Herman Cain's "Smoking Man": Here Come The Conspiracies!

It's half a minute of politcal blather by a craggy white man - "My guy is the best, he'll get us going again, blah blah blah..."

And then...he states at you, and takes a drag on a cigarette, carelessly releasing the inhaled smoke into the breeze.

And thus - all hell breaks loose:




The video is brilliant in that it’s tricked a whole lot of people to sit through 40 seconds of happy platitudes about Herman Cain before getting to the scandalous part. Meanwhile, the media is reading all sorts of underlying meanings into the video. “When he headed the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s, Cain lobbied against smoking bans in restaurants,” writes the Hotline in its post on the video. “A web ad from the Tea Party favorite’s team serves as a reminder that Cain used to lead a lobbying group that fought tobacco rules,” reports The Atlantic...


Whereas candidate Obama was sneaking cigarettes in the dead of night in 2008, Herman Cain is pushing his smoking chief of staff out in front of a video camera in 2011. You can’t get more un-Washington-like than that.

Although the guy in the ad does remind me of this fellow from The X-Files:

Smoking Man....is involved in the Syndicate, a shadow organization which includes members of the United States government that exists to hide from the public the fact that aliens are planning to colonize Earth. Smoking Man often ruthlessly protects the secrets of the conspiracy, and serves as the main antagonist to Mulder, who has an equally consuming devotion to reveal the truth in the first seven seasons.  Although his actions can be described as monstrous for the most part, his stated justification is a desire to prevent the alien colonization for as long as possible, and he is at times shown working towards that goal, particularly in connection with developing a vaccine to protect people from the "black oil", a parasitic agent which the alien Colonists use to propagate themselves....