Herman Cain Says Culling the Herds and Closing Cities Answer to America’s Woes

Last week, GOP candidate Herman Cain was asked to speak at a meeting of The Elite Club. He began his speech reiterating his idea that in order to fight the war on illegal immigrants, we must build a fence, electrify it, and put a sign on the Mexican side that says “it will kill you.”

While it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that most Mexicans trying to sneak into the country aren’t able to read a sign in English, we assume that is Cain’s genius at work to get rid of the pesky border hoppers before they reach American soil.

And so, it is no surprise that Cain then remarked that we shouldn’t stop at the borders. “It’s time to get rid of the lazy, shiftless people right here in America who are a drain on our society,” said Cain. “Perhaps we could start by lacing old folks’ oatmeal with poison with the same warning,” he said. “You know, ‘eat this and you might die,’ just print it in really, really small letters.”

“I’m just coming up with these things off the top of my head, so they’ll have to be thought through a little bit,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure getting rid of the folks who don’t really contribute to society any longer will go down well with the wealthy and get me elected,” he said to a very receptive crowd.

One other way Cain said we can reduce the drain on the rich is to totally raze unproductive cities and sell the land to mineral miners. “Take Detroit, for instance,” he said. “It’s sitting on top of millions of dollars worth of salt. Make the whole damn place a salt mine, put some of the riff raff to work, and tell the rest to get the hell out. Build little shacks along the edges of the salt mines and charge the riff raff to pay rent like everyone else, and you got yourself a going concern. Ain’t nothing wrong with big companies making a buck off the sweat of the people,” Cain said to rousing applause.

“We’ll literally make those folks go back to the salt mines.”

Hours later, Cain admitted he was joking. “Of course I didn’t mean it. Salt doesn’t really fetch the kinda dollars coal or natural gas does. We’d have to find a way to close the salt mines and just tell the riff raff to get lost. Then we could dig deeper, maybe look for diamonds or something,” he said. "Then we could go after other cities like Pittsburgh and Buffalo that don’t really contribute half what they would if they were razed and mined for minerals.”

Cain got a standing ovation.