COMMENTARY | Herman Cain's 999 plan is the Beast, an upside-down version of the Number of the Beast. Or Cain himself is the Beast. Or maybe his plan is a vehicle for the advent of the coming of the Beast, which would make Cain the devil's henchman. At least that seemed to be what Rep. Michele Bachmann was attempting to insinuate at the latest Republican presidential debate Tuesday evening.
During the Bloomberg/Washington Post Republican presidential debate in Hanover, N.H., the gathered candidates repeated their September debate strategy -- attacking the newest poll frontrunner. October's attackee was Georgia businessman Herman Cain, who recently surged in the national presidential preference polls, tying front-runner Mitt Romney in a CBS News poll and vying with recently deposed front-runner Rick Perry in several others.
But Bachmann, a challenger for front-runner status in July and August (but lately not so much), took her jabs to an entirely different level. With the debate centered on economic matters, she focused on Cain's 999 plan of flat taxation and noted that the "devil was in the details."
Bachmann, a publicly avowed evangelical Christian and former federal tax lawyer, said Cain's plan would be a "pipeline" to further raise taxes in the future. "When you take the 999 plan and turn it upside down," the congresswoman said, using her hands to make a revolving motion, "I think the devil's in the details."
Which would make Cain's flat tax idea -- 9 percent taxation on corporate income, 9 percent on personal income, and a 9 percent national consumer tax -- a 666 plan, which, as most with even the slightest knowledge of Christian teachings know, is the "number of the Beast," the mark that designates the followers of the anti-Christ. Was Bachmann implying that Cain or his plan (or both) were in some way devilish or evil? Was she trying to attach some sort of satanic significance to the former Godfather's Pizza CEO and his flat tax plan?
While it was undoubtedly her intent through a strange positional twisting of the name of Cain's tax plan to get Christians to see that a 666 plan would be a bad thing for Americans and paint Cain as somehow aligned with dark forces like the devil, she came off as a desperate candidate.
Isn't it enough that Cain has to battle the Christian connotation of his namesake, who, according to the Christian "Book of Genesis," murdered his brother, Abel, and was banished to a faraway land? Apparently not for Bachmann.
Not what would be considered the Christian thing to do.
But desperate times -- and low national poll numbers -- call for desperate measures, especially in a nationally televised debate. And the details of a flailing campaign seem to have brought out a little of the devil in Bachmann, so much so that if the desperation in her remarks is seen for what it truly is, the congresswoman faces being burned for her efforts.
All for a few extra votes.
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