Carson: Not Ready for Prime Time

 thepilot.com:

Ben Carson is not ready. He’s not just unprepared to be the president. His behavior in the last week or so has shown us he’s unprepared to even run for the office.

First, the press began questioning Carson’s claim, made in books and public appearances, that the former commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, met the 17-year-old Carson at a dinner in Detroit on Memorial Day 1969 and was so impressed that the young man was soon offered a “full scholarship” to West Point.

Except, as investigators from the online news site Politico pointed out, West Point doesn’t work that way. You have to apply to be nominated, preferably in the spring of your junior year. Then you undergo a “rigorous vetting process,” and if you’re accepted, the government covers all the costs.

You don’t just get offered a scholarship after dinner, even if that dinner was with a four-star general. In any case, there’s no record of Carson ever applying. Oh, and as it turns out, records show that Westmoreland was in D.C. that Memorial Day of 1969, not Detroit.

Pressed by reporters, Carson’s campaign backpedaled, telling Politico that Carson’s meeting with Westmoreland was “brief,” and that he “couldn’t remember it with any specificity.” As for the date, they said, well, maybe it was February 1969, not May. Except as Esquire reporter Robert Bateman pointed out, the spring of Carson’s junior year, when the process would need to have begun, was in 1968.

Even more bizarre was the controversy regarding other claims Carson has made about his youth, when his “violent temper” caused him to try to attack his mother with a hammer and, on one occasion, to attempt to stab a classmate.

A CNN investigation, however, found no one from the area or the time period who could remember Carson being such a violent kid or recall any of the incidents he described. So then we were treated to the surreal spectacle of a major political campaign trying to insist that the candidate was TOO a murderous little thug, and they could prove it, but they didn’t have to — so there, liberal media.

It seems that, faced with the type of scrutiny one should expect when one becomes a front-runner for the most powerful job in the world, Carson immediately fell back to the old tactic of whining about how he’s being picked on by the “liberal media” and then added the patently ludicrous claim that no one ever says anything bad about President Obama.

“I do not remember this level of scrutiny for one President Barack Obama when he was running. In fact, I remember just the opposite.” Carson went on to say that “no one wanted to talk about” figures from Obama’s past such as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Jeremiah Wright.

If Dr. Carson thinks that, then all I can say is he must have been locked away in surgery every moment of the years 2007-2012, and that operating room must have been on a desert island with no TV, radio, or Internet. He also doesn’t seem to realize that the fact that all those names come so quickly to his lips directly contradicts the idea that nobody talked about them.

In fact, the so-called liberal media talked incessantly about all of those people, along with questioning Obama’s religion, his college drug use, his grade school, his father, his father’s friends, his sexuality, even whether he was a native-born American. As I’ve pointed out before, when a wingnut complains that Obama was never “vetted,” what he or she is really saying is “nobody bought into the ridiculous stuff we made up about Barack Obama.”

It is absolutely true that, during the now-eternal presidential election cycle, the media engage in a frenzied search for the scandal or gaffe of the week. It is true that they obsess over trivia, to a point so extreme that it’s almost impossible to parody. Remember “Tip-Gate,” when the “serious” pundits were all abuzz about whether Hillary Clinton left a tip in a diner, or whether the tip was too big? Remember Chris Matthews’ shock that Barack Obama ordered orange juice instead of coffee in a diner?

I will agree, it’s all very, very stupid. But that stupidity gets directed at every candidate, and how you deal with it is one of the tests of your ability to lead. To cry that you’re the only one being picked on when it happens to you is the sign of a rookie. An amateur. Someone who’s not ready to play in the big leagues.And this week, Ben Carson proved that he is not ready.

Ben Carson: Gump Republican

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Dr. Ben Carson is not a stupid man.

 He’s a world-class pediatric brain surgeon. He’s a graduate of Yale University, the University of Michigan Medical School, and the residency program of Johns Hopkins Medical School. He’s been elected into the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine. The list of his honors goes on and on.

No, Dr. Ben Carson is not a stupid man. So why is he talking like one?

For instance, although he’s obviously had rigorous scientific training at some of this country’s finest institutions of higher learning, Carson continues to publicly embrace what’s called “young Earth creationism,” a theory which asserts that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, despite the fossil records and the fact that there are observable objects in the universe (such as long-period comets), all of which are clearly much older. He’s described the Big Bang Theory as “part of a fairy tale.”

I’m reasonably sure the good doctor is talking about the generally accepted explanation of the origin of our observable universe, not the TV show. The TV show, which tells the story of brilliant but socially awkward nerds who end up having smoking-hot women fall in love with them, is definitely a fairy tale. But I digress.

Dr. Carson has also described the Affordable Care Act as the “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.”

Now, we know that Dr. Carson is far too intelligent a man to really believe that a law that keeps insurance companies from denying you coverage based on pre-existing conditions is exactly like being forced to pick cotton from sunup to sundown under the threat of brutal flogging if you don’t do enough, having your wives and daughters subject to constant rape, and living under the pervasive fear of having your family broken up and sold to someone hundreds of miles away. Only a stupid person would believe those things are even remotely comparable, and we know Dr. Carson’s not stupid.

Just lately, Dr. Carson told NBC’s Chuck Todd he didn’t think a Muslim should ever be president. “I absolutely would not agree with that,” he said. Later, he told the online magazine The Hill that a president should be “sworn in on a stack of Bibles, not a Quran.”

Now, I’m sure that Dr. Carson, a highly intelligent man who claims to revere the U.S. Constitution, is aware of Article VI of that precious document, which states explicitly that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” I mean, he has to have read the Constitution, right? And understood it?

So why is Ben Carson saying all of these silly things? Well, he’s not simple-minded, but the rise of Donald Trump shows us that a substantial number of the GOP primary voters apparently are. They’re what I call the “Forrest Gump” Republicans. Remember that movie? It was another in a long line of stories that have fed and bolstered the uniquely American mythology of the naïve half-wit who’s yet somehow more “wise” than the clever but wicked people all around them. (You can probably tell I’m not a fan of the movie.)

Rick Santorum, who you may be surprised to know is also running for president this year, served up that trope with an extra side order of resentment back in 2012 when he told the Values Summit, “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”

At one point, it seemed that the GOP was trying to shed that image. It was Bobby Jindal — who, you also may or may not remember, is himself a presidential candidate — who said that the GOP needed to stop being “the stupid party.” We all see where that attitude’s gotten him. He’s polling slightly lower than toenail fungus. So the upper tier of Republican candidates has apparently given up and decided to go full-out Gump.Ben Carson is not stupid. But he needs stupid people to vote for him. And that’s why he says the things he does.