Is Ben Carson OK?

août 28, 2015

Is Ben Carson OK?

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Can someone pull Ben Carson aside and ask him how he’s doing? Because this rant pulled straight from your uncle’s email chain has me pretty concerned:

That was wild from start to finish. Let’s review.

It’s always a treat to hear someone warn about how dangerous wedge issues can be before running through a massive list of wedge issues, all while saying that they don’t trade in wedge issues. And you literally cannot contradict yourself more thoroughly while claiming to be neutral in the culture war than to say “There is no war on women. There may be a war on what’s inside of women, but there is no war on women.” This comes as calling in the FBI to forcibly prevent abortions from taking place — literally a war on women — is considered a not-that-crazy idea in the Republican primaries.

Ben Carson, via Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons

Then Carson shrugged off the idea that America has a problem with racial injustice by claiming that conflict is just “the nature of people.” Which is true, but convenient if one wants to ignore the staggering racial disparities that are arising from a largely white criminal justice system and a disproportionately black lower class.

Carson also made sure to remind us that Americans these days are soft. The immigrants who came to Ellis Island didn’t complain about how hard they had to work. They didn’t need luxuries like the five day work week, the eight hour day or the minimum wage. They took a thirty cents per hour job at their local meatpacking factory and were thankful for it. And if they died on the job, their kids were more than happy to step up and take their place. They were doing it all for them, anyway.

Speaking of which, for Carson, that same concept of the American dream applied to slaves who didn’t get to choose whether to make a new life in America. They may have been living out a historical injustice, but they were doing it all in hopes that their grandchildren might be free one day. So, you know, silver linings.

From there, Carson went on to outline the grand, subversive liberal conspiracy to destroy America, actively accusing President Obama of trying to destroy the country by giving the poors Obamaphones, inviting illegals and terrorists over the border, hardening the electrical grid (first candidate I’ve heard this cycle talk about that), weakening the military and ceding outer space to our enemies. Seriously.

But not to worry, with Carson in charge, all this will change. “We are the natural leaders of the world,” you see, by way of the fact that we have immigrants from all over the place. So we owe it to Latin America, China, Western Europe and Africa — and all of the other countries that send us their tired, poor huddled masses — to dominate the hell out of them. Because that’s what America is all about.

Carson, by the way, has quietly worked his way up to second place in the Republican primary. Which, in its own way, makes some amount of sense: He’s the crazy outsider for the Republican who wants to feel smarter (and totally, completely, definitely not-racist) about voting for a crazy outsider.

Emphasis on the crazy.

(h/t RawStory)