Saturday, November 7, 2015

Ben Carson's Biography



Do people remember violent things? I remember when a knife was held on my mom in a bus on the way to her obstetrician when I was about six years old. Would I know any of the other people on the bus who saw that? Nope. Would they be easy to track down? Nope. This happened over thirty years ago, so I know that while I recall this thing, it would be hard to pin down. I can understand how people inquired about some of what Carson lays down regarding his trying to hit people with bricks, or stabbing a friend with a knife, or hitting his mom with a hammer, wouldn't know anything about that. And yet, I think it's really weird that the standard of ones veracity is verifying the degree to which one was, once, a violent sociopath.

Most candidates for elective office do not rely upon a verification of their being a formerly violent sociopath as proof of their honesty. It's a wild double-bind, no? On one hand--such a liar! On the other, such a violent sociopath! Why is this an argument we're having about a guy who never held office and doesn't seem to have real policies? Why aren't both sides of this question equally disqualifying, all other things considered?

But Ben Carson wants to change the subject to pretend that Barack Obama was never vetted by calling out things he (vaguely) knows about, like Frank Marshall Davis, and Bill Ayres--that absolutely proves that Barack Obama's life story was scrutinized and publicized all the hell over the media. Or those names wouldn't even be on the tip of his tongue. But people asked for Barack Obama's birth certificate, wanted his school records--in trying to claim that Obama wasn't as scrutinized as Carson is being right now, he's kicking up all the ways Obama genuinely was, even to this day. Obama had to give a speech regarding his race and the church he went to in the early stages of the 2008 campaign. He did this far more deftly, and with less blaming of others for his problems, than this whiner.

I dunno.

Also, some of his challengers in the 2016 Best of the Worst competition are supporting him, instead of actually pretending they want to win this thing by taking him out.

I sometimes get to thinking I don't even understand any of this stuff anymore. But I'll say this--once you're explaining, you're losing. Once you're denying what everyone knows, you will get hauled. Maybe they are just not getting in the way of what his tongue is, like a scalpel, doing to himself.

He doesn't have experience and his policy is vague--he had his biography. And his biography isn't exactly correct.

What does that leave?


3 comments:

Grung_e_Gene said...

Vixen S,
The Ben Carson saga which is unfolding before out eyes is fascinating. It's a master class in right-wing perfidy. Conservatives get to brush off the "But, Obama..." rhetoric which one can read in every single right-wing news story about Carson, Additionally, Right-Wingers masterfully get to portray themselves as so enlightened about Race and play the Liberals are the Real Racists card which only finds purchase amongst conservative bigots. And they can just republish their old Clarence Thomas 'High-Tech Lynching' stories.

Vixen Strangely said...

I've been viewing his campaign as a straight-up grift, like a donor-subsidized book tour and a bust-out for self-dealing campaign advisors. Not taking it seriously, though, is like comforting myself, because the problem with a genuinely uninformed candidate who doesn't get policy and believes conspiracy theories with all credulity is that anyone can get in there and call his agenda. And it doesn't hurt that the first people who would call out "identity politics" might just play the race card--like some hitherto unrecognized penultimate "refuge of scoundrels".

Grung_e_Gene said...

I think you ate correct. Carson' s cabinet would be full of conservative charlatans and right-wing scoundrels, and as is their wont they would use the Awesome power of Government to advance their agenda and enrich themselves.

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