As Clint would say, a man’s gotta know his limitations.
Cain’s extemporaneous speaking skills are limited to brief interviews held behind closed doors … with pre-screened questions … demonstrating a philosophy of the perceived role of the media shared by other faux, tea party brown-nosing political wannabes: He wants them to only ask the questions that he WANTS them to ask.

“We need a leader, not a reader.”

Once again, Cain fills the void created by his unbridled ignorance with snarky sound bites and banal one-liners.

This is why we don’t want our Presidents to be “Joe 6-Packs” or “Sarah hockey-moms”, despite the naive proclamations to the contrary by tea partiers.

It’s a curious position being taken by the tea party/conservative movement— the idea that a college education is a waste of time and that intellectuals are elitists and should be shunned. Cain, Bachmann, Perry, Palin, Beck, and other reality-challenged politicians and pundits have embraced ignorance of the modern world, and they regard a distrust of the well-educated as an attribute to be used in their desire to be perceived as “just one of the common folk” … albeit very wealthy common folk.

Lord knows we don’t want our children to go to college and have their heads filled with all kinds of IDEAS. Before you know it, they’ll be thinking for themselves, challenging the status quo, and developing new points of view.

And we certainly don’t want our national leaders to be eloquent, scientifically literate, and generally well-informed about the world in which we live. Much better to derive scientific theories based on the teachings of the Bible, and to form national public policy based on the rumors, gossip, and unverified anecdotal accounts described in supermarket rags and online blogs.

Long live the anti-intellectualism movement!