tl;dr





Via ThinkProgress, Herman Cain sure knows how to engage a crowd:

After claiming that the administration had not read the [health care reform] bill, Cain promised the audience that as President, he would never sign pieces of legislation that are longer than three pages. CAIN: Engage the people. Don’t try to pass a 2,700 page bill — and even they didn’t read it! You and I didn’t have time to read it. We’re too busy trying to live — send our kids to school. That’s why I am only going to allow small bills — three pages. You’ll have time to read that one over the dinner table. What does Herman Cain, President Cain talking about in this particular bill? Cain’s pledge received a raucous round of applause from the crowd, who didn’t seem to fully appreciate the implications of such a radical cut-off mark. The vast majority of substantive bills passed by Congress are longer than three pages. Under this bright-line rule, Cain wouldn’t have signed such landmark pieces of legislation as the Civil Rights Act, the Social Security Act, or the PATRIOT Act. In fact, he wouldn’t have even been able to sign the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which ran 114 and 18 pages, respectively.

This puts Cain in the long line of Republicans that think what this country really needs is ridiculous, preschool-level rules able to be implemented by rote or by stupid people. This goes along with Tim Pawlenty proposing his "google test": if you can find any private service offered via Google, the federal government shouldn't do it, and House Republicans proposing an arbitrary numerical cap on all federal employees, regardless of future structural or cyclical needs. Because, in Cain's case, we hate hints of intellectualism so much that we're not even going to allow any federal legislation to exist that's even half as meaty as a elementary school book report.

I'm not sure if America is governed by dumb people or not... well, let me rephrase that. I'm momentarily going to set aside the question of whether America is governed by dumb people or not. But it seems that most Republican leaders and presidential candidates are convinced that, at the least, Americans want dumb answers to all their problems. The problem with our laws? Too long! The problem with history? Too damn complicated! The problem with government? It does a bunch of stuff I don't have time to understand – like volcano monitoring!

And what's with all these foreign leaders with long, hard to pronounce names? We should pass legislation to name them all "Bud" and be done with it. Just imagine the time we'd save.

No, I'm not taking Herman Cain's pronouncement seriously. And neither is he, and neither is anyone else. He just knows that to get a Republican crowd riled up, you have to at least pretend you're a simpleton.

