With Herman Cain’s status as a front-runner for the Republican nomination under assault thanks to a litany of gaffes and multiple rehashed sexual-harassment allegations from the 1990s, conservative crank Ann Coulter decided to come to the defense of the pizza man using her favorite tactic — blame the “liberals.”
Coulter took to Fox News last Monday to defend Cain, citing the difficulty with being both Republican and black in America. Because the Democratic Party traditionally garners most of the black vote, Coulter reasoned that conservative African-Americans have had to form political views different than those of their families and communities, which is a somewhat tenuous theory in itself.
“Our blacks are so much better than their blacks,” she said.
Putting Herman Cain aside for a moment, Coulter’s word choice is more than a little troubling. Conservative black politicians are either a curiosity or a commodity to Coulter, at least as evidenced by her bumper sticker-style generalization about their relative quality when compared to their liberal counterparts.
Ironically, it could be said that Coulter is playing the “race card,” a tactic long maligned by conservatives. She never presents any concrete evidence that the criticism Cain’s campaign is buckling under has anything to do with his race, but still constructs a narrative of racism to explain his difficulties as the nomination process intensifies.
But, alas, Coulter was not done. She also felt Cain deserved more credit for his African-American ancestry as compared to that of Barack Obama, who is “the son of a Kenyan” and “is not a descendant of the blacks that suffered these Jim Crow