Ben Carson: meet the nominee who doesn't understand how the economy works

[josephpalazzo]

The question is: can he operate on his own brain? Even if could,  it is beyond repair.

[SGOS]

Does it matter if most Americans are just as ignorant as this guy?

Ben Carson’s accomplishments in the field of medicine should be incontrovertible proof of his intelligence. But read enough of his musings on government spending and the economy, and you’ll find yourself questioning this premise, or perhaps the nature, of intelligence altogether.

It is odd that one would see the medical wisdom of a doctor as a certification to run a country.  It would be like hiring a doctor to fix your car, or fly you to Seattle.  What is even stranger is why some people equate wealth and celebrity with wisdom. 

But Carson is a doctor running for president.  Why this doesn't immediately send up warning flags is odd.

[Sargon The Grape]

I'm very concerned that someone this fucking stupid somehow became a neurosurgeon. Any idiot can become president if he's popular enough, but you'd think becoming a neurosurgeon would require some kind of skill with critical thinking.

[GSOgymrat]

Carson is the clear Republican front runner in North Carolina. Draw from that what you will.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Impressive,  eh?

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Ben Carson perfected the proceedure of the self lobotomy using only an old,  rusty coat hanger. 

[stromboli]

More questions about stories by Carson:

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/ben-carsons-past-faces-deeper-questions-1446861864-lMyQjAxMTI1NTAxNzgwMTcxWj

The day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, Ben Carson’s black classmates unleashed their anger and grief on white students who were a minority at Detroit’s Southwestern High.

Mr. Carson, then a junior with a key to a biology lab where he worked part time, told The Wall Street Journal last month that he protected a few white students from the attacks by hiding them there.

It is a dramatic account of courage and kindness, and it couldn’t be confirmed in interviews with a half-dozen of Mr. Carson’s classmates and his high school physics teacher. The students all remembered the riot. None recalled hearing about white students hiding in the biology lab, and Mr. Carson couldn’t remember any names of those he sheltered.

“It may have happened, but I didn’t see it myself or hear about it,” said Gregory Vartanian, a white classmate of Mr. Carson’s who served in the ROTC with Mr. Carson and is now a retired U.S. Marshal.

Mr. Carson’s biography, a rise from poverty to become a top neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins University, is central to his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Now, his storyâ€"told in nine books and countless inspirational speeches over the past 25 yearsâ€"has come under the harsh scrutiny of presidential politics, where rivals and media hunt for embellishments and omissions that can hobble a campaign.

In 2008, Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton said she was mistaken when she claimed she and her daughter, Chelsea, had come under sniper fire and had to run for cover during a trip to Bosnia in 1996 while she was first lady. A video of the trip unearthed after her comments showed no gunfire.

The threat to the Carson candidacy is that the inconsistencies or hard-to-check anecdotes, which were told long before he ever considered a presidential run, will put off voters only now getting to know him.

Mr. Carson’s campaign manager, Barry Bennett, said Friday there was “no evidence” that any aspect of Mr. Carson’s biography wasn’t true. “There’s no facts saying they are not true. We are guilty until proven innocent,” he said. “You have no reason to believe that they are not true. There’s no evidence to point to the fact that they are even questionable.”

In his 1990 autobiography, “Gifted Hands,” Mr. Carson writes of a Yale psychology professor who told Mr. Carson, then a junior, and the other students in the classâ€"identified by Mr. Carson as Perceptions 301â€"that their final exam papers had “inadvertently burned,” requiring all 150 students to retake it. The new exam, Mr. Carson recalled in the book, was much tougher. All the students but Mr. Carson walked out.

“The professor came toward me. With her was a photographer for the Yale Daily News who paused and snapped my picture,” Mr. Carson wrote. “ ‘A hoax,’ the teacher said. ‘We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the class.’ ” Mr. Carson wrote that the professor handed him a $10 bill.

No photo identifying Mr. Carson as a student ever ran, according to the Yale Daily News archives, and no stories from that era mention a class called Perceptions 301. Yale Librarian Claryn Spies said Friday there was no psychology course by that name or class number during any of Mr. Carson’s years at Yale.

In books and speeches, Mr. Carson has said he hated living in poverty, vowed to grow rich, and lashed out in anger at others until a religious transformation at age 14.

When CNN sent reporters to his former neighborhood in Detroit to verify Mr. Carson’s stories of violence, including attempting to stab a boy in the stomach, none who knew Mr. Carson as a youth recalled any such trouble. Instead, most of Mr. Carson’s former friends and neighbors remember him much as he is today: soft-spoken and studious.

In his 1996 book, “Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence,” Mr. Carson identified the boy as a friend named “Bob.” Mr. Carson told Fox News on Thursday the boy was actually a “close relative.” Mr. Carson said, “I’ve never used the true names of people in books.”

Also disputed in a report Friday by Politico: Mr. Carson’s assertion, first raised in the 1990 book, that he turned down a “scholarship” offer from the U.S. Military Academy at West Pointâ€"though the academy is free to those accepted. Mr. Bennett said Friday that Mr. Carson was offered a “nomination” to West Point but never applied.

“Lying, I believe, is a grave sin and there’s just no way that I would be sitting here lying about something like this,” Mr. Carson said Friday on Fox News.

Last month, Mr. Carson said in a radio interview that, as a young doctor, he had a gun stuck in his ribs at a Popeye’s restaurant in Baltimore near Johns Hopkins University. “A guy comes in and puts a gun in my ribs. And I just said, ‘I believe that you want the guy behind the counter,’” Mr. Carson said. “He said, ‘Oh, okay.’” The Baltimore Police Department later said it couldn’t find a report matching the incident Mr. Carson described.

In response to a question at a recent GOP presidential debate, Mr. Carson said he “didn’t have an involvement” with Mannatech Inc., a multilevel marketing company that sells nutritional supplements, and called any suggestion to the contrary “propaganda.” Mr. Carson, who has taken the company’s products, appeared in videos that could until recently be found on Mannatech’s website, including two filmed in 2013 and styled like commercials.

Mr. Carson also has given four paid speeches at Mannatech gatherings; the proceeds from three went to a Carson-affiliated charity. Mannatech settled false-advertising charges with Texas in 2009.

One reason that Mr. Carson’s stories are difficult to check is that he navigated the turbulent times of his young adulthood without leaving much of a trace. He arrived as a scholarship student at Yale University in 1969 to a campus engulfed in protests but said he avoided them.

You decide.

[GSOgymrat]

[stromboli]

Good one, GS. Btw, love the hat. Leather, apparently; boy that just bleeds country right there.

:13:

[josephpalazzo]

Is Carson turn a new page?

Feisty Carson Turns Heat on Reporters, Making Political Ritual Into Confrontation

Ben Carson was feisty. He was mocking. He was unyielding. And he was unexpectedly theatrical.

Mr. Carson, the doctor whose soft-spoken and sedate style has made his rise to the top of the Republican presidential field all the more puzzling, abandoned his gentle manner on Friday night and delivered a powerful public scolding of the news media that has begun to question his celebrated biography.

In the process, he turned what has become an almost robotic ritual for candidates under attack â€" the live and often defensive news conference â€" into an aggressive confrontation, and at times interrogation, of the reporters' motives and methods.

Read More › Poll: Clinton ties Carson in '16 match up

''Don't lie,'' he told them, interrupting a journalist's question.

''That is a silly argument,'' he said to another.

In a stern admonition to the journalists standing just feet away, Mr. Carson declared, ''The American people are waking up to your games.''

The performance, at a news conference in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., was mesmerizing at times, in part because of the serious personal questions that have been raised: whether he embellished or even made up crucial episodes in his life story, like the attempted stabbing of a childhood friend and his claim that West Point had offered him a ''full scholarship.''

[Baruch]

If being a "legend in your own mind" qualifies you for high office, then Dr Carson might be Dr Mengele ;-(

This is part of the whole GOP ... the Liberal Media is crucifying our candidates ... false meme.

[Jason Harvestdancer]

This guy is as bad as a Keynesian, just in another direction.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Well folks, it's time for everyone to go buy a pair of outrageously expensive boots, the kind with straps to pull ourselves up from,  take a big pay cut,  forget about higher wages, join the army and forget about veteran benefits and make America great again and forget about the other party because all of our problems are because of having health care and they're the liars, not Benny boy or tRump ..

That pretty much settles why you should vote for a rube.

[TomFoolery]

I just found out that Ben Carson claimed he tried to stab a guy as a teenager in an effort to appeal to black voters? WTF?! Could that be more patronizing? "Hey guys, see, I'm a gang banger just like all of you!"

He tried to stab a guy but a belt buckle deflected the blade. Cool. That means he was inches away from going to prison instead of medical school. Inches away from dealing with the gauntlet of bureaucracy in our judicial and prison systems instead of the odd labyrinth that is American politics. Inches away from struggling to figure out how to make it in America with the “felony” label instead of struggling to figure out how to get the Republican nomination with the “Bible thumping” label. I agree that personal responsibility is important in life, but so is luck.

It’s important to note here that Ben Carson also believes that prison rape is proof that people choose to be gay, so he was also inches away from becoming gay.

[SGOS]

God must have been looking out for Ben Carson.