Ben Carson is burning up a lot of pants


Now that Ben Carson has managed to draw attention to himself with his remarks about the Oregon shooting and the yet-uncorroborated story of having a gun dug into his ribs at a Popeye’s restaurant, people have started looking more closely at the other things he has said. (Too bad that Carson didn’t have the gun pointed at him at a Burger King instead of a Popeye’s because after all, that is the Home of the Whopper.)

Thanks to commenter Reginald Selkirk, I was pointed to this post by Ed Brayton who had highlighted a PolitiFact analysis of a claim that Carson has repeatedly made that Russian president Vladimir Putin, Iran’s spiritual leader Ali Khamanei, and president of Palestine and the PLO Mahmood Abbas had all attended Lumumba University in Moscow in 1968.

Carson seemed to be implying that while there together they formed yet another Axis of Evil, probably by joining a fraternity whose initiation rites required pledging to overthrow the US. PolitiFact could find no evidence for the claim and the Carson camp dismissed their request for substantiation and so they gave it their biggest bogus rating of ‘Pants on Fire’.

But wait, there’s more! Jack Martinez at Newsweek has compiled a list of the 16 most idiotic things he has said. As Martinez says, “When you listen to Ben Carson speak, you hear a soft, measured voice marked by an upward lilt that bookends his sentences, almost like he’s pleading for your understanding—or for you to remain calm. Never has such a mellow man said so many incendiary things.”

For a long time, people assumed that someone who spoke in such a calm and measured way must be saying calm and measured things. It is now clear that there is no correlation. Carson is more detached from reality than most of the Republican candidates and that is saying something.

Comments

  1. says

    I can’t recall what site it was, but I left a comment somewhere last year to the effect of “Ben Carson is a reprehensible asshole with deplorable opinions and beliefs”. One or two of the responses to that comment were incredulous and asked me to back up my assertion. I really couldn’t understand what they hell they were asking for since my conclusion about Carson is based on the very things he’s said.
    Now that I think about it, the site I made the comment on was a conservative one. So that’s likely why they didn’t agree with my conclusion.

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