceptable (read: white) candidate.
He could be their Never-Was – a way for them to prove they’re not racist, because they’re letting him win votes, but not the nomination. The TPers might groan and stamp some, but they’d vote for Romney.
It’d still be awesome to see him nominated, but I think the PTB will do everything possible to prevent that from happening.
@Chris:
Completely true. I’m not saying there’s actual truth to what Cain is saying, but I hadn’t pinned down exactly what was up with Margaret Sanger. My US history education neglected her, for some reason. ;-)
agrippa
Cain is fat.
ruemara
I’m nearly +3 before noon (gooooo wine!) Obviously I’m doing a Peggy Noonan costume for hallows. If it was box wine, it would be Althouse. True fact, if you put “franzia pundit” into teh googs, Althouse comes up. This is drunk babble for, even hammered, I wouldn’t vote for Cain. PEACE OUT! *collapse*
Southern Beale
HE IS NOT A CANDIDATE.
He barely has a campaign staff. He has no campaign office. He is not even campaigning, he’s on a book tour.
This entire thing is a farce. Some sick joke played on the media and the public.
It’s like someone saw how Sarah Palin was playing the media and decided to up the ante.
rikyrah
Cain is their A-B-C
shuffling and jiggling all the time
malraux
@The Spy Who Loved Me:
Is it worth saying that the nazis gave Eugenics a bad name? Or at least a worse name than it deserved. in the pre pill times, being fertile kinda sucked. Starting to pop kids out at 15 perpetuates a pretty nasty cycle of poverty. The idea that you can improve the population by helping people in bad situations avoid excessive births isn’t exactly controversial. Though the idea of forced sterilization is a bit off, it was something see favored only for the feeble minded (though clearly that’s a loaded term to itself).
Zach
@The Spy Who Loved Me: Sanger was not a Eugenicist. She bought the science published by Eugenicists (like almost everyone at the time) and engaged with them when it came to discussing methods of the sorts of social engineering that was all the rage at the time. There were several competing philosophies as to how to best marry public policy and new (usually very misguided) scientific findings. Sanger fell into the birth control camp that figured that the best way to go was to educate women and let them decide whether or not it was in their personal interest to have children. Eugenicists favored widespread sterilization as well as medical approval of marriages between the fit. These were up against various Marxist schemes of social planning as well as the conservative positions held by the Catholic church and others.
So, Sanger wasn’t a Eugenicist, but did count Eugenicists amongst her colleagues. That’s the extent to which there’s any truth to that. The abortion-equals-black-genocide stuff is a total sham that as far as I can tell is only based on one letter taken out of context and the fact that Sanger taught women in the KKK how to not get pregnant.
Tom Q
@The Dangerman: Compare that to the way Bush’s many gaffes in 2000 were buried or laughed off by the same sources. It’s quite clear the GOP Central Committee was fearful Perry would bring them to a cataclysmic defeat, and they brought out the nuclear weapons to try and bury him early. And they’ve succeeded for now — but I’m not convinced he doesn’t have a Kerry-like resurrection in him.
Sir Oliver Martext
If Margaret Sanger had some scheme to commit black genocide, why did Martin Luther King, Jr. accept an award named after her in 1966?
oldswede
New Haven, Connecticut, was the venue for Griswold v. Connecticut, a landmark case that was decided by the US Supreme Court in 1965
JGabriel
Zandar:
Is it possible that with Cain’s candidacy the GOP Tea Party wing is engaging in a version of the Bradley Effect?
I suspect most of Cain’s polling support will never translate into primary votes because, in their desire to look less racist, many Tea Partiers are just choosing Cain as their “holding place” until the race develops more.
.
oldswede
New Haven, Connecticut, was the venue for Griswold v Connecticut, a landmark case that was decided by the US Supreme Court in 1965. It concerned a Planned Parenthood Clinic that was opened in New Haven right at the edge of the Yale University campus (see photo) in middle of a very affluent neighborhood occupied mainly by Yale faculty and students.
Were they trying to eliminate the ruling class?
oldswede
MikeBoyScout
I’m so old I can remember when reading something like this was hard to believe.
Then again, how old does one need to be to be hearing such bull?
malraux
@Zach: As near as I can tell, there were multiple different versions of eugenics involving varying degrees of coercion. Providing and encouraging birth control use among the lower classes is at a certain level both eugenics and coercive, but it isn’t equivalent to rounding up all lower classes and sterilizing or killing them.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
You know, if the GOP wasn’t chockablock with drooling idiots, an African-American who declared that African-Americans should hate X because X was founded on the idea that they were subhuman would make them a little nervous.
Villago Delenda Est
@oldswede:
Planned Parenthood has always been in the business of preventing unplanned pregnancies.
Unplanned pregnancies are the Lord’s way of punishing sluts, along with sexually transmitted diseases. Hence the opposition to HPV vaccines.
We can’t interfere with the Lord’s punishment system for sluts.
RossInDetroit
Cain has just won the lottery this year. In a weak GOP field he can get maximum exposure for minimum effort and cost. Most of his publicity is free, and what he has to pay for comes out of donors’ pockets. He gets to become a ‘serious’ national political figure, with all of the potential monetary rewards, for very little trouble.
Villago Delenda Est
Another thing that the evil slut-enablers of Planned Parenthood do is provide pre-natal care for those women who have made the choice to give birth, and PP wants them to have a healthy baby.
But the baby is what the anti-choicers are more than happy to toss out with the bath water.
Yutsano
@Southern Beale: I think this was initially true. But then he started actually getting ahead in the game. The calculus changed on him and like any good grifter he figured out he had to play it out. I agree he’s totally in over his head and the Republicans are total idiots for taking him seriously. But our opponent is making an error. We should let them. :)
TheMightyTrowel
@oldswede: As a yalie, let me tell you, a number of my fellow yalies really should not be allowed to reproduce (myself included). It’s the only sensible option.
Roger Moore
@Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen:
Why? After all, the GOP was founded on the idea of ending slavery, so by that logic the blacks should be flocking to them. What the GOP doesn’t want people thinking about is how institutions change from their founding principles. Who cares if Margaret Sanger was a committed eugenicist? She isn’t in charge of Planned Parenthood anymore, and any of her ideas regarding eugenics have been irrelevant to Planned Parenthood’s operations for generations. Similarly, the GOP may have been founded in favor of free labor and opposition to slavery, but it has long since abandoned those principles.
JWL
James Carville doesn’t think there’s much chance that Romney will be denied the delegates to secure the nomination, but I’m not so sure.
I tend to think the “anointed one” mentality, which has historically emerged early-on during the republican nominating process, will be derailed in 2012. Their field is so damn lame.
I suspect their convention will be brokered, and a dark horse will emerge.
Villago Delenda Est
@JWL:
The horse-race loving twits of The Village would be in endless throes of ecstasy if this were to happen.
You couldn’t shut them up.
Who might the dark horse be? Could someone persuade Christie or Daniels to make a go at it? Or do they try to get Jeb brother of the worst preznit ever Bush to do it?
Who else is left? You’re not going to get many senators to give up their current gigs for a historic ass kicking by the near sheriff.
The Dangerman
@Tom Q:
Yup, and it wasn’t just his gaffe’s that got airplay; someone with some pretty good Oppo Research leaked to the WaPo about the Family Farm with the inappropriate name (Rove, you dirty ratfucker). That wasn’t exactly subtle in terms of kneecapping.
Martin
Man, it’s a great lie though, isn’t it?
Take the anti-abortion movement and twist it around to cast every pro-choice person as a genocidal racist, and then use that along with some completely made-up historical ‘facts’ to mask the uncomfortable fact that you’re secretly on the side of rape and incest but don’t know how to address that without undermining your primary message. So, you just paper over it.
If it got real traction, it’d be devastating. Thankfully, RvW was 4 decades ago and now it all looks stupid. Would have been a great lie four decades ago, but nobody in the GOP then would have listened to a black man make the claim. Irony abounds.
Martin
FYWP moderation!
Chris
@efgoldman:
That’s true, but I still think there was an overwhelming “she’s one of us” factor for Palin that I’m just not seeing with Cain. They seem to like him, yes, but identify with him, no. (Again, can’t imagine why). I think that’s the big difference.
harlana
You’d think the party of “personal responsibility” would be interested in preventing unplanned/unwanted pregnancies of the unwashed masses, which only increases the number of dependents on the “welfare state.” Instead they want people to have as many babies as possible, they’ve taken to terrifying young women with limited options to bring a child into the world they can neither afford nor are emotionally mature enough to care for. Curious bastards. They make me sick.
Villago Delenda Est
@The Dangerman:
Which makes Cain’s abject shuffling of deference to Massa Rush in the wake of Cain’s very reasonable and moderate comments on the Perry “hunting lodge” name just that much more humiliating for Cain. Of course, that’s with the broader electorate…you know, the people you don’t care about when you’re wrasslin’ with pigs for the GOP nomination.
Martin
@The Dangerman:
And this is why incumbents have such an advantage. The long knives all come out during the primaries. Birtherism, Wright, pledge issues, Clinton sniper fire, all the racism/sexism stuff – that was all in-party or easily blamed on in-party shenanigans. And some of that stuff didn’t come out until much later in the cycle.
Obama should be begging these guys to all stay in. This stuff is great.
FWIW, I looked it up and in the 2008 primary cycle, the dems already had 13 debates by this point, and would hold 4 more before the Iowa caucus was held. By that measure, the GOP are slackers.
Interesting that I don’t recall that many debates so maybe there’s much less damage being done in these than we think.
JWL
@Villago Delenda Est: That question puts me at a disadvantage. My contempt for all things republican is too ingrained for me to reasonably judge who might emerge in the dark horse scenario.
Jeb Bush? Yeah, I could see that.
Who else? How about Daniels?
Or even Paul Ryan? If nothing else, the Village media accord him the respect due one of their own.
Or a current governor of state that isn’t deep red.
Which is to say, I haven’t got a clue. I’ve always adhered to the “ear full of grasshoppers” school of thought where polls are concerned.
I just can’t see republicans rallying to Mitt Romney, under any circumstance.
YellowJournalism
No matter what Sanger’s personal prejudices were, the organization has become a very necessary one for women’s reproductive health. It would be like saying the United States was founded by slaveholders, so we should just scrap the entire country.
(I know, there many who seem ready to do that, too. Or else they’re leading us down that path.)
Davis X. Machina
The time-window for the Dark Horse Scenario may already have closed.
kdaug
@RossInDetroit:
Yep. Say something outrageous once in a while to keep your face in the news, and watch the book revenues pour in.
Call it the “Sarah Palin Model” to financial success.
Cain
@RossInDetroit:
He sure did.. and Bob Schieffer tried to talk about Cain’s web ad, I couldn’t help but laugh because Cain mentions in the spot that it was only a web ad and that it was not run on television (until of course, Bob ran it on television getting free air time on TV)
Groovy.
Zach
@malraux: There is no lower-case eugenics. It was a scientific field and a real political movement. Being in favor of birth control for reasons that include believing that allowing women to decide when they want to give birth will lead to a better gene pool did not make one a Eugenicist; nor did thinking that poor folks or folks of one race or another were genetically inferior make you a Eugenicist. Eugenicists were strictly people doing bogus science to advance these views and people who wanted to jump from that to mass sterilization of people who were too dumb or poor.
The correct response to anti-abortion campaigns painting Sanger as a Eugenicist attempting a Black holocaust isn’t saying, “Well, Sanger was bad, but the result was good!” Her movement presented an alternative to Eugenics; she explicitly made arguments comparing birth control to Eugenics that you can read in the journal she edited, Birth Control Review.
Lyrebird
Margaret Sanger and some other pioneers of reproductive choice no doubt held some biased views which would bother me now. [ETA: still true even taking Zach’s excellent points into account.] How-evah…
a) Most of her legacy has kept women alive to mother their already-there or later children. I can’t say this at work, but there are really two options: supporting legal abortions or supporting making more orphans.
b) Cherry-picking (or is this what they call nut picking?) quotes from Sanger to discredit Planned Parenthood now makes even less sense to me than urging the Af Am community to abandon the Constitution bc of Jefferson’s participation in slavery.
PS: Zandar, you make a great addition to the front page! Tried to say that yesterday & it didn’t go through.
Amir Khalid
@Yutsano:
If you are right, then Herman is not running a presidential campaign; his campaign is growing out of control like Mickey’s multiplying brooms, and it has started to run him.
I’m not sure if Cain fancies the prospect of running for realz. His target is not the Oval Office, but a decent sales for his book and a TV talking-head gig. I’ve been expecting him to resort to Alvin Greene-ing his candidacy to salvage his original grifter’s plan.
If he decides to run for realz, could he still do it? He’s handicapped himself a lot compared to the other candidates. When he bothers to do candidate stuff, where he seems to be slacking, he’s still putting his foot in his mouth almost every day. Like Southern Beale notes, he doesn’t have grassroots organizations in place. His reported aloofness with his own campaign staff doesn’t sound helpful either.
And Cain has left it far too late to put together a decent campaign org — itself one of many campaign tests of executive ability relevant to the Presidency. I suspect he’d have to fire whoever he’s got now, starting with the smoking man, and start from scratch; but at this point, the top talents are all spoken for.
shoutingattherain
@Villago Delenda Est:
The Near Sheriff. That’s very funny.
RossInDetroit
@Cain:
Yup. I heard that on CBS radio news. Bob tried to get him to disavow the smoking in the ad. They’re both cancer survivors. Cain said there’s no point in pulling it because it’s viral now. He wouldn’t go any further than that.
He’s just along for the ride and I’m sure it’s taken him farther than he ever dreamed.
Hal
Love it when people say this. Like there’s no internet.
catclub
@Villago Delenda Est: “But the sex…it drives them fucking bananas.”
Unlike everyone else. Sounds like the “under capitalism man exploits man, under socialism it is the reverse.”
How about: “But the sex…it drives them fucking bananas, an in a bad way, not a good way.”
Nutella
@oldswede:
More historical tidbits about Griswold vs Connecticut: The case struck down a law that prevented married women from getting birth control. The law was enacted in 1879 under the sponsorship of Connecticut state legislator P.T. Barnum. Yes, that P.T. Barnum.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/kfiles/b739485.html
catclub
@Chris: “(I can’t imagine why).”
Not as meth-addled as Wasilla natives?
oldswed
Nutella,
Ol’ PT was also mayor of Bridgeport (see WC Fields on New York and San Francisco)where there is an Iranistan Avenue. Truly an inside joke.
The decision was a step in a long, incremental process leading to Roe v Wade and other rulings. What it did was establish that the use of birth control was protected by a Constitutional guarantee of privacy, a key element of many cases establishing rights, including overturning Texas sodomy laws.
Griswold v Connecticut was a big deal.
oldswede
hells littlest angel
“… being just a completely vile individual is exactly what the Tea Party wants…”
I think that is just exactly right. A chilling insight.
Yutsano
@Amir Khalid: He could still theoretically get the delegates for the nomination, get to the convention, then decline it. Then the Republican Party goes boom. And the whole race goes wide open. If that happens, break out the popcorn.
bemused
Creepy Uncle Pat as running mate, whoa. That thought will give me nightmares.
Amir Khalid
@Yutsano:
Now that is some scenario. If Herman won the nom and then refused it, I wouldn’t fancy being in the Republicans’ shoes: their convention would be a humiliating failure, their nomination would start to look an awful lot like a booby prize. The backroom meetings would be sweet to contemplate. “Please, please, for the sake of the party, accept the nomination.” “What’s in it for me?”
The Democrats would point and laugh all the way to November, at a candidate unable even to win a majority of his own hopelessly divided party.
You have a wicked imagination. I like that.
merl
The murdering black babies would be a plus for most teabaggers. Now they’re going to want more Planned Parenthood clinics
Yutsano
@Amir Khalid: The nominee always gets a small poll boost during the conventions. But if the nominee changes during the convention…I have no idea what happens then. I don’t know if that’s happened before.
Nicole
Of course Margaret Sanger hated the poor and the black. Because as all wealthy white men know, if you love the poor and the black, the last thing you should do is give them a choice. They can’t handle the responsibility, poor dears. Emphasis on the “poor.”
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub:
OK, I accept your friendly amendment.
Southern Beale
BREAKING: Herman Cain sexual harassment allegation.
Nobody could have anticipated …
Nemesis
Uhmm, Mr Cain, planned genocide in the black community is a feature your base supports. It aint a bug.