Conor Friedersdorf can scarcely believe Herman Cain’s recent Libya remarks:

Like Rick Perry’s inability to remember one of the three federal agencies he would eliminate, the moment must be seen to be believed — do watch above, no description is adequate — and is damaging not because presidential candidates must know small details like the leader of Uzbekistan, but because Cain clearly hasn’t thought at all about a war his country was fighting while he ran for president. Presumably he was briefed on it prior to Saturday’s foreign policy debate.

Obviously, Cain doesn’t care or know very much about these issues, and in the past this has almost been a point of pride for him. After all, as he said during his Uzbekistan remarks, how will knowing any of this create a single job? It’s easy to point and laugh at Cain, and it’s even easier to deride the cable news and talk radio conservative celebrity culture that allows Cain to flourish as a candidate when he has no business doing so. The party as a whole has helped to make Cain’s candidacy possible by lowering the bar for knowledge about foreign policy and national security issues so much that he could bluff his way through most of this year by saying that he would defer to experts. Aside from Huntsman and Paul, the GOP field doesn’t have any members who could discuss foreign affairs for any length of time without falling back on a lot of cliches and slogans, and much of what Romney and Santorum think they know about foreign policy is simply wrong.

Romney and Santorum are more practiced in rehearsing the cliches and slogans, and they have been doing it for years or decades to make it sound halfway credible, which is why their alarmist nonsense doesn’t get them laughed out of the room. Some of the things that Santorum has said about Venezuela over the years have been so absurd that they ought to be immediately disqualifying, but because he says them with authority and conviction he gets a pass. Cain failed to do the basic work that ought to be required of any major party presidential candidate, but there is so little accountability for the “serious” and “credible” candidates on this score that he could be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t take much preparation. Journalists seem to have a high tolerance for nonsense on these issues, but they cannot abide a bungled answer.

Conor concluded his post by saying that Cain is not a quick study, and he may be right, but what I think Cain’s answer showed was that he put little or no time into preparing answers for this question because there was no incentive for him to do so, and he believed (erroneously, as it turns out) that there would be no penalty for flubbing the answer. He had every reason to believe that conservatives would bend over backwards to defend him when he demonstrated just how little he knew. Over the last several years, he must have observed quite a few Republican candidates and officeholders saying preposterous, baseless things on these issues, and in Palin he saw someone wildly out of her depth treated as a political hero because of her ignorance. Palin became a ridiculous figure very early on during her time in the national spotlight, but so long as she kept mouthing the right slogans she was taken seriously and encouraged to consider higher office. As long as candidates can be relied on to back Israel, hate the current vilified countries, favor increased military spending, and endorse the latest war, they normally aren’t expected to know very much. Cain probably thought that was how it worked in the nominating contest, too, and he has now been disabused of that notion.