Opinion

Why the liberal media is targeting Herman Cain

Jerome Hudson Member, Project 21
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Thank you, Politico, for dragging our already divided and depressed nation back to the “high-tech lynching” days of Justice Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Sadly, Herman Cain is just the latest “uppity negro,” as Justice Thomas put it, to break the Eleventh Commandment: Cain dared to speak his mind, and because his message is anathema to the orthodoxy pervasive among liberal blacks, he is being bludgeoned.

However, the high-tech lynching of Herman Cain is not about Herman Cain. It is not about loosely detailed allegations of sexual harassment. Nor is it about how Cain’s campaign is handling the current conflagration.

No, Cain is merely a vehicle. And the liberal media war against him is a warning to blacks, Hispanics, women and any other member of the liberal minority victimhood class system that if they ever decide to escape the liberal plantation, they will be destroyed. Period.

Again, it doesn’t matter that Herman Cain is a 65-year-old Reagan conservative who, despite the fallout over the sexual harassment allegations, holds a commanding lead in a number of early Republican primary states. It doesn’t matter that he has remained so popular as long as he has, a feat that defies all political logic given that he has a fraction of the money and name recognition of presumed front-runner and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

No, liberal journalists like MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell love leading the charge to destroy Herman Cain because he defines American exceptionalism: Cain was born into poverty in the racially segregated South. He later earned his master’s degree in computer science from Purdue University while working full-time for the Navy developing fire control systems for ships and fighter planes. He went on to serve as vice president of Pillsbury Company, regional vice president of Pillsbury’s Burger King division, the president and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza and the head of the National Restaurant Association.

But because he just happens to be black, Cain is a threat to the Liberal Democratic Machine’s greatest lie: that blacks have no chance of success in America unless they’re showered with set-asides and poverty programs.

Moreover, Cain’s immense tea party support renders laughable the argument that its members are a bunch of racists. As Cain put it, there is no way that “this many white people can pretend to like me.”

Ultimately, the real national tragedy in all this — tragic because of our pitilessly lazy media’s complicity — is that Cain has received more journalistic scrutiny in the past week than Candidate Obama received in two years of campaigning.

Jerome Hudson is a member of Project 21, a sponsorship of the National Center for Public Policy Research. He can be reached at Jeromehudsonspeaks.com. He can be followed on Twitter @jeromeehudson