HERMAN CAIN GETS TESTY WITH THE PRESS.

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain is not exactly your average GOP candidate. He’s an African-American conservative. He’s not a politician. And he is not afraid of confronting the press on their repeated efforts to bash him over his “Muslim cabinet member” comments. In the video above, a reporter from the website TPM takes a broadside answer from Cain after asking the question on the “Muslim cabinet member” issue that Cain has answered repeatedly to date. TPM caught up with Herman Cain at the RightOnline conference. Here is how they reported on Cain at the after conference presser.

Cain said the first thing that came to his mind when he got the question was violent Muslims. Cain made it clear that he would treat applicants for his administration differently if they were from the Muslim faith, based on the fact that they could, in fact, be terrorists. “I am not anti-Muslim,” he said. “I am anti-terrorist. And so my statement has been misconstrued several times, I’ve even been called a bigot because I expressed a desire to be cautious if I were to consider a Muslim for my administration. That was the intent of [the answer to ThinkProgress].” Cain explained his reasoning:

Because I’m thinking from the perspective of what Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said when I first heard him two or three months after 9/11/01. Number one, he said, terrorism is going to last a long time, and number two, America’s got to learn that they — the terrorists, the jihadists — they want to kill all of us.

Cain answered the reporters questions with a professional and polished reply.

“So, no, I‘m not going to play nicey nice and say that I’m not going to take extra precautions in order to be able that make sure that we can do our job,” Cain said.

Not getting enough from Cain’s first answer, the TPM reporter asked a follow-up question of what kind of “extra precautions” would you take, then?

From there Cain’s reply became a little heated while admitting that he was close to losing his “cool”:

“If you’re trying to make me lose my cool, you are almost succeeding,” Cain said, his voice rising. “I never said I would use any special precautions!” OK, then, TPM followed up: “So a Muslim applies to be in the administration, he gets in like anybody else?” “Yes,” Cain said.

One thing Cain needs to quickly learn is that the press will feed off this issue like a pack of blood thirsty wolves if they know asking this line of questioning gets the presidential candidate hot under the collar.

Check out the video above for Herman Cain’s testy reply.