Topic category: International Affairs/Foreign Policy
Herman Cain's Right-of-Return Stumble on Fox News Sunday Shows Him Better Qualified for Secretary of Treasury or Commerce than President. Herman-- Your admirers are disappointed not only by your lack of knowledge on the "right of return" issue but also the lack of brutal candor in your clarification thereafter.
Cain is an intellectual dynamo on economic issues. But thus far, he's shown that his knowledge-base on foreign policy make him a more suitable conadidate for Secretary of Treasury or Commerce.
Being an admirer of Herman Cain, I had looked forward to watching Chris
Wallace interview him on Fox News Sunday this morning (May 22, 2011). Cain
was quite good on economic issues. But he stumbled badly on an
important foreign-policy issue-- the
"right of return" issue between Palestinians and Israelis.
The
interview went well until Chris Wallace sensibly sought to explore the full
range of his views on Israeli-Palestinian relations, in the course of which he
asked Cain's views on "the right of return." I was stunned when
Cain's response ("Right of return? Right of return?") made it
obvious he was not familiar with the term.
His response that it would be "up to Israel" just made it more obvious
that he didn't know that Israel believes (correctly) that a "right of
return" would result in the demographic destruction of Israel, which, in a
way unique among nations, in that its founding and design were intended to
establish a permanent home to a people whose
extermination has been sought with the home designed so that no one could
control it with such exterminatory purpose ever in the future. How
can Israel be expected to ignore the fact that the Palestinians' and
Arabs' education of their children continues to preach
that the Jews are evil and should be killed (exterminated). So, what's
hard to understand about Israel's refusal to agree to a "right of
return"?
Have there been equally stunning gaps in Obama's knowledge? How about
referring to Corpsmen as "corpsemen" (see video below) for starters-- almost
unforgivable for one serving as Commander in Chief. There are numerous
others, but that's just the first one that comes to my mind.
I had expected better from Herman Cain. I also wasn't thrilled by his
response to Chris Wallace's question during the South Carolina debate asking
Cain to describe what he believed to be a proper mission in Afghanistan:
Cain's reply, which I paraphrase, was "I'll study the issues and then let
you know."
Perhaps Cain should stick to the areas of his greatest strengths--
economics. Hope for a position as Secretary of the Treasury or Secretary
of Commerce? . Cain's attempt at damage control is also not likely
to be successful because it lacks an essential element otherwise
characteristic of Cain: Candor. Here's the link
to the Cain campaign's damage-control effort, which fails to candidly
admit he was ignorant of the "right of return"
issues.
If Cain expects to be taken seriously (and I had hoped he would be taken
seriously), he needs to assemble a team of advisors to confront him with all
issues on which he needs to be fully knowledgeable. The traditionally
dominant media (ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, NYT, WaPo, LaT, AJ&C, MSNBC, CNN, etc)
consistently ignores gaffes by Obama, and they will continue to do so
throughout the campaign from now until 2012, but they will seek to magnify every
such gaffe by every opponent of Obama.
Jim is a proud descendant of 18th Century criminal exiles from England who swam to the Outer Banks when the British ship taking them to a Georgia penal colony sank in a storm near Cape Hatteras. Having the prescience to prevent their descendants from becoming "TarHeels," they immediately migrated to Virginia, where, within just a few generations they worked their way up into poverty. Jim's grandfather was the first in the family tree to see the distant horizons, but his career was cut short by severe injuries he sustained when a cousin cut down the tree.
After a brief stint in the Amry (ours) following graduation from law school, he began his legal career in the state bureaucracy but was never able to break into the federal bureaucracy. Several years later, he entered the private practice of law and co-founded a small law publishing company. Later, finding the publishing of small laws unstimulating and finding his private practice too private to be lucrative, he began writing political satire/commentary. His greatest vice is taking himself too seriously.
Although he regularly teaches Continuing Legal Education courses to lawyers, he's too-often available through he Rubber Chicken Speakers Bureau to speak on politics, satire, etc., at luncheons, dinners, root canals, funerals, etc. His speaking fees are so outrageously high they border on criminal price-gouging, but as a free-market advocate, he defends his fees on the higher moral ground of charging whatever the traffic will bear. For more information (surely more than one would want or need), go to www.PoliSat.Com.