Herman Cain has released a "vision for foreign policy and national security" on his web site, and it includes a map in which he labels major world countries with pithy (and boy do we mean pithy) summaries of the U.S. relationship with them. So while Canada gets the label "friend and ally," Pakistan gets the more foreboding "Danger and opportunity." The accompanying text actually expands on each of these labels, but just looking at the map, folks on Twitter like Harry Reid's spokesman wondered if it was a parody of Cain's foreign policy, reducing complex relationships to two word epithets. His labels remind us a bit of the brilliant part of the movie Mean Girls in which one character quickly summarizes the stereotype under which each lunch table in the cafeteria falls. "You've got your Freshmen, ROTC guys, Preps, JV Jocks, Asian Nerds, Cool Asians..." This map feels like Herman Cain's tour of the world's cafeteria.

The map he used actually shows the density of Facebook connections from various parts of the world, with higher densities showing up brighter on the map and lower densities remaining dark. CNN reports that Cain said of this map, "Where you see the most light, that's where there's the most amount of freedom. Where you see the most light is where you see the greatest amount of economic development," and "You'll also note on this map that some of the darkest areas are the Communist areas because they deny their citizens access to this global economy and this global information source called the Internet." 

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