What’s old is new again in the Herman Cain campaign, and this weekend’s deadly electrified border fence thing is no exception.
Here’s how it went last week: Cain told a tea party crowd in Tennessee he wanted to build an electric fence (with bilingual warning signage) along the border that would kill anyone who tried to climb it. After criticism mounted, he went on a nationally-televised forum, said the whole thing was a joke, and called on his critics to lighten up.
This is basically exactly what went down in August, after Cain suggested America stock its southern border with an alligator-filled moat.
Here’s what that proposal sounded like, as captured in June by the vigilant Cain-watchers at ThinkProgress:
“My fence might be part Great Wall and part electrical technology,” Cain told a crowd in Iowa. “It will be a twenty foot wall, barbed wire, electrified on the top, and on this side of the fence, I’ll have that moat that President Obama talked about. And I would put those alligators in that moat!”
The video popped up on Spanish-language TV and in the New York Times.
When the candidates met for a debate sponsored by Fox News in August, Cain said the line was all in good fun — just as he did on Meet The Press Sunday. Here’s the clip:
As we mentioned earlier, Cain’s been running for president for a long time. And just about all this stuff he’s getting in hot water for now has come up before. As have Cain’s attempts to wriggle his way out.
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