[12th J.P.’s Moment of Common Sense, my weekly oratorial exposition on Broad View, KBZZ 1270 AM Reno.  Click on the microphone to listen.]

Herman Cain has jumped to the front of the pack in the Republican presidential race and the lynch mob is already forming.  Treatment of conservatives by liberals is never good—just look at the nasty, bitter, irrational comments directed at Sarah Palin over the last few years—but things get even worse when the conservative is black.

The treatment of black conservatives harkens back to the racist, Ku Klux Klan past of the Democrat Party and it’s one of the ugliest spectacles in American politics... which is really saying something because politics is chock full of ugliness, let’s face it.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Cain won the Republican straw poll in Florida and didn’t just win, he demolished the other candidates.  Cain received 37% of the votes, compared to second-place finisher Rick Perry’s 15% and third-place Mitt Romney’s 14%.  So Cain collected more votes than Perry and Romney combined.  In politics, that’s what they call a landslide and Cain is either first or second in all the polls now.

If you’ve listened to Herman Cain, you know why he’s winning over Republican voters.  He’s intelligent, confident, personable, expresses conservative American principles better than anybody since Ronald Reagan, and has a non-political business background which appeals to people who are sick to death of politicians.

Trouble is, the Democrats cannot abide a black man who defies their claim on his allegiance.  Without the black vote, a Democrat couldn’t get elected dog catcher in this country, that’s how out of touch the party is with the majority of the population.  Year after year, Democrats run for election using two basic strategies: one, they run to the right during the campaign, disguising their socialist inclinations as much as possible; and two, they count on the blind loyalty of black voters, who vote 90% Democrat no matter what.

You could paint a “D” on an armadillo, run it for governor of Texas, and the critter would get 90% of the black vote.

Since Herman Cain won the straw poll in Florida two weeks ago, he’s been attacked by Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC for “insulting the intelligence of black people,” and accused by both O’Donnell and NBC’s Martin Bashir of standing on the sidelines during the civil rights movement.  He’s been called “simple” by the Washington Post, a “bad apple” and “false Negro” who was “denied intelligence” by Harry Belafonte, and compared with a segregationist by ESPN’s Kevin Blackistone.  At a website called Your Black World, some vicious little miscreant named Dr. Boyce Watkins called Cain “the perfect racist... the cute little political puppet which allows white America to say the things that they are afraid to say.”  And the dumbest man on television, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, not only accused Cain of “pandering to white Republicans out there who don’t like black folks,” but even extended the racial attack line to Senator Jim DeMint, simply because Cain hinted that DeMint might be his choice for V.P.  Schultz accused DeMint of using an “old southern racist term” when he used the word “break.”

That’s B-R-E-A-K.

Gee, I gotta admit, that’s a new one.  I grew up in an integrated neighborhood, attended integrated schools, grew up and married a black woman, have a black son, and rooted fanatically for Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons who often ran very fast down the basketball court to score before the other team could set up their defense, and nobody ever told me I wasn’t supposed to use the word “break.”

Something tells me the doughy-white Schultz doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.  (As usual.)

These vicious, race-based attacks on Herman Cain are nothing new.  The same thing was done to Clarence Thomas when he was nominated to the Supreme Court, to Colin Powell when he was made Secretary of State, and to Condoleezza Rice when she was National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State.  As Americans, we should never forget the political cartoons published in 2004 showing Condoleezza Rice as an Ebonics-speaking, big-lipped, black mammy who loves her master.  Nor should we forget that Colin Powell, at the height of his popularity, refused to run for president because his wife was afraid of the recriminations and physical threats he would face as a black Republican.  And Clarence Thomas, another black man who’s been called simple by liberals, had this to say about his nomination hearings in the U.S. Senate:

“This is a circus.  It’s a national disgrace.  And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you.  You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Democrats started doing it in the 1880s, during Reconstruction in the South, and they’re still at it today, viciously attacking any black man or woman who doesn’t toe the line.

It’s hard to imagine the courage that men like Herman Cain must have to endure this kind of thing and still remain faithful to the principles they hold dear.  I hope, when the attacks get worse in coming days as I know they will, that all Americans, liberal and conservative, will stand together and condemn the nasty little cretins who engage in this sordid racism.  We’ll all be better off when the Lawrence O’Donnells, Ed Schultzs, and Harry Belfafontes are marginalized.

That’s just common sense.

“You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing.  They always happen to the best men, you know.”—George Eliot

“The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.”—John Stuart Mill

From Reno, Nevada, USA        Tweet

October 18, 2011 - Amen....loved your column this week Jim...you are right on....thanks for saying it! - Mary, Michigan

October 16, 2011 - Here's the left in a nutshell - using every racist insult they can think of on Herman Cain while accusing the Tea Party which supports him of being racists. It makes me so angry I can hardly see straight. I'd love to meet Penn on a public street somewhere and see if he has the guts to call me a racist to my face. - T.C., Michigan