Posted on 10/16/2011 9:18:08 AM PDT by kristinn
At two campaign rallies in Tennessee on Saturday night, the Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said that part of his immigration policy would be to build an electrified fence on the country’s border with Mexico that could kill people trying to enter the country illegally.
But by Sunday morning, in a dramatic change of tone, Mr. Cain, a former restaurant executive, said he was only kidding.
“That’s a joke,” Mr. Cain told the journalist David Gregory during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he was asked about the electrified fence. “That’s not a serious plan. I’ve also said America needs to get a sense of humor.”
Mr. Cain’s attempt to pass off incendiary comments as nothing but a joke may take more effort, however. In making the initial remarks about an electrified fence killing illegal immigrants, Mr. Cain was detailed and repetitive. He did not introduce his thoughts as anything but serious commentary, beginning with the words, “We have a crisis of illegal immigration.”
And the crowds responded with cheers, not laughs.
(Excerpt) Read more at thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com ...
building an electrified border fence will create green jobs with windmill supplied electricity.
Would it be “heartless” of me to say that you have zero since of humor?
Because you don’t.
“Cain is going to be one of the toughest border hawks of our lifetime but he is going to keep the leftist media guessing.”
Bingo!
Cain is playing the drive by’s like a fiddle.
Odd how you are all bent out of shape about a joke but not about a Candidate dumb enough to call 3/4s of his voter base “heartless”.
Besides, a fence without 999 mines every section just doesn’t SOUND as cool.
He should’a had mines if he was hughly series.
Cainwreck in 999..998..997..996..
Yes, that’s the problem when someone has no political record whatever that you can study.
First he says that he would never appoint a Muslim to his cabinet, and then he says he didn’t mean it. Well, which is it? Is he going to go politically correct on us like Bush? Bush fought the Muslims in a couple of places, but he insisted on calling it the Religion of Peace, and that it had nothing to do with Islam as such. And he put Muslims in high places in the Defense Department and other sensitive places.
Of course, Obama is much worse. But we don’t need yet another Republican bowing to the news media and surrendering his principles.
An electric fence that will kill people? What’s wrong with that? It won’t kill anyone unless they try to climb over it.
As the saying goes, don’t whizz on the electric fence, and you’ll be OK. We have electric fences all over here in rural Vermont, to keep the cows and sheep and other critters in the pastures. It’s not a problem. Just stay away from them. Even a cow can figure that out.
Who got in the race last after it was clear Romney was not going to get any appreciable support from social conservatives?
Who did the GOP Establishment push into the race after it seem Tea Party heroine Bachmann was going to upset Romney’s ride to the nomination?
Who does the GOP Establishment see as their back up card if Romney fails?
Who has long standing intimate ties with the Liberal wing of the GOP Establishment?
The answer is Rick Perry.
Bill Kristol to a NY Time Reporter telling him how the GOP Establishment plans to deal with “the Tea party mutiny”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2792217/posts?page=3
Kristol told me just after Perry entered the race, a development that essentially ended [the more radical Michele] Bachmann’s brief ascent. Establishment Republicans may prefer Romney to Perry, but their assumption is that either man can be counted on to steer the party back toward the broad center next fall, effectively disarming the Tea Party mutiny.
Wonder who Perry will be VP with?
Odd how that question never gets asked of Perry.
Could it be because everyone knows Perry is the GOP Establishment mole in the race to split the Tea Party/Conservative vote and hand the nomination to Romney?
Could it be because they know the ticket the GOP Machine is setting up is “Romney/Perry 2012? Think about it. Romney has the money, Perry has the idolatrous worship from the social Conservatives.
Could that be why the Perry camp is knowingly lying about Cain’s solidly Conservative record on both social and fiscal issues? Because they know full well Perry’s record can not stand close scrutiny?
What does anyone really know about Perry other then the nice words and platitudes he puts in his speeches? Looks like Perry is just Bush 3.0 another tough talking social conservative who will go to DC and be yet another good little GOP crony capitalist water boy.
>> I wonder when he’ll tell us that his praise for Romney was a joke, or he was just kidding when he said he thought Greenspan was a great fed chair
“So these nine illegals and nine Romney supporters walk into these nine different bars...”
Sure Herman says something and its just ‘a joke’,,
Michelle says something and the flying gargoyles of the media savage her.. sounds racist to me. :-}
Used to work with security fences, charged and otherwise.
Israel makes some good ones .. I’m sure they would be glad to build and man a southern border for us..:-]
“Cain is playing the drive by’s like a fiddle.” Yes he is!
______________________
Immigration Bill: Lots of Bad Ideas, and No Fence
June 11, 2007
By Herman Cain
The Comprehensive Immigration Bill debated in the Senate last week was dead on arrival because of too many competing agendas. Liberals wanted to keep illegal families together, conservatives passionately rejected amnesty, some businesses wanted more low-skill workers, other businesses wanted more skilled workers with a new temporary workers program for legal immigrants – and most regular folks kept screaming, “Where’s the fence?”
Comprehensive has become congressional code for: Let’s put a lot of agendas and stuff in the legislation and maybe the public will not notice the details. This time it backfired miserably, because people did notice the details and all groups dug in their heels for their key agenda item and their respective regular folks screamed loud and in great numbers.
Not since the outcry against the failed Hillary Care plan for universal health care in 1994 has there been such a broad revolt by the public. People have disagreed with proposed legislation before. It happens all the time. Usually Congress is able to smooth over the public objections during debate, pass the legislation and then hold a press conference and tell the public how great it is, and how hard they had to work to get good compromised legislation.
A well-known example was the passage of the Prescription Drug Bill in 2003. Democrats loved it because it expanded social spending. Republicans loved it because they thought it would buy votes from senior citizens, which it did not. And once again, the taxpayers had to pay for good compromise legislation that will cost over $900 billon instead of the original estimate of about $300 billion over 10 years.
The Immigration Bill was supposed to be another episode of good compromise legislation, even though Congress has no idea what it will cost. It is just bad legislation with different agendas glued together, while not emphasizing enough of the public’s number one priority – the fence! Not just wire, wood and concrete, but all the technologies we have available to stop the rampant inflow of illegal aliens into this country.
We have the technology to identify one mad cow and a chicken with the flu when they threaten our food supply. We can track one potentially contagious tuberculosis patient half way around the world when he threatens the health of thousands of people. And we can capture a crystal clear picture of a driver, his tag number and who is in the car with him going through an intersection a fraction of a second after a traffic light turns red.
But yet, Congress is reluctant to use that technology to shut down our borders, which threaten our national and economic security.
Just as the proposed bill was going down in flames, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the ever-liberal Ted Kennedy were asking for President Bush’s help in trying to persuade Republicans to support this bill to nowhere. Now that’s interesting. Where were they and the Republicans when the president was leading the charge with a good solution (personal retirement accounts) to the oncoming crash of the Social Security system? Nowhere!
The Immigration Bill could have succeeded if the political class in Congress and the president had listened to the public and addressed the four distinct problems. Namely, secure the borders convincingly, expand the temporary worker program for skilled legal immigrants, establish a reliable legal immigrant identification program and then propose a reasonable program for the 12 million (and counting) illegal persons who broke our laws to get here, but not amnesty.
The one positive out of this legislative disaster is that people should now see that if enough of them scream loud enough and often enough, they can influence their senators and representatives on ill-constructed legislation. We should not have to scream, but, unfortunately, that’s what our information-overloaded, frenzied media, overwhelmed and leaderless legislative process has come to.
Congress has allowed this problem to fester and grow for over 20 years, and for once in a few times the voters have refused to accept a bad solution to an even worse situation. Maybe next time they will listen to the voters before they try to pass glued together legislation.
Maybe next time, Congress will start with the fence!
He didn’t even suggest that the fence could actually kill someone, only that they put up a sign claiming it could.
Herman Cain is the Left’s worst nightmare! They will do ANYTHING to stop him! (The gutter is certainly no problem to them. In fact, that’s where they’re most at home.)
“There was a long thread on FR yesterday about Cain’s remarks on the electrified fence. I’d say half the respondents supported zapping anyone trying to illegally cross the Tex-Mex border.”
...and I was one probably the biggest poster on that thread. And no, I didn’t want to see anyone killed, and doubt more than a handful of people would be killed by that kind of fence (the ones that test the system). Simply put, people are not going to test it as long as they believe it’s real.
Supporting the status-quo (i.e., no fence) means that those people are fine with Hispanics (and others) by the HUNDREDS dying every year in the Arizona desert and other remote places. If the wall is there, they don’t try, and they live.
Given the above, I’d say the status-quo people are MUCH MORE bloodthirsty than the pro-fence people.
Watched The Undefeated last night. What they did to a good citizen makes me cry. And sorry to say but it seems obvious that this is what the GOP wanted as much as the communists.
So.. you knew this was a joke, eh?
10/02/11""My reaction is, that's just very insensitive," Cain told Fox. "[There] isn't a more vile, negative word than the N-word, and for him to leave it there as long as he did, before I hear that they finally painted over it, is just plain insensitive to a lot of black people in this country."
10/03/11: “All I said was the mere fact that that word was there was ‘insensitive,’ ” Cain said outside Trump Tower in Manhattan, N.Y., according to the National Review. “That’s not playing the race card. I am not attacking Gov. Perry. Some people in the media want to attack him. I’m done with that issue!”
Get off your soapbox. Perry apologized for his dumb remark. Holding agrudge serves no good purpose at this point.
So using your rationale for your candidate is okay. I guess you could say 1/2 of Cain’s supporters around FR want to electrify illegal border crossers. And if that diidn’t work....
Next, Mr Cain should say he would restart NASA for the sole purpose of oil exploration on other plantets...haha
Isn’t Mexico’s unemployment rate less than ours? If so, why would they even come here unless it’s for the freebies or they’re up to no good and figure they’ll be protected here?
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