Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, a businessman from Georgia, talks to voters from the Des Moines Register's Soapbox during the second day of the Iowa State Fair August 12, 2011 in Des Moines, Iowa.

I raise that question because actress and comedian Jeanine Garafalo , in appearance on Countdown with Keith Olberman, recently said that republican presidential candidate Herman Cain must be either a sellout or suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.   Ms. Garafalo and Mr. Olberman are both committed leftists so it is not surprising they would attack Herman Cain.  What puzzled me was that they did not attack his ideas, they attacked his race.  Specifically, they assumed that because of his race he could not possibly believe the limited government philosophy he espouses on the campaign trail.

For the left to attack the right as being racists, sexists and homophobes is common; in fact it is practically an ad hominem attack repeated almost without thinking.  I sometimes find myself amused watching leftist commentators twist themselves into rhetorical contortions attempting to “read” racism or bigotry into any statement of right leaning philosophy.   It has gotten so bad recently that even left leaning comedian Jon Stewart called out MSNBC host Ed Schultz.  Schultz was attempting to portray Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry as a racist because Perry referred to the national debt as a “black cloud” hanging over the nation.  Schultz suggested that the phrase “black cloud” was actually code for President Obama.

Because the left tends to see people as members of “groups” rather than individuals, it is impossible for the left to conceive of blacks, females, gays or members of any other “group” holding views antithetical to those which the left thinks they should hold.  The leftist worldview is based on a white male “oppressor” and a series of oppressed groups.  This is also why the left sees everything as a struggle for “rights” for particular “groups”, and why the left so vociferously attacks those whom they perceive as “traitors” to their group.

Rooted in Marxist orthodoxy regarding “class consciousness”, the left views anyone on the right who is not a white male, as no better than the Jewish Ghetto Police in Nazi occupied Europe.  The left sees no distinction between small government conservatives, libertarians or the religious right.  To the left there is one vast right wing conspiracy with a goal of maintaining some perceived “white privilege.  This is why attacks on conservative women such as Michelle Malkin, or conservative blacks like Clarence Thomas, or GOProud, the organization of conservative gays, are so malicious.

Ironically it often seems that the left are themselves the ones consumed with racism and sexism.  By denying the possibility of independent thought on the parts of blacks, gays and females, the left refuses to see them as individual Americans with their own thoughts, beliefs and desires.  It was Martin Luther King himself who stated he wanted an America where people are judged by the “content of their character”, not the color of their skin.  Despite their rhetoric, it is the left which seems incapable of doing this.