But they made Him walk when He was arrested and taken to jail, and no, He was not read any Miranda Rights. He was arrested for just being who He was and doing nothing wrong. And when they tried Him in court, He never said a mumbling word. [...] The liberal court found Him guilty of false offences and sentenced Him to death, all because He changed the hearts and minds of men with an army of 12.

Via bernardpliers , a Herman Cain column from last December engaging the War on Christmas . It is a perfect Herman Cainism: in it, Jesus was a conservative persecuted by the liberals.

I don't read much into Herman Cain's presumption that it was a "liberal court" that killed Jesus. There could be an underlying rationale there, if you were to pick his brain for it, but I think the odds are better than ten to one that Herman Cain means liberal in the same way as most of the far-right use the word: as generic catch-all for anything or anyone they don't like. Much like the assertion that something is both fascist and communist at the same time, the word is just a placeholder. Anything good is Conservative: anything bad is Liberal. To wit, Cain continues:

Never before and not since has there ever been such a perfect conservative. For over 2,000 years the world has tried hard to erase the memory of the perfect conservative, and His principles of compassion, caring and common sense.

I am going to be depressed when Herman Cain is eventually discarded from the race. His writings are, among politicians, among the better to pick through. They combine self-assuredness (no, more typically arrogance) with an utter disinterest in knowledge; more often than not they contain some trinket of glaring prejudice against one group or another as citation of how that group is responsible for society's ills, or is intrinsically untrustworthy or the like. Cain crafts his assertions, some grand and some trivial, then hurls them like wayward bowling balls toward the reader, daring you to either catch them or get out of the way.

Cain himself seems to have no preference as to whether his assertions and accusations are vaguely true or are entirely fantastical; one will do as well as the other, and he has just enough contempt toward his listeners to not particularly care as to whether you can disprove them or not. Going back two thousand years in order to accuse his ideological opponents of something is not much of a stretch, for Cain. No harder than summarily dismissing every single economist who points out that his loudly branded tax plan would not work, anyway.

Perhaps this next December Cain will rewrite his tale again, and will explain how the Government Accountability Office were the ones who really killed Jesus. With Cain, you never know.



Top Comments for today are here.