If Rick Perry Is Forced To Balance The Ticket With The Hermanator, Does He Get Invited To Weekends At Niggerhead?

Don't ask me why Christiane Amanpour decided to waste so much of ABC's valuable time yacking with Herman Cain yesterday. (Maybe she was taking her cues from Sarah Palin in the video above.) He has as much chance of becoming president as that LaRouche guy who grabbed the mic at #OccupyL.A. yesterday and started raving about a resource based economy. Come to think of it, the LaRouche guy made more sense than the Hermanator usually does. But everyone's supposed to make believe, for some reason, the Hermanator is a serious candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Amanpour would have served ABC's audience better had she spent her time talking about the OccupyWallStreet movement. (I know, I know... silly me.) Or she could have spent the time talking about Niggerhead, a hunting retreat by someone who could-- possibly, though less likely by the day-- be the GOP nominee. Some say Rove leaked the Niggerhead story to the Post. Other says Perry's camp got it out to curry favor with the racists who can be the deciding factor in a GOP primary battle, after he was seen as not racist enough towards Mexicans.

But Christiane, an actual recipient of multiple Peabody awards, and famous for timely interviews with Tony Blair, Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Jacques Chirac, Pervez Musharraf, and Muammar Qaddafi (and his sons), did a pointless Q&A with The Hermanator yesterday on This Week. She did manage to ask him-- without uttering the N-word, of course-- about Niggerhead, as well as what Cain refers to as African-American "brainwashing."

AMANPOUR: On the front page of the Washington Post today, there's a story about Rick Perry...

CAIN: Yes.

AMANPOUR: ... and a hunting lodge that belonged to his family, bought in the 1980s. And on a rock apparently near the entrance there, there is a word that is a very ugly racial word, a slur.

CAIN: Yes.

AMANPOUR: And it's been-- it's been painted over. But the report raises questions about whether this rock, this stone, with that word on it, was still on display even quite recently in the last several years. What is your reaction to that?

CAIN: My reaction is that is very insensitive. There are some words that do not basically inspire the kind of negativity like that particular word. And I know that you're refraining from saying that word, so I'm going to say what the word was on the rock. The name of the place was called "Niggerhead." That is very insensitive. And since Governor Perry has been going there for years to hunt, I think that it shows a lack of sensitivity for a long time of not taking that word off of that rock and renaming the place. It's just basically a case of insensitivity.

AMANPOUR: It was painted over.

CAIN: Yes. It was painted over. But how long ago was it painted over? So I'm still saying that it is a sign of insensitivity.

AMANPOUR: Let me move on to some things that you've said. Right after the debate in Florida, you told Wolf Blitzer of CNN that, basically, African-Americans, blacks in this country had been brainwashed over the years into supporting Democrats.

CAIN: Yes.

AMANPOUR: I mean, isn't that really an inflammatory thing to say? I mean, do you really believe that African-Americans, blacks, are so easily manipulated?

CAIN: I also said in that same interview...

AMANPOUR: No, but let me you ask about that. That word is very inflammatory.

CAIN: It is. I'm going to answer your question. I also said the good news is a large percentage of black people are thinking for themselves. Now, I think that-- if the word is inflammatory, that's too bad. It is true. And here's why: because some black people won't even listen to someone who appears to be a conservative or a Republican. I call that brainwashing.

AMANPOUR: Some would say that-- some would say that actually it's because those policies and what you're proposing, for instance, don't meet their demands or what they're looking for.

CAIN: And I say that the reason they don't see them as meeting their demands of what they're looking for is because they have not looked at them. My economic growth and jobs plan, as an example, is not partisan. It is a solution that benefits everybody, especially the African-American community.

The right-wing blogosphere's biggest Romney proponent, David Frum, says he considers The Hermanator a serious candidate. He must be high. But he did mention one thing worth repeating: "His business career is also the most admirable of any recent candidate for President. In the current GOP field only Mitt Romney can claim similar personal private sector success and, unlike Cain (the son of a chauffeur and a cleaning woman) Romney was born with immense wealth, privilege and political connections. He also possesses the type of campaign trail discipline that Michelle Bachman and Rick Perry seem to lack."