Herman Cain looked pretty ridiculous on Monday when he was asked a simple question: do you agree with President Obama on Libya? Staring at the ceiling, the Republican struggled to remember why Libya was important; started to deliver one talking point before saying, “No, that’s a different one”; blamed the painful delay in responding on “all this stuff twirling around in my head”; and ultimately said he disagreed with the president for reasons he couldn’t explain.
It was brutal, but one assumed that going forward, at least Cain would now know what to say when asked about Libya.
But those assumptions would be wrong.
Mr. Cain’s own prolonged attempted explanation of the moment, however, seems to be making matters worse. At a news conference on Friday in Orlando, Fla., his remarks on Libya — including a suggestion that the Taliban, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is at least partly running the government — raised new questions about his foreign policy qualifications.
Mr. Cain criticized the writer, saying “His question was, ‘Do you agree or disagree with President Obama on Libya?’ What part? Do I agree with the part that we intervened with rockets and missiles? Do I agree with siding with the opposition? Do I agree with saying that Qaddafi should go? Do I agree that they now have a country where you’ve got Taliban and Al Qaeda that are going to be part of the government?”
Cain had all week to learn the basics about Libya and yet, when pressed, he thinks the Taliban and al Qaeda are going to be part of the new Libyan government.
For the record, the Taliban is nowhere near Libya. The Taliban, which has nothing in common with Libyans, is in Afghanistan and Pakistan — thousands of miles away.
This is Cain’s position after he’s been prepped?
At some point, Cain and his backers really should try to explain — to themselves, if no one else — why this guy even wants to be president. He doesn’t even seem interested in learning anything about current events or the basics of public policy. So why bother?
