The Republican facility for producing salted nuts and elevating them to prominence is a sort of beautiful demonstration of American know-how (to the hedge funder who said finance is what America still can do best I would argue  the manufacture of prominent crackpots is our preeminent skill). I suppose it’s a triumph of diversity when an African-American can excel as a fencepost dumb, know-nothing redneck just as convincingly as the cowboy-booted buffoon governing Texas. God bless America, etcetera.

Mr. Cain is creating a list of bon lulus fabulous enough to be the envy of luminaries on the order of Bachman, Perry and Santorum. You can make sport of congresswoman Bachman as much as you please, but I defy anyone to demonstrate she was not correct in her assertion that 999 upside down is 666. So having made a single factual statement, she no longer is in the running for dumbest Republican primary candidate.

Cain’s body of work in the Republican decathlon of competitive non compos mentis grows ever more impressive by the day. Admittedly the man shot out of the gate strong, naming a section of the Declaration of Independence as part of the Constitution. In fairness, it’s a lot of paperwork to keep straight. When I heard him say, first making reference to the Great Wall of China, “I think we can build one if we want to! We have put a man on the moon, we can build a fence!” my first response was that while we can put a man on the moon we can’t keep him there for any length of time as far as I can tell, so perhaps building the fence is beyond our capability too.

But when he said, “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!” I knew that this was my Jon Landau/Bruce Springsteen moment, saying to myself, “I have seen the future of immaculate idiocy, and its name is Herman Cain.” And of course nothing says first-world confidence like a gigantic, electrified wall with an alligator-filled moat around it to deter thirsty, bedraggled, indigent, third world economic refugees. Home of the brave, and their twenty foot, electrified, alligator-filled moat surrounded wall.

But what really separates Herman Cain from the rest of the pack of boobs, ignoramuses and certifiable Lorna Doones is his pronouncement that a “conservative” Jesus was sentenced to death by a “liberal court”. In the first place, this is particularly silly because a liberal court wouldn’t be Roman it would be Rastafarian. In the second, no court of Rastafarian justices will waste their day sitting around and adjudicating, much less sentence some long-hair with a good vibe to be executed. Do I have to teach religion to everybody, Herman?

Still, the salient question for political observers remains, “Can Herman Cain actually win the Republican nomination?” My answer is yes, but only if Republicans fail to find someone even dumber and crazier.