See Herman Cain Yell at a Reporter While Trying to Clarify Muslim Comments

Ever since Herman Cain made some either brutally honest or highly misunderstood statements in March about not appointing Muslims to his cabinet, and then doubled down on those comments, he's been under fire to clarify them. He's tried. Last month he told Glenn Beck that is comments were "misconstrued" -- an odd statement considering he had already reiterated them. Since then, the words have continued to haunt him, like Saturday when the liberal outlet Talking Points Memo tried to pin him down about what exactly his position is. It didn't end well.

During a press conference after his speech to the RightOnline conference, Cain tried to explain what he really meant when he said he wouldn't appoint Muslims to his cabinet. Here's how TPM characterized it:

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. [Italics added to denote a block quote]

So far, that seems to be in line with the damage control he's been doing since making the original comments. But then he added something curious.

"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.

That caused TPM to issue a follow-up question, which really is not odd in this instance: what kind of "extra precautions" would you take, then?

That's when Cain decided to yell, even 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.

You can watch for yourself below:

Cain quickly recognized that it probably wasn't "politically correct" to scold the reporter like he did. And after defending himself, he apologized.

As a side note, others have characterized Cain's response as a "scream." TPM, and Cain, said he raised his voice. We think it seems somewhere between the two. But no matter what it is, it's apparent that his initial comments are still giving him grief.