Yesterday, after the Carson “Scholarship” story broke, it looked like the Erik Eriksons of the conservative media were going to rely on Jesuitical parsing of Carson’s lies to demonize Politico and defend the guy. After all, someone, somewhere probably told Carson he’d make a good West Point candidate, so that’s just like getting a scholarship to a school that doesn’t offer scholarships, amirite?
Now the Wall Street Journal has a story that lists a few more of Carson’s confabulations (If you can’t read that link, Kevin Drum has a devastating list, including a couple the WSJ missed, here).
My personal physician no longer lets me read Red State or watch Fox, so I haven’t checked them today. But I have to believe this the end of the line for Carson, even for those clowns. Or is the Wall Street Journal now “liberal media”?
Update: Here’s some vintage Carson (via):
After Ben Carson suggested in a Facebook post that the signers of the declaration of independence has never, like himself, served in elected office, the Wall Street Journal quickly pointed out this was false.
“Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, John Hancock and many other signers had been elected members of their colonial assemblies, prior to signing the Declaration.”
Carson amended his statement saying they has no “federal” elected experience.
Hal
But Hillary said…and Al Gore said…and just what were Obama’s grades in junior high!
JPL
Yesterday, Morning Joe said that Carson is quirky. Is that the republican term for liar?
Carson yesterday complained that no one insisted on seeing Obama’s grades while at Occidental. It might be time for Carson to release the long form of his birth certificate.
Eric
Murdoch is now desparate to placate the Obama DOJ to avoid indictment. It is the alinsky way. Obama is the godfather of a liberal crime syndicate. I should say he is the Fredo to Hilary’s Michael as the circle is about to be complete.
How is that?
Hal
I forgot. What damming evidence is supposed to be in Obama’s transcripts? That was on conspiracy theory I never quite understood.
Big ole hound
Carson is the con man supreme and that reliable 27% is falling for him. This is about an ego as big as Trumps. What a ticket that would make.
JPL
@Eric: The Bush family are the real culprits. imo
Amir Khalid
It’s especially weird to me that a presidential candidate would claim a violent past that no one who knew him then will verify. The normal practice is to make the false claim that you were never in trouble.
Schlemazel
any outlet that prints/broadcasts or reports any event or story that does not conform with the TruBeLeafs (TM) is by definition “liberal media”
Edit: interesting – not only have the buttons disappeared but the html codes no longer work
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone :)
Off to swim and then go see SPECTRE :)
rikyrah
Already told you…The GOP Establishment will get rid of Unca Ben
AliceBlue
@Amir Khalid:
It’s all part of the “I-was-such-a-terrible,horrible, no good person-but-then-Jesus-saved-me” narrative so beloved by wingnuts.
greennotGreen
This will not end Carson’s support because the people who support Carson already have at best a tenuous hold on reality.
Oatler.
MSNBC is servicing conservatives like Seka in an elevator. Maddow should quit unless she’s part of it.
Schlemazel
@Hal:
That he just isn’t very smart, he got in only as a sop to his race & couldn’t handle the course work.
It never caught fire because only the basest of idiots thinks President Obama is not smart
Ryan
I can’t wait for the campaign to explain all of this as mere propaganda. I’m also waiting for Trump to pounce.
WereBear
@Oatler.: Maddow hasn’t done anything wrong. If anything, she’s a beam of light and she must get ratings or she would be gone.
She should give up a valuable platform because her network sucks? They all suck!
Tommy
@Amir Khalid: How about it. CNN reports that when they tried to verify the “stabbing” story his classmates said he was quiet and “nerdy.” I was a quiet “nerdy” kid and I don’t (1) see anything wrong with that and (2) that is kind of how I’d assume a child might be in their youth before they became a world-class neurosurgeon.
But it is clear to me, and it seems many others here, what is an amazing life story just isn’t enough for him so he has to embellish if not lie about it to make it more “interesting.” I find that sad and honestly I think he might want to find a professional to talk with.
rikyrah
Ari Berman
@AriBerman Ari Berman Retweeted Matt Flegenheimer
When Jeb gov in 2000 Florida purged thousands of black voters & likely violated VRA http://www.thenation.com/article/how-the-2000-election-in-florida-led-to-a-new-wave-of-voter-disenfranchisement/?nc=1 …
MazeDancer
Joe Scarboriugh tweeted a video last night of Carson on Charlie Rose show sayong “I was offered a full scholarship to West Point” This was moments after Carson said in his bizarre presser that he never said he got a full scholarship to West Point. (Not llinking vid or tweet in case of FYWP, but easy Google search of either “Joe Scarborough Twitter” or “Ben Carson Charlie Rose”.)
Joe is no friend of Ben’s.
The word weasel for Carson is “offered”. As he said last night, the military brass whose names he does not recall, saying they could make it happen at West Point “was an offer to me”.
Carson takes no responsibility for decades of implying he got an official appointment and offer of full scholarship from West Point that he turned down. For Carson, saying he only applied to one college covered it.
Schlemazel
@Ryan:
Trump has already tweeted insults based on the West Point BS. The ones I saw were pretty pedestrian for the Dump. He seems to save his best work for JEB?
Another Holocene Human
@Big ole hound: It sounds like Carson is a con and he thinks Obama is a bigger con than him but he, Carson, can see through Obama, so why can’t you see through him too?
Says a lot about Carson’s twisted psyche right there.
mai naem mobile
So has Ron Fournier deemed Carson’s explanations Clintonesque because both sides do it?
OzarkHillbilly
But… but… but… BENGHAZI!!!!!!
JPL
@Tommy: Alice Blue nailed it.. Carson appeals to the fundies cuz he was saved by god.
rikyrah
About Unca Ben…
I had no doubt whatsoever that the GOP Establishment would dispatch him when the time was right. They have decided that he’s got to go…so, he’s going to be GONE! and very soon. I doubt he will be in this race come December 1st.
CTVoter
The comments on the WSJ piece are priceless. “Who remembers what they had for lunch one day in college? Your MSM, at work!”–pretty much all of them….So yeah, WSJ is now librul media to the wing nut Wurlitzer.
WaynersT
To me the guy always seems like he’s on some heavy mood stabilizing meds – he reminds me a guy I know that takes lithium. That dazed kind of effect – he even closes his eyes when he talks, ala Carson.
Major Major Major Major
OT:
You take too much medicine, you hallucinate.
You take too little medicine, some asshole named mclaren doesn’t give you the benefit of the doubt over a missing comment button.
Oh also you get insomnia.
Been a fun week. Sorry to cloud the thread. Just, y’know, still awake.
max
But I have to believe this the end of the line for Carson, even for those clowns.
Maybe. If the R establishment can continue to pile on effectively they might bag him. (If there are any suggestions of the euphemism ‘sexual improprieties’ whatsoever he’s dead on the spot since he’s a black guy.) A little bit (or a whole lot) of fabulation in a biography isn’t necessarily going to hurt him decisively with R crowd. Consider Ronald Reagan.
Probably going to take some spin off the ball. Back to Trump they may go.
Or is the Wall Street Journal now “liberal media”?
Next best thing: ‘Establishment Media’.
In the end, the R base and R establishment have the same problem – they’re pining after elder white (Protestant!) dude that they can look up and who will lead them to endless victories, just like Ronald Reagan. (And just never you mind Reagan’s actual record.)
Unfortunately for the R establishment, the only old white guy they could conceive backing was Jeb Bush and he’s reaping the harvest of the Bush’s family’s failure to be ‘proper’ successors to Ronald Reagan, and their overall pattern of failure in general.
The R base, on the other hand, has rather different ideas about what constitutes the platonic ideal of Ronald Reagan, and the closest match is … Donald Trump. Oh, dear.
max
[‘Bit of a pickle, really.’]
Tommy
@MazeDancer: I am nothing close to a fan of our media. But I will say this about them, when they smell blood in the water they swarm. There is blood in the water all around Carson and if he thinks they are all over his background now he has seen nothing yet. They are going to vet anything he has ever wrote or said, no matter how minor. They’ll dig up text if not video of every speech he has ever given, even it was to like five people. He better have his “ducks in a row” (I don’t think he does, not even close) or this is going to get ugly really, really fast.
BTW: I tend to agree with Josh at TPM. This was just a scam direct mail campaign. A grift on the far right by Carson. I don’t think for a single second he had any desire other than to make a buck off this campaign (look at the timing of the release of his book right now) and never, never thought he’d end up at the top of the polls. Again as Josh asks, who is even running his campaign? Nobody because he didn’t ever expect to be in this position and now he is FUBAR because the spotlight of the media is shining directly on him and it is going to shine bright!
Schlemazel
@rikyrah:
I’d be surprised if it were that soon. They need somebody to hurt Trumps numbers & give their real candidates a chance to hang on for the caucuses that they can control better. So far only Carson has hurt the Dumpsters numbers. It would be ideal for them id Carson could hold on through Iowa and then be tossed overboard. That said, given his own stupidity he doesn’t look to last that long. I always wonder how people who lie on this scale can believe they will not get caught when put under such intense scrutiny.
Tommy
@JPL: But can’t you still be “saved” and not try to stab a classmate or attack your mother with a hammer? I mean he is about a step away, from the stereotypes, of saying he was a drunk and in the gutter and god came to him.
JPL
@Major Major Major Major: Close your eyes and play a youtube of Carson giving a speech. Sleep tight.
@rikyrah: pet peeve of mine. Don’t use the term uncle unless he is in fact your uncle. The rest of the comment is spot on.
Schlemazel
@CTVoter:
any outlet that prints/broadcasts or reports any event or story that does not conform with the TruBeLeafs (TM) is by definition “liberal media”
that label is applied even to Fox on the rare occasion they do not hew correctly to the TruBeLeafs. This goes a very long way to maintaining the epistemic closure they are famous for
smintheus
@Tommy: For me the most striking thing is that Carson repeatedly tells lies that nobody with an ounce of sense would believe. A psychological test of Yale students to determine who “the most honest student in the class” was?! You’d have to think your audience is incredibly dumb to swallow a scenario like that. (And of course his scenarios are replete with the kinds of specifics (“the teacher smiled again”) that the worst liars typically use to bolster their ridiculous scenarios.) Carson has serious problems that go well beyond being a liar.
MomSense
@Tommy:
Why believe in a God who only works in ordinary ways?
OzarkHillbilly
@Tommy: At this very moment there are hundreds of reporters all over this country going thru every single one of his books with a fine toothed comb.
ruemara
Tommy dear. The Nav arrows are gone on my kindle & if I click a response link to someone’s comment, I have to scroll back to where I was. Back buttons completely bring you to the front page. Might want to fix that.
JPL
@smintheus: He didn’t pass the test about honesty? I’m shocked
benw
I’m at Carson threshold. I thoroughly enjoyed the Democratic forum last night. i thought Bernie was great, and MOM and Hillz did fine, too.
Gin & Tonic
The similar WaPo story has, as of now, 4455 comments. I’m not going to waste my time looking at them; we all know newspaper web site comments are a cesspool. But I can’t help thinking about the motivation of someone who reads that story, sees that there are, say, 4320 comments, and says “I’ll add something to that.”
dmsilev
@Amir Khalid: It’s a redemption narrative, which is a very powerful story, particularly among Carson’s evangelical base
Mandalay
The Drum link in the OP reveals the most blatant lie Carson has told….
Ignoring the fact that the class never even existed, the notion that of 150 Yale Students taking an exam, 149 of them would not even turn in their paper is just absurd.
Carson needs to get out quick. Apart from Trump his rivals have left him alone, but once they realize he is a wounded animal they will tear him apart.
Gin & Tonic
@OzarkHillbilly: I asked a question downstairs about concrete floors; don’t know if you have anything useful to answer with.
Tommy
@ruemara: Use whatever is the tab key on the Kindle to take you back to the comment. Will look into the arrow, but I don’t have a Kindle to test it on. UGH!
Linnaeus
@Tommy:
One should also consider if there’s a racial component to Carson’s redemption story, if not in his original intent, at least in how it will be decoded by those receiving it. If you hold certain stereotypes about the behavior of black men, particularly poor(er) black men (and lots of white Americans do), then Carson’s story dovetails with beliefs you may have about social welfare, notions of personal responsibility, etc. So Carson looks like one of “those people” who overcame his violent past, so why can’t the rest of “those people” do the same thing?
NotMax
This is what comes from munching on ancient Egyptian grain.
MomSense
Anyone watching the press conference about the Russian aircraft crash? It is getting really heated but I can’t hear what the journalists are saying because they are covering the sound to provide English translation only for the official. There were only a few moments where I could hear the loud questioning coming from the journalists and it sounds like they are accusing the officials of cover up.
Cervantes
No, it’s just like getting a scholarship to a school that gives everyone scholarships.
NotMax
Carson (and his consigliere Williams) will be throwing out the Clarence Thomas “lynching” accusation any time now.
Count on it.
Steeplejack
@rikyrah:
You’ve got the right idea. No wonder you always sound so sane.
bemused
@JPL:
Fundies gold standard is being “saved by God” which makes me laugh hysterically. I just wish for once that media folks would ask them for their certificates of verification from God.
JPL
@benw: Bernie showed a lot of passion when talking about voters rights and Hillary is just a policy wonk. I wonder when Carson will call for her transcripts. Gore was a policy wonk who actually was in Nam, but that didn’t serve him well.
beltane
@NotMax: He used the term “witch hunt” already. You’d think Carson and his supporters would be in favor of witch hunts, but I guess not.
Cervantes
@Tommy:
Just FYI, there are mobile “keyboards” that do not have TAB keys.
Schlemazel
@NotMax:
Already done.The link to it was in the TPM story comments.
RSA
@smintheus:
Yeah, that’s urban legend territory. But consistent with comparable stories where a lie-beral professor is shown up in public by a brave God-fearing student.
(ETA: HTML tags still work, apparently.)
Tommy
@Linnaeus: You know I had not really thought about this until your comment, but the narrative as Carson tells it, well it ties into like every stereotype of “black” men many “whites” believe. Almost words for word. Single mother. Angry, violent, troubled black youth. Government welfare. But then the lord came to him and look at what he became.
Matt McIrvin
@JPL: Remember, Donald Trump went from a celebrity grotesque to a national political figure by embracing birtherism, back in 2012 (edit: should have said 2011). Why would this hurt Carson?
Another Holocene Human
@Major Major Major Major: Sorry to hear you are having so much trouble titrating your dose.
I am doing really, really well with Lithium. As if it were made for me.
Cervantes
@JPL:
Even as pet peeves go, that’s an odd one!
Another Holocene Human
@max: In my humbly so-not-a-Republican opinion, the Carson and Trump crowds are two separate crowds.
I think Cruz stands to gain a lot from Carson’s downfall. He fakes pious pretty well. Huckabee is a joke and Santorum is now an also-ran.
benw
@JPL: I thought the silly random card question gimmick was surprisingly good at loosening everyone up, and Bernie was really funny with his. I thought Hillary’s wonkitude actually failed to come through, as her answers rambled without actually being detailed.
smintheus
@OzarkHillbilly: Here’s another apparent Carson lie, seemingly minor but there might have been something concealed behind it we don’t know about: Carson claims he applied only to Yale because at the time all colleges required a $10 application fee and he had only $10 to his name.
If memory serves, application fees were introduced later, in the ’70s. Besides in the ’60s, $10 was a lot of money (the minimum wage in 1967 was $1.40/hour).
Cervantes
@benw:
As intended?
NotMax
@Cervantes
Kids in Hawaii are taught to refer to any unrelated adult they’re addressing in conversation as Uncle or Auntie. And do.
Linnaeus
@Tommy:
Precisely.
benw
@Cervantes: yeah, I thought so. IMO it seemed like she was going for a talk-out-the-clock strategy.
JPL
@Cervantes: Maybe it’s just me. I’m not big on folks calling the current President, Barry, either. I didn’t mine the use of W though for Bush. It didn’t seem to be as demeaning.
@benw: hmmmm She was evasive on a few questions.
smintheus
@RSA: Good point. Everything about Carson’s self-portrait is so obviously part of his grifting operation among fundigelicals. And in this case, he was found to be so honest that the Yale paper wanted to run a picture of him! He was practically iconic as a university student.
Btw, I’ll bet reporters don’t realize that anytime you run a test on human subjects at a university, you need to obtain formal pre-clearance for the experiment. They could ask Yale to search records to see if it ever authorized such a preposterous experiment.
Amir Khalid
@NotMax:
I’d always thought that was a strictly Asian thing.
Cervantes
@smintheus:
Many colleges that asked for an application fee in Carson’s day were also willing to waive that fee as needed.
ThresherK
Oh, Politico, there’s no way you can lower my opinion of you.
PaulW
blog flogging on this very topic: http://noticeatrend.blogspot.com/2015/11/when-legend-becomes-liability-they-keep.html
How is everyone else’s weekend looking like?
Go USF Bulls! Go Gators! Go Bucs! GO Bolts! oh, and I shall NaNo you when the time is right.
smintheus
@Cervantes: Were there application fees at all in the ’60s? I know that in the ’70s and ’80s waiving the fees was pretty common.
Cervantes
@NotMax:
And in many other cultures.
Plus “Uncle” can have other useful meanings in certain phrases (“Uncle Tom” and “Uncle Sam” come to mind at once).
Plus referring to Ben Carson as “Uncle Ben” is obviously a joke!
Anyhow, with my veritable menagerie of pet peeves, I shouldn’t talk too much!
Cervantes
@Amir Khalid:
There are, of course, many Asians in Hawaii.
Tommy
@ThresherK: I got Politico bookmarked. I check in maybe once a day just to read the headlines on the homepage, because I know if I want to understand the “inside the Beltway,” “talking heads” thinking, well that is where I can find it in spades. But that the far right is calling that “rag” a liberal publication is just laugh out loud funny. If we keep up at this rate next thing you know Rush is going to be a RINO.
MattF
@smintheus: Considering that the infamous Milgram experiment took place at Yale, and what happened in the aftermath of that… it’s not even remotely possible that the Yale Psych department would pull a hoax like Carson described.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Gin & Tonic: Not OH, but …
We used some Rustoleum EpoxyShield Garage Floor Paint (I had a link for it, but didn’t want to end up in FYWP Moderation) on some 50-year old concrete floors at work. It previously had a poured engineered material on top (kind of like hard ground-up linoleum) that peeled off easily. There was some mold underneath. We cleaned it up with a concrete cleaner and followed the directions. We gave it a few days to dry after painting before doing anything rough with the floor.
It stuck very well and I’m generally happy with the results. But it didn’t stick well to some areas that we patched with some Quickrete concrete patching material before painting. I don’t know whether we didn’t wait long enough for that to cure, or what.
I don’t know how well it would work in a basement, especially if there’s any chance that the basement floor has water or dampness issues. In almost any painting, having a clean starting surface makes all the difference.
It might make sense to try a small area of your basement first. If it doesn’t stick well, or if there are other issues, you won’t have to redo the whole floor with something else.
HTH a little. Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
Tommy
@MattF: My undergrad degree is in psychology. All I did was some experiments on rats in my Comparative Psychology class. This was the late 80s but we read more than a little about experiments, like the Milgram experiment, and it is safe to say the time Carson was in college many psychology departments literally treated students like lab rats. I wouldn’t doubt for a second they ran the experiment(s) Carson says they did, I just question the results he cites.
SiubhanDuinne
@Cervantes:
And “Uncle Ben” is a brand of rice!
And rice is a grain!
And grain is stored in pyramids!
Q.E.D.
Amir Khalid
@SiubhanDuinne:
I never realised all that before. Finally, it all makes sense!
feebog
A significant portion of Carson supporters will simply dismiss any negative story as “Librul Media” attacks and pay no attention. But there are alternatives, and Cruz is certainly the most logical. Which is very scary.
Lige
@Mandalay:
I’m not sure what the point of that experiment would be how does finishing the exam make him honest? If anything it makes him look gullible as the rest of the students seemed to smell a rat (it was psychology right?) and left without finishing. Not that it probably happened but it doesn’t even make sense as an urban legend.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
It’s part of a bog-standard Evangelical Christian redemption story. The point is that the teller was a hopeless wretch who was headed to an early grave and an eternity in Hell until they found Jesus. Then they turned their life around and became the paragon you see today. There’s a natural tendency to exaggerate how much of a wretch they were at least as much as how much of a paragon they are today in order to show how big a change Jesus made in their life.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: How does Egbert Viele’s tomb figure into this?
J
@Mandalay: You’re absolutely right. I’m a Yale graduate from a decade later and have been a university teacher pretty much ever since. With the rarest exceptions, undergraduates who leave an exam early are the ones who have aced it (or think they have). Everything about this story rings false. It also doesn’t make even minimal sense. Why would the fact that BC stuck it out to the end testify to his honesty rather than cleverness or doggedness? And why would the the departure of 149 students show that they were lacking in honesty rather than grit or smarts?
MattF
@Tommy: Well, I was a ‘hard’ science & math guy who took literature courses for his liberal arts reqs… so I missed all the social sciences. But I do remember that the social science types would keep telling me that social sciences were not ‘normative’– which, I’d think, rules out what Carson was claiming.
benw
@JPL: “hmmmm She was evasive on a few questions.”
It wasn’t always evasive, but each answer seemed to be trying to make all sides happy, and it was a little disheartening to see her fall back on triangulationish answers. She’s still light-miles better than the Republicans, tho.
Lige
@J:
A better end to this tale would be Carson realizing he was the only rube that stuck it out wanting to punch the game playing professor in his face but resisting due to his Christian morals. I might feel that way if I was tricked into taking a test twice.
Cervantes
@smintheus:
There certainly were.
Is Carson claiming that he faced a fee of $10? That was not uncommon in those days.
(Aside: College application fees were seen even before the Depression, albeit not everywhere.)
Mark B.
I honestly think that Carson believes his own stories, and the fact that a lot of other people don’t is evidence to him that they’re out to get him. That, to me, is light years worse than him being a knowing liar, or even a compulsive liar.
Cervantes
A joke … right?
WereBear
Grifters lie. It’s like it’s embedded in their DNA. When they don’t have to, even when it would be to their advantage not to, even when it’s clear they are not sure what the truth really is.
Everything is shaped towards the con.
Iowa Old Lady
@Schlemazel: Was it just that? I thought his college records were supposed to show he applied as a foreign student.
Roger Moore
@smintheus:
Today you do, but I don’t think they did back in Carson’s day. They did a lot of stuff that would never pass muster with an ethics committee chaired by anyone but Dr. Mengele.
kc
I really feel kinda sorry for Carson at this point. Instead of being remembered as a brilliant, groundbreaking surgeon, he’ll be remembered as a delusional crackpot.
WereBear
@Mark B.: I am not sure about mental illness but you make a good case. It could be why he left a lucrative profession.
Omnes Omnibus
@kc: His choice.
Roger Moore
@Cervantes:
Maybe so, but there have always been a lot of kids who make bad choices about the college application process because they don’t know about stuff like that. I have no trouble believing that a very poor kid would apply to only one school because he didn’t know they’d waive the fee for somebody as poor as him. I’m sure there are kids making that same mistake today.
MattF
@Cervantes: Apparently not. I was kinda taken aback by that, m’self.
kc
@Amir Khalid:
New York mag headline: “BenCarson Defends Himself Against Allegations That He Never Attempted to Murder a Child”
MattF
@kc: Just waiting now for a debate on whether “I am not a liar” can be a true statement.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
I had to Google him.
Fascinating. “Guarded by a pair of sphinxes” is a nice touch.
beltane
Donald Trump: Carson should “start taking pills” for mental illness http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-primaries/259454-trump-carson-should-start-taking-pills-for-pathological
This is the weirdest election I’ve ever seen.
Cervantes
@Roger Moore:
Could not agree more.
In fact I recently read a study about precisely this phenomenon.
beltane
I used an off-limits word in my previous comment. Anyway, Trump goes there: http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/gop-primaries/259454-trump-carson-should-start-taking-pills-for-pathological
Roger Moore
@Mark B.:
This. I’m pretty sure he’s told these stories so many times that he’s lost track of what the truth is.
Schlemazel
@Iowa Old Lady:
I had not heard that one! I try not to pay too close attention to the wingnuts because they make me want to unleash the chang!
JPL
@MattF: Carson could choose Christine O’Donnell as his running mate and they could run on the I’M NOT A LIAR OR A WITCH PLATFORM………..
Emperor of Ice Cream
@Linnaeus:
Bingo! His story is all about “a bad black” turning into a “good black” … Racists love to tell themselves that story…
Cervantes
I looked at it. It’s not all that “devastating.”
Without a proper rebuttal, the Mannatech thing seems open-and-shut, I agree.
The plagiarism thing, well … Buzzfeed says:
One can argue that, as an academic, he should have known better even when writing for the general public. I would agree. It’s at least arguable.
The stuff about a violent childhood not being corroborated by some childhood friends, is … curious, but an absence of evidence could just mean you haven’t looked in the right place. It could mean he’s lying, too, but the evidence for this proposition is hardly “devastating.” And Carson could help himself by naming a friend or two who might corroborate what he has said. Has he named anyone, or been asked to? I have no idea.
The West Point thing, as reported by Kevin, seems to me just a matter of word choice. It’s possible there’s an open-and-shut case here, too, but Kevin does not make it.
Using drones at the border? Yes, he talked about it. Destroying caves and that sort of thing? Is he saying otherwise now?
The thing about “Perceptions 301” is somewhat bizarre. If I had to comment on it beyond that, however, I’d like to see more reporting first — and not the kind of reporting where absence in publication of a photo taken by a staff photographer means anything whatsoever.
sharl
Carson has certainly inspired some fine creative writing on social media.
Gifted Hands™
Randy P
@bemused: I was once dragged to a cultish “young people” group by a girl I was trying to go out with. (In fact, later it finally dawned on me that my interest in her was being used as bait to drag me in).
At one point early on, everybody went around the circle telling their story, and WITHOUT FAIL, each story had drinking, drugging, the words “I hit bottom” and a specific date and time when they were “saved”. When it got to me I just shrugged and said I was doing fine, no sign of any bottom-hitting.
It was all I could do to keep from cracking up. But sad to say, many people close to me who seemed otherwise intelligent were pulled in by this particular cult and the damage it did to families was enormous.
Tommy
@Cervantes: Yet another way lower income kids get screwed. When I was applying for colleges in the late 80s not only did I have parents that could afford the fees, but dad was a former college professor that called friends that were still professors that spent more than a little time with me on the phone telling me how my applications would be reviewed and what I should focus on. I might not have been born on third base like say Jeb Bush, but I also didn’t hit a ground rule double on my own.
This would be a perfect example of all the cuts, they are at least happening in my state of Illinois, of high school guidance counselors is just so shortsighted.
JPL
@Cervantes: Either it’s a joke, or Carson really is crazy.
Cervantes
@Tommy:
Funny you should say that. Here’s the Summary of the study I mentioned above (Avery et al., Harvard, 2014):
skerry
@Cervantes: I applied to only one school in the ’70s because of the application fees. I don’t remember anyone ever talking to me about fees being waived. First-Gen college grad, obviously.
Cervantes
@skerry:
And it’s still a problem today, as mentioned above.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Cervantes: I took a leap and sent off for an application to Harvard in the late 1970s. My recollection is that the application form was about 30 pages of small print on a booklet that was printed on ~ 1/2 Letter size paper. And the application fee was something like $70 (but I could be mis-remembering that). I’m sure it was designed to be daunting for people who were on the fence, worried about the cost and whether they’re “good enough”. I didn’t bother (and probably wouldn’t have made it if I did).
There are many subtle and not-so-subtle barriers for even qualified people applying to elite colleges. It’s good to see that there’s discussion of these barriers.
Cheers,
Scott.
PurpleGirl
@Roger Moore: If he was in Jr. ROTC, wouldn’t he have been able to get application help from a superior officer? The college adviser of my high school didn’t have the time to really help all of us individually but I was a member of the Biology Department squad (we did things like take books to classrooms, also experiments, charts and models for the teachers to use). I got application help from the head of the Bio lab.
Gvg
@Schlemazel: I have actually encountered one compulsive liar in my life, about 25 years ago. It was such a weird experience to me compared to the rest of my very normal life, that it really stood out. The guy never considered that it was obvious to the rest of us that he was “lying” often because the last story an hour before contradicted it, such as being married or not after we had been introduced to his wife and daughters a few days before. He seemed to have a compulsion to one up everyone else’s story of the moment. Work related chat where some one just mentioned her mother was a nurse and his wife was a doctor. Coworker wasn’t even boasting, it was said in passing. Coworker checked and his wife was a nurse. He got fired for lying on job application and bothering female customers and workers. We never found out enough to understand him.
I sort of doubt Carson can have always been like this. Seems like a serious strike against med school and practice at least in th beginning when establishing himself. I get the impression that this type, really don’t know they are lying but I can’t explain it.
Debbie
@JPL:
What a combo that would be!
Tommy
@Cervantes: I don’t think a lot of people, outside of residents of IL know this, but my state is flat out broke. Our Controller, while in still in office was on 60 Minutes last year, and he called Illinois a “deadbeat State” (his exact words). My father sits on the Board of Directors of the local community college and the state owns them millions, but no money coming. They are starting to cut, and cutting some more.
BTW: I knew there were politics in colleges/universities, but I never knew at the level I do now because of talking with my father. The community college he works with is in rural, southern Illinois. They have a large number of foreign students. They actively go after them (and I think that rocks) and they are successful in recruiting them. But it is a rural town of 12,500 and it isn’t like there are a lot of apartments. So the community college, which has a lot of land, wanted to build apartments. Seems they can’t unless a board, made up almost entirely of four year colleges approves it. And of course it isn’t exactly in their interest to do so.
Many local families are taking them in and offering up rooms, but that hit a snag recently, because I kid you not a huge drug ring was going on. Now the stereotype would be it was run by Hispanics or folks from Africa. Nope, these super cute, 19-year-old girls from Japan. Go figure. My father and I don’t find it funny, but we do kind of smile when thinking about it.
Cervantes
@Debbie:
“She’s the liar. I’m the witch.”
Cervantes
@Tommy:
ハローキティ!
(My rough translation: “Hello Kitty!”)
Tommy
@Cervantes: Well here is where it gets funny/sad. They must have not paid and/or pissed off their dealers in Chicago. So they send some people down to “have a conversation with them” and as you might guess things went kind of sideways.
Happened less than a block from my parents house. Dad and mom like to sit on their huge front porch and drink ice tea or coffee, read the paper or books, and play around on their laptops. They watched the police response unfold. Dad said it was about the most interesting thing that had happened in the town in a few decades. But then I share my father’s strange sense of humor and/or what is interesting or not interesting :).
The Other Chuck
Anyone else struck by the irony of Carson lying about being singled out as “most honest”?
SFAW
I tend to agree that the whole Carson “I was a bad motherfucker” set of stories/lies is a redemption thing. Assuming that to be true, I think there should be an All-Redemption-All-the-Time ticket, with Carson for Prez, and Unclueable Kimmy Davis for Veep. The Talibangelicals would cream their jeans, so to speak.
Carson could have the people he didn’t attack endorse him, and Kimmy could have three of her husbands do the same. (I’d say “her four husbands,” but that would risk charges of voter fraud, and we know white people don’t do that, especially Teahadis. Except for Ann Coulter, that is.)
Renie
OT I know we are not permitted to discuss issues with the commenting system but can someone please tell me how to stop the ads FROM TAKING UP HALF THE SCREEN. They are really obnoxious and that one of the woman’s shrinking stomach on the side being so youuggee is horrible.
Thanks for any input.
Roger Moore
@PurpleGirl:
From the sounds of it, the help his superior officers in JROTC were offering was with getting him into West Point, which is the origin of this particular round of examining his truthfulness. And it’s worth remembering that being willing to help and having relevant expertise are two very different things.
Mandalay
@Renie:
Use AdMuncher: http://www.admuncher.com
Tommy
@Renie: Can you please take a screen cap and link to it?
I could really get myself in trouble here with my client, which of course is John, but I have nothing to do with the ads. I am an ad guy at my core (15+ years agency side) so I don’t mind, even like ads if they serve a purpose and help to provide revenue for a client to cover costs and maybe make them a few bucks.
But as I am seeing these ads in different browsers, I more then cringe a little. They could be done in a different manner that doesn’t slap users in the face. I am not remotely saying I can change anything. We’re making final edits to the site tomorrow, outside of launching the new commenting system, but I’ve always at a later date wanted to come back to John about ads.
PJ
@Cervantes: I was a middle class kid who went to decent public schools, but it did not occur to my parents that I might be eligible for any kind of scholarship/financial aid because we were “not poor”. I had to limit the number of schools I applied to because, if I recall correctly, the application fees were on the order of $40 per school, which was not money that I had, so I had to ask my parents for the money each time, and they were not at all pleased. The guidance counselor at my school was less than useless, and at no point was I given any advice about how to apply to college or the information that application fees might be waived. I can imagine that someone who came from a less fortunate background might have much less information about the process.
bystander
I hope his embellished story about the scholarship to West Point has no bearing on the cancer cure elixir Dr. Carson has endorsed. People’s lives depend upon it, dammit!
The only thing to learn from this episode was more of a reminder than a lesson: Grifters got to grift.
dmsilev
@The Other Chuck:
It struck me too, but I don’t think irony is quite right. Instead, I think it’s an essential element of a con-man’s personality. Getting the mark to trust you and believe that you’re being honest with them is key. Think of Carson as Harold Hill from The Music Man; or at least Harold Hill before the last act. It’s even set in Iowa.
RSA
@The Other Chuck:
Maybe he thought it was along the same lines as “I cannot tell a lie. I cut down the cherry tree.” Memorable! Every American kid knows that story!
Of course, the cherry tree story would have been a complete failure if it had come out that George Washington himself had been spreading it around.
bystander
@Cervantes
“The West Point thing, as reported by Kevin, seems to me just a matter of word choice. It’s possible there’s an open-and-shut case here, too, but Kevin does not make it.”
I don’t expect everyone to have thought about how the service academies work, especially people who never thought of applying or never knew anyone who was seriously pursuing an appointment. I do expect one of Detroit’s top ROTC seniors, especially one who wants to run the USA as Chief Executive, to grasp that a nation does not produce its military cadre by charging tuition. Of course if this ninny ever were put in charge, I wouldn’t be shocked if one of his first acts was to privatize the service academies and get them off the books. You know, the way Dad would cut the ballet lessons when balancing the budget of the family of four living on a total annual income of $65,000.
Tommy
@PJ:
And the fact your guidance counselor wasn’t helpful is a flat out crime. Mine told me it would be a waste of time and my parents money for me to go to college. Undergrad double major with a 3.7 GPA. Grad school, 4.0 GPA. Homecoming King. President of my frat. Director of the university’s Suicide Hotline. President of the Manship School of Journalism Graduate Committee. Graduate student rep for the Committee on Structural Improvement.
I went back to my high school and threw this in her face years later.
I often wonder if she just looked at my grades, which were terrible in high school, and had some formula she used. That maybe she didn’t know I was one of the best high school golfers in the state of Illinois. That most days I was bored in class. Or that I was bullied because at the time I was short and kind of fat (still short, but not overweight anymore).
Gretchen
@Hal: The transcripts conspiracy is because they think that Obama’s accomplishments are all due to affirmative action, that he got lousy grades at Occidental but got into Columbia anyway because he was black.
Gretchen
Tommy, I think the new site is a big improvement. It was really hard to read on my Ipad Air – it appeared as a tiny narrow column between two columns of ads. I had to read it on my old Ipad where it appeared all the way across the page, with no ads. I don’t mind ads as long as I can see the words too.
Tommy
@Gretchen: LOL. Let’s say that is correct. I got into a pretty good university, nothing close to Columbia, because I could hit a golf ball a long way, often on a straight line. I stopped doing that and studied.
Do any Republicans think Obama isn’t the smartest person in the room or very close to it? Do they think he is dumb?
Citizen Alan
@Hal:
“I forgot. What damming evidence is supposed to be in Obama’s transcripts? That was on conspiracy theory I never quite understood. ”
The next step would have been to go over the bios of every professor he did well under and/or took more than once for any signs of far leftist views. “Obama was an acolyte if So-and-So who, forty years earlier, said this Awful Thing that proves he hates America.” That sort of thing.
MaryRC
@Hal: It’s a birther conspiracy theory. Obama is supposed to have registered as a foreign student, thereby proving that he was not an American citizen (either by birth or by having been adopted by his Indonesian stepfather) and his college transcripts at Occidental College are supposed to contain proof of this.
The LA Times has some information on this: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/30/news/la-pn-birthers-claim-obama-applied-to-college-as-a-foreigner-20120529
Tommy
@Gretchen: I am trying not to think about this site today, which somebody said is a reason to fire me. Taking off today and not really thinking about it, but I got a long .txt doc of all the comments. But these darn ads seem to have messed up a lot of stuff. Since they have been put in everything on my end has gone sideways. We’re doing shit over here. I just replaced all the demo site files with the newer files with the ads on my test server. Things are FUBAR. We will figure it out.
The Other Chuck
@Renie:
Install an adblock for your browser. If it’s Firefox or Safari, I recommend AdBlock Plus, if it’s Chrome, uBlock. If it’s IE, I recommend Chrome or Firefox. I don’t block all the ads on this site, but I long ago stopped tolerating the truly obnoxious ones.
Pondering turning adblock off and adding the monster ads to the list of crap to hide in MBBJ. But I imagine anyone who uses user styles probably also has an adblock already.
Gin & Tonic
@dmsilev: If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.
Renie
@Tommy: Thanks for replying. I don’t have any of those photo files like flicker so I added it as a page to a website I do.
Picture of Ad
I can’t keep it on there for long, so let me know once you see it.. Thanks.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
“The Producers” is on TCM right now. “Come in, Mr. Tact!”
Tommy
@Renie: Pull it down. What I am seeing.
WereBear
It truly, awesomely, sucks to grow up poor and a member of an oppressed minority. Wingnuts like to point to examples like Dr. Ben Carson, pediatric neurosurgeon, as an example of “anyone can do it, see?” but they have no idea.
One needs everything that anyone else might have to make it through a tough obstacle course, PLUS having some support, some breaks, someone kind and someone savvy and someone in the right place at the right time. The privileged have a guide on their raft as they go down the river, but the disadvantaged are running these rapids on their own. One wrong reading where the water gets white and frothy, and they are out.
And hope they make it to some shore or other. Because sometimes they don’t.
Renie
@The Other Chuck: Thanks for info but I already use an Ad Muncher. Don’t know why I still see them. Happens in IE and FF.
Denali
It seems apparent that all those Brinks trucks have been busy funding Rubio(bad credit history)and Carson(dishonest about his past) ‘s demise. Jeb?’s strategy is to knock them all down until he is the only one still standing. He might even succeed in appealing to voters after his PR training.
Renie
Has anyone seen those pictures of Carson’s home in The Guardian? Some pretty classy narcissism going on there.
Guardian
RSA
@Tommy:
Is there a list anywhere of stuff that will be fixed and stuff that won’t?
sharl
@Renie: Just learned about that Guardian post via Twitter.
I’m wondering if a significant percentage of white U.S. evangelicals (especially the Olds) will react negatively to the Black Jesus shown in the fourth image. Maybe the long straight hair will cancel out the dark skin in the minds of such folk (assuming it’s an issue in the first place).
sm*t cl*de
@SiubhanDuinne:
Ahem. The plural is “sphinges”.
Renie
@sharl: I had the same thought also felt that was a huge ego trip picture.
chopper
@Renie:
ah, poverbs. my favorite part of the bible.
SFAW
@Renie:
Wow. I thought that Trump was the most narcissistic Rethug candidate, but now I’m not so sure.
No doubt Carson, making small talk on his first date, said “But enough about me. What do YOU think of me?”
SFAW
@chopper:
I had to go back and look.
I expect it would have cost him a few hundred bucks to get a correct one, and it’s not as if he’s made of money.
sharl
@Renie:
Oh it’s definitely that!
PST
Carson’s comment about the signers is so crazy I hate myself for commenting. But … the Continental Congress raised an army and had been managing a war for a year before the Declaration of Independence was signed. Its members were the first and only federal elected (by state legislators) officials.
SiubhanDuinne
@sm*t cl*de:
Not “sphinces”?
bemused
@Renie:
Pic of Jesus with hand on Carson’s shoulder is especially nutty. The guy is missing a lot of brain cells. Ironic for a renowned brain surgeon.
gwangung
@Tommy:
He’s black. So, yes.
navarro
@Amir Khalid: the problem is that to make the evangelicals sit up and take notice you need the redemption story. without the violent path turned by the restroom prayer there is no redemption. there is no redemption if you were always good. thus the stories of a violent past.
FortGeek
@Amir Khalid:
He sounds like some of the fundies I’ve encountered who had amazing back-stories of bad, bad, bad behavior that became dewey-eyed tales of redemption when they turned to Jesus.
bemused
@FortGeek:
The worse the sin, the bigger the redemption? Sounds like a game show.
Denali
@bemused
Its a reality show, haven’t you noticed? Christie and Huckabee are the latest to be kicked to the side. Ah, that’s entertainment!
bemused
@Denali:
Reality show. Game show. Hard to differentiate a difference.
This country is off it’s rocker.
Ruckus
@FortGeek:
When your whole story spins around fairy tales and bullshit wouldn’t the person with the most bullshit story be the best person?
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@gwangung:
Exactly. I guarantee you that even Louie Gohmert, the dumbest man in Congress, is convinced that he’s smarter than Obama and Obama only got to where he is by cheating (aka affirmative action, in their minds). They cannot admit that there is any POC in the world who is smarter than any white person or the whole facade crumbles.
boatboy_srq
@Amir Khalid: What AliceBlue said, plus the added expectation in white Ahmurrrca that all Those People have “troubled childhood.” If Carson, who after all was raised by a single mother in challenging surroundings (I can’t recall whether it was public housing or just bad neighborhoods) had tried the “good kid” whopper, he’d have been pounced on immediately. Being a reformed bad kid is more believable for his target audience.
NotMax
@Renie
Strictly for future reference, there are alternatives, such as Thumbsnap.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@gwangung:
Also, to extend my point, I think the white liberal version is that there are people of color who are smarter than *other* white people, but no people of color who are smarter than *them,* which is why you have so many white pundits insisting that Obama is doing it wrong.
Calouste
@FortGeek: Some people call it redemption, other people call it finally growing up.
Cervantes
@Renie:
There’s obviously a lot going on there that may stem from his background.
Not my style in home décor but I don’t feel a pressing need to criticize him for it.
Southern Beale
But remember all of the Republican hissy fits about Al Gore inventing the internet and Hillary Clinton saying her planed was fired upon when it landed in Bosnia?
jl
@PST:
I for one think it is telling and significant that none of the Founders held federal office before any federal offices existed, under A of Confed or Constitution. Coincidence? I think not.
The Carson West Point scandal is one of those gotcha scandals that puzzle me. I can see how his story is vague enough to pass as a general recollection of a general situation rather than a precise factual history written down under oath. And compared to his other whoppers, why is this the one that has legs? I think it is similar to Obama making composite characters for his autobiography. Though Carson is totally wrong that Obama got a free pass on what he wrote. Obama’s writings have been mined like the silver load, and it is not Obama’s enemies’ fault the guy is so boring that they could find nothing that could even be ginned up into a molehill.
I suppose the Carson fib, or vaguity, or whatever comes close enough to ‘stolen honor’ territory that the media and pundits can feign Genuine Outrage (TM) and Righteous Wrath and Bitter Bile Rising in their Throat (patented, Ronald Reagan). But this specific fib or inaccuracy is a vague charge and quite common, and the usual prominent morons have given Carson a pass on far scarier nonsense. To hell with them all.
Bah humbug, all you kids get off my lawn, my wife is sick and I have to get up early to go to work… damn kids these days…
Cervantes
@bemused:
In the immortal words of the mortal Buddy Holly: That’ll be the day.
Mike in NC
Ben Carson sure is in love with Ben Carson. The painting with him and Jesus is just over the top.
MazeDancer
@navarro:
This is such a good point.
Fundie cult leaders have to have been saved. Without having tried to hammer his mother and kill his friend, Carson is just another nerdy kid who studied hard and became a doc. Impressive. But not specially saved by God. Not so “anointed”.
However, IMHO, Carson’s anger issues seem always present. He has such a cruel, nasty vibe. Have never understood why his devotees think he’s so nice. He feels like someone who would enjoy hurting people. Last night a little of that slipped out when he started to unglue.
jl
So I read in the news that those famous and very politically successful ‘centrist Democrats’ are skeeered of Bernie and lefty Dems. Only name I see is those Third Way people, about whom I know next to nothing.
What is Third Way? Should I be concerned that Third Way is all pissy skeered in their very polite and demure knickers?
Has Third Way ever done anything, at all, other than do dopey hack gimmick PR that is bland and boring no one pays any attention to? They ever get anybody elected, passed legislation, predicted anything unexpected and important, got any successful movement started?
Honest question, has Third Way ever done anything at all that merits anyone paying the slightest attention to them? I really don’t know.
jl
May have missed if this was posted above. If so , apologies, but a more animated Carson:
Unusually Animated Carson Rails Against ‘Unfair’ Media For Examining His Past (VIDEO)
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/carson-florida-press-conference-west-point
I think Fiorina already imploded because of emitting too many fantasies and lies. Carson next? And after Carson, which one of the other GOP fantasists and liars deserves to be next?
Cervantes
@bystander:
But what did he actually say? Was it the following (taken from Facebook)?
How from these words do you conclude he fails to “grasp that a nation does not produce its military cadre by charging tuition”? Neither “tuition” nor “scholarship” appears in this passage. Are you looking at some other source?
You can quibble with “I was offered a slot at West Point” and with his having been “thrilled to get an offer,” but that’s a separate matter from “tuition” — plus is it really inconceivable to you that he was informally assured by someone that, given his record, if he wanted to attend West Point, it could be arranged?
Omnes Omnibus
@Cervantes: ” Later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point.”
From his book “Gifted Hands.” http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/ben-carson-west-point-215598
Another Holocene Human
@JPL: Maybe because George “Dubya” Bush put it out there during the early part of the 2000 campaign that he liked the nickname (and didn’t want to be “George Bush Junior”) whereas Barack made it really clear he preferred Barack. Which turns the use of his old nickname into a kind of taunt.
Another Holocene Human
@Tommy: Don’t forget the Ivies were taking nekkid pickshures of their students for “experiments” well into the 1960s, an episode they’d love for all of use to forget forever.
Another Holocene Human
@J: What do you call the moron who graduated dead last in the class at medical school?
Stan
> Carson amended his statement saying they has no “federal” elected experience.
Next you’ll tell me that Jesus wasn’t a christian.
Another Holocene Human
@Tommy: Please do. I had to start blocking ads with Ghostery because BJ was too unstable on my browser and I guess once I hit Google Adwords (the fucking WORST), I rarely see ads at all. That’s not good, obviously…
Something needs to be done.
Cervantes
@Omnes Omnibus:
The “Editor’s Note” suggests that the article below it was initially a mess — which I can easily believe it was.
About the “full scholarship” thing, I find the choice of words easy to understand because of the contrast with Yale and so on. A place at West Point is, in effect, a full scholarship.
The article also says (quoting Carson?):
Inconceivable?
Another Holocene Human
@Renie: Meh, it’s no Chateau Limbaugh
Lots of people on my mom’s side of the fam had houses like that. Come to think of it, they were pretty self-centered people too. But not abnormally so? I think?
Another Holocene Human
@bemused: He’s a religious nutjob. In his world, a portrait like that is normal. It shows what a humble person he is: Ben Carson didn’t do it alone. Ben Carson did all this with Jesus’ guidance and blessing.
Cervantes
@Another Holocene Human:
I agree — plus the skin tones are significant as well, especially given the environment in which he grew up.
If he is still having to compensate, it would not surprise me at all.
Renie
@Cervantes: That many pictures of yourself and a whole wall of your own awards, certificates and a picture of Jesus with his hand on your shoulder? Yep that’s a bit much in my opinion.
Mnemosyne
@Another Holocene Human:
“Doctor.”
Mnemosyne
Also, as I was saying yesterday, I can completely believe that Carson is both a brilliant brain surgeon and a very bad politician, because the absolute confidence that you need in order to cut into other people’s brains is the kind of personality trait that makes it almost impossible to doubt and examine your own beliefs. Self-doubt is not a neurosurgeon’s friend.
Lewis Thomason
Having a terrible sinful past makes your salvation seem more miraculous,after all what is a little lie for Jesus if it adds to his glory.
The Other Chuck
@Renie: BJ’s ads are too obscure to show up in the global filter lists I guess. Any decent ad blocker should have a way for you to write a new blocking rule by clicking on the ad you want to block. It’s definitely a feature in uBlock and AdBlockPlus.
Cervantes
@Renie:
I understand it’s your opinion.
All I’m saying is you might think differently had you walked a mile in his shoes.
And with that I have said more than necessary on the subject of Ben Carson’s home décor.
Renie
@Cervantes: You don’t seem to get that its not about the décor its about the need to have so many pictures and awards displayed in your home.
trnc
“Carson amended his statement saying they has no “federal” elected experience.”
Aside from the obvious ridiculousness of being surprised that no one held federal office for a federal gov’t that didn’t exist (as many have pointed out), the amended statement is pointless. What federal offices were held by Bush 43, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, etc?
But again, hard to blame the guy for spouting nonsense when the percentage of voters who say “Uh-huh, uh-huh, yup” is in the double digits.
Svensker
@Tommy: Do any Republicans think Obama isn’t the smartest person in the room or very close to it? Do they think he is dumb?
Yes. I know a number of them who think Obama is actually really stupid. Hence all the teleprompter stuff, because obviously he can’t talk proper without a white folk telling him what to say. Pure racism.
The Other Chuck
Hahaha, no “Federal” experience, because the country didn’t exist yet. Oh, except for the fact that every single last signer was a delegate of the Continental Congress. But eh, it’s wrestling with a pig, ainnit?
Elie
@The Other Chuck:
Very funny, LOL… yessir — that pig is slippery!
mclaren
@Roger Moore:
Which means that Ben Carson is the true and proper successor to Ronald Reagan. Now, if Carson goes senile and starts claiming he personally liberated concentration camps in WW II, he’ll have a lock on the Republican nomination.
Brachiator
Carson, sadly, is pathetically ignorant in the same way that Sarah Palin was ignorant. It is a belligerent ignorance that is immune to reflection or the need to apologize. Did some aide feed him the line that Jefferson and others had no “federal” experience? Even so, you would have to be a shameless fool to repeat something so laughingly ridiculous.
I almost feel sorry for Carson. He is out of his depth, but seems incapable of backing down. Instead he doubles down and only makes himself look more foolish.
At this point, I don’t think it matters whether he still leads in some polls. His balloon has been deflated. Slow leak or fast, he’s pretty much done except among whatever hard core supporters he might have.
Elie
@Brachiator:
I agree… but the man cannot help himself — its a compulsion and his narcissism prevents him from seeing his risk — he can only see himself from a grandiose perspective where whatever he thinks, says or does is not only good, but masterful. His outrage when people question him is real.. he truly cannot appreciate the issues that they have with him — they are just not important enough.
Its sick. In my opinion he is gonna act out big time one of these times because there is no lava hotter than the magma coming from the inner volcano of a narcissist.. to be questioned is to be assaulted in their view and they.never.ever.forgive.or.forget. No — I would not expect his family to be ready for this…. but I expect that the King has probably been suppressing true personality development and true sense of self esteem in anyone around him for a while. He picked the wife for that trait, I expect. I hear she is also on the weird side.
trnc
@Cervantes:
He made the scholarship claim in his book, “Gifted Hands”.
Edit: But you probably already knew that, so maybe I’ve missed some context of your thread.
Cervantes
@trnc:
Thanks. Yes, someone mentioned that, and I responded.
Brachiator
@Cervantes: Wouldn’t someone familiar with the process say that “we could get you an appointment to West Point?”
Not “scholarship.”
Brachiator
@Elie: A previous attempt to post disappeared.
I don’t think that anyone knows Carson well enough to offer a psychological profile. Trump, for example, reacts with far more venom when challenged. Is he also “sick?”
Carson reacts like a political novice unused to close scrutiny. I am not sure we should try to make more of it than that.
Carson’s wife has kept a low profile. I don’t see much point in trying to slam her.
Cervantes
@Brachiator:
I imagine so.
If in recollecting that alleged exchange Carson used the word “scholarship” instead, some might see it as a lie or an act of bad faith. I’ve squinted at it this way and that and still just don’t see it that way.
I think someone above criticized him for seeking the presidency while not knowing what words to use when discussing the service academies. If this is one of the good doctor’s flaws, let me just opine that it’s not among the five thousand most important ones.
I’m off. Have a great evening.
AxelFoley
@kc:
Fuck him. I don’t feel the least bit sorry for him.
I don’t feel sorry for anyone who’d fuck over people to get ahead, which includes the entire GOP panel.
sneezy
@Tommy: Use… the tab key… to take you back to the comment.
This doesn’t work. Let’s say I’m reading a comment with a link to a previous one. I want to see what the previous one says, so I click the link. This takes me to the previous comment: so far, so good. At that point, pressing the tab key DOES NOT return me to the comment I was reading in the first place: it takes me to the “Name” box below “Leave a Reply” at the bottom of the page. Since that is the next text-entry box on the page, this is exactly as expected.
With the old web site, the “Back” button or keystroke handled this situation correctly. So what we have now is basic functionality that is BROKEN and web designer who does not seem to understand that it is broken.
sneezy
@sneezy: pressing the tab key DOES NOT return me to the comment I was reading in the first place: it takes me to the “Name” box below “Leave a Reply” at the bottom of the page. Since that is the next text-entry box on the page, this is exactly as expected.
That’s what happens in Firefox. In Safari, pressing the tab key after following a link to a comment does nothing at all. Opera behaves the same as Firefox. Tommy, in what browser does your suggestion actually work?
trnc
@trnc:
OK, LGM had a link to the relevant passage.
https://books.google.com/books?id=iW_dw1Qh_BQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gifted+hands&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAGoVChMI2Lnb6v_-yAIVRYI-Ch0mVg1B#v=snippet&q=professor&f=false
The “last honest man in America” part makes more sense in the book, but the story is still off, what with Carson wanting to make himself out to be the humble hero. Anyone notice how many different times in 2 consecutive paragraphs he realized he was alone? I know it’s nit-picky, but I wonder if had this guy handle the ghostwriting.
https://screen.yahoo.com/mr-short-term-memory-000000263.html
Emily68
@Mandalay: I’m pretty sure that a professor couldn’t do that these days–as an experiment, tell the students that the exams were destroyed and they’d have to take the test over again. Students have to agree to be in a psychology experiment. But who knows what the rules were back in Carson’s college days. If I were a reporter, though, I’d check.
The Other Chuck
@sneezy: The tab key thing works in chrome. Sort of. But it’s bizarre and a non-solution, and the proper solution is to get rid of the onClick handler that’s getting added to every comment link. I just wish I knew how to do that in a userscript, because the obvious approach hasn’t worked so far.
The Other Chuck
JFC … WHAT did I write that threw my last post into moderation?
Cervantes
@trnc:
Thanks.
Ben Carson’s oeuvre has inexplicably never made it on to my reading list, so I had not seen the text in question.