Herman Cain: Money and Connections

I've been reading up on Herman Cain lately, and finding him a bit hard to parse. On one hand, he seems like a guy with real-world experience who might bring something useful to the office. On the other hand, he says outrageous things about Muslims and the people at Occupy Wall Street.

But there was one thing about him I thought I could like on a simple, human level, and that was his (so far) successful battle with stage IV colon cancer. According to the Wikipedia, he has been cancer-free since 2006, and more power to him, I thought. It gave me hope for a friend whose recent diagnosis sounded a lot like Cain's.

That was until I read this story from Mother Jones. Cain, it seems, trumpets his survival as a message from God that He is not finished with Cain yet. He also proclaims that he would have died under Obamacare.

As MoJo writer Stephanie Mencimer shows, however, God had nothing to do with it, and if it had been in existence at the time, Obamacare wouldn't have, either:

• Because of his personal wealth, Cain never had to worry about how he would pay for his care. He had the best of everything.
• He got immediate access to one of the best treatment centers in the country after his friend T. Boone Pickens made a call. (Pickens was on the board of the Houston-based center).
• He got a free second opinion from a Savannah doctor who was an admirer and supporter.
• He was able to leave Houston a week early during his recuperation because "one of the companies on whose board he sits dispatched its private plane to fly him back to Atlanta so 'we did not have to endure the stress of commercial travel.' "

It's not uncommon for people who have near-death experiences to think God had something to do with their survival, and that God has a purpose for them. But as I've written earlier, such thinking implies that all the people who do die had no purpose in God's eyes, or that it was somehow their fault. The illogic reaches mind-boggling proportions almost instantaneously.

In Cain's case, though, it's even worse because the reason for his survival is right in front of his face: money and connections, baby. How hard is it to be honest about that?