Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Ben Carson: The GOP's Scariest Candidate?

Looking at the current field of GOP presidential nomination candidates, they all look pretty scary if one lives in a reality based world where logic, reason, and objective reality are important.  Each of the GOP standard bearers lives in a fantasy world, the only issue being how detached from reality they are.  As a column in the Washington Post argues, perhaps the scariest GOP candidates is Ben Carson.  As indicated before, a family member used to work at Johns Hopkins and has said that the Carson we now see seems to have gone crazy or had a nervous breakdown compared to the Carson that was renown at Johns Hopkins.  The column underscores Carson full fledged insanity.  Here are  column excerpts:
The craziest thing about the Republican presidential contest isn’t that Donald Trump is in the lead. It’s that Dr. Ben Carson — who truly seems to have lost his mind — is in second place and gaining fast.

Trump may be a blowhard, but Carson has proved himself to be a crackpot of the first order. Of all the GOP contenders, he’s the scariest.

I say this as a longtime admirer of Carson for his stellar medical career. As the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Carson not only saved lives in the operating room but also inspired countless young people to overcome rough beginnings and reach for the stars.

[D]espite spouting more utter nonsense than the law should allow, Carson has the support of 18 percent of GOP voters, according to the RealClearPolitics poll average — five points behind Trump and miles ahead of the rest of the field.

Carson speaks softly, slowly, thoughtfully. Much of what he says, however, is dangerously wrong.

His most recent burst of blather was over gun control in the wake of the Oregon massacre. As recently as Sunday, on “Face the Nation,” Carson was defending his assertion that the Holocaust would have been “greatly diminished” if Jews had been able to keep firearms in their homes. Gun control laws enacted by the Nazi regime, he contends, were a prelude to genocide.

To say that experts disagree is an understatement. As Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote in the Huffington Post: “It is mind-bending to suggest that personal firearms in the hands of the small number of Germany’s Jews (about 214,000 remaining in Germany in 1938) could have stopped the totalitarian onslaught of Nazi Germany when the armies of Poland, France, Belgium and numerous other countries were overwhelmed by the Third Reich.”

It is equally beyond the pale, in my view, for Carson to have written on Facebook that while he saw the horror of gun violence as a youth in Detroit and as a doctor in emergency rooms, “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” Or to have implicitly criticized the victims in Oregon by saying that “I would not just stand there and let him shoot me,” stating that people who find themselves in such circumstances should rush the gunman.

Carson is a fan of dark conspiracies. Witness his claim that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Russian President Vladimir Putin got to know each other in Moscow in 1968. All of them, he claims, were at Patrice Lumumba University at the time.

PolitiFact looked into the matter and found one meager shred of evidence that Abbas might have attended the university, though no indication of when; zero evidence that Khamenei ever studied in Moscow; and the inconvenient fact that Putin was 16 at the time. PolitiFact’s verdict: “Pants on Fire!”

Carson has compared the Affordable Care Act to slavery. He has called President Obama a psychopath. He disbelieves established science on evolution and climate change. 

Carson is a lunatic - which is why apparently he is loved by so many in the GOP base who are just as insane and dangerous. 

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