Poor Dr. Ben Carson. The retired pediatric neurosurgeon turned 2016 candidate — who became famous among conservatives after making a series of incendiary remarks — just wants to campaign in peace, but the liberal media keeps pushing what he calls the “craziness narrative.” For example, today he’s in the news just for making the completely innocuous suggestion that Americans could learn something from a brutal terrorist group that beheads innocent people.
“A bunch of rag tag militiamen defeated the most powerful and professional military force on the planet. Why? Because they believed in what they were doing. They were willing to die for what they believed in,” Carson said during a speech at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting. “Fast forward to today. What do we have? You’ve got ISIS. They’ve got the wrong philosophy, but they’re willing to die for it while we are busily giving away every belief and every value for the sake of political correctness. We have to change that.”
Carson preemptively criticized journalists for twisting those words to make him sound nutty. “Now I recognize that there’s press here and some of the press will say, ‘Carson said that ISIS is the same as the United States,’” he said. “They are just so ridiculous, so ridiculous.”
Also absurd: People get riled up just because Carson said our government is “very much like Nazi Germany,” compared Obamacare to slavery, and mentioned homosexuality and beastiality in the same breath. “Every time the liberal press does something about me, they say, ‘He’s the one who said Obamacare was worse than slavery,’” he said. “I never said that. I said it’s the worse thing since slavery.” (He did not note that he also said Obamacare “is slavery in a way because it is making all of us subservient to the government.”)
As for his comments on homosexuality, he clarified that he believes gay couples “can even get it legalized so they can have visitation rights and property rights. They just don’t get to call it marriage … If you do it for one, you got to do it for the next one who comes along. And pretty soon it has no meaning. I don’t have any problem with gay people. No problem whatsoever. But I don’t think anyone gets to change things for everybody else.”
In the media’s defense, it’s easier to focus on Carson’s quest to find increasingly offensive analogies because he’s never run for office before. Though, as Carson explained, that’s exactly what would make him a great president: “I will confess that I do not have experience in certain things like empowering special interest groups and growing the government and wasting taxpayer money and disarming our military and deserting our allies and lying to the people and submitting to the PC police.”
