Ignorance Is Strength: The Ben Carson Story

He may be good w/ his hands, but Ben Carson, M.D., appears unable to gather the most basic information concerning the world around him.

The woman answered Carson's question about political parties, telling him that there were Labor and Likud and a host of other factions in the Knesset. "And what is the role of the Knesset?" he interjected. This prompted a tutorial on Israel's legislature. Carson is a tall, dignified-looking man with a placid, almost sleepy face. As he tried to concentrate on his Hebrew Schoolhouse Rock primer, he seemed even more fatigued. "It sounds complex," he finally said. "Why don't they just adopt the system we have?"

Like a damn ten-yr. old: "They're weird! Why aren't they just like us?"

The doctor's ignorance is not limited to dirty furriners & their weird ways (in which no real American could have any interest) he doesn't know shit from Shinola about the shithole where he lives, either:

For instance, though he's answered criticism about his lack of experience by promising to rely heavily on his advisers, he has little notion of who or what he'd be looking for in his cabinet. When I asked him which secretary of state he most admired, he replied Condoleezza Rice—who, of course, happened to be the most recent person to hold that post in a Republican administration. Similarly, Robert Gates was Carson's favorite secretary of defense. And when I asked Carson to name his favorite secretary of the treasury, he was stumped. "Andrea Mitchell's husband," he eventually offered. I reminded him that Mitchell's husband, also known as Alan Greenspan, had actually been chairman of the Federal Reserve. "I don't know that there's anybody that really stands out to me as an outstanding treasury secretary. I mean, that's a pretty hard place to be outstanding," he finally said. "Secretaries of the treasury, for the most part, are not big policy people."

Here, the fear that dominates reactionary psychology:

"Perhaps we can move over here," the lieutenant colonel suggested, steering Carson's group to a quieter spot to discuss the nearby Syrian civil war. He claimed that most of the Islamist fighters weren't Syrian but came from Morocco and Europe. "It's just like the troublemakers in Ferguson," Carson said, betraying a habit of wedging the unfamiliar into a context he understands.

The lieutenant colonel tried to direct Carson's attention to a Syrian city in the distance, where some of the war's fiercest fighting has raged. But Carson seemed just as interested in his own location—and whether he was safely under the cover of Israel's vaunted missile-defense system. "Is this area right here protected by the Iron Dome?" he wondered.

The next day, Carson was standing on a pleasant hillside outside Jerusalem that overlooked a grove of olive trees; a shepherd tended his flock of sheep in the distance. Carson heard some noise from a construction site, and he flinched. "Was that machine-gun fire?" he asked.

Did you shit your pants, Ben?

Further evidence of how tenuous the doctor's connection to reality is:

Already he's adopted positions that vex the black community. He's become a booster of GOP-backed voter-ID laws—which many African-Americans view as an effort to disenfranchise them but that Carson, citing largely discredited anecdotes of voter fraud, argues are necessary. And then there's Barack Obama, whose 95 percent share of the African-American vote Carson mainly attributes to ignorance. "I remember one of the man-on-the-street interviews with Jesse Watters"—the Fox News producer who does ambush interviews for Bill O'Reilly—"where he went to Harlem and he was asking people about Obama's policies, except they were all McCain's policies," Carson says. "And they were like, 'Oh yeah, it's brilliant!' 'What do you think of his vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin?' 'Oh, she's the best!' I think a lot of people are like that." (Like those voter-fraud anecdotes, this appears to be a figment of Carson's imagination: Fox News denies that such a segment ever aired.)

Don't forget the projection:

"He faces the same challenges you will face," Williams said of Obama as he spoke. "He's gotta convince people to believe him. That's all he's doing: selling his narrative."

"But he knows he's telling a lie!" Carson vented. "He's trying to sell what he thinks is not true! He's sitting there saying, 'These Americans are so stupid I can tell them anything.'"

Yet another loves America hates Americans candidate from the G.O.P. Carson/Cruz 2016!!

Also wallowing in it: No More Mister Nice Blog.