The Commentariat -- Nov. 6, 2015
Internal links & defunction videos removed.
Afternoon Update:
** Coral Davenport of the New York Times: "President Obama on Friday announced that he had rejected the request from a Canadian company to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline, ending a seven-year review that had become a flash point in the debate over his climate policies. Mr. Obama's denial of the proposed 1,179-mile pipeline, which would have carried 800,000 barrels a day of carbon-heavy petroleum from the Canadian oil sands to the Gulf Coast, comes as he is seeking to build an ambitious legacy on climate change." CW: Thanks to Akhilleus for the heads-up. AND thanks to John Kerry, who nixed the pipeline. President Obama's announcement is worth a listen:
Adam Liptak of the New York Times: "The Supreme Court on Friday announced that it would again address a clash between religious freedom and access to contraception. The case concerns regulations under President Obama's health care law that require most employers to provide free insurance coverage for contraceptives to female workers. The regulations say the insurance must cover preventive services, including all forms of contraception approved for women by the Food and Drug Administration."
** "Gifted Grifter." Every Day a New Lie. Kyle Cheney of Politico: "Ben Carson's campaign on Friday admitted, in a response to an inquiry from Politico, that a central point in his inspirational personal story was fabricated: his application and acceptance into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.... West Point ... has no record of Carson applying, much less being extended admission.... Also, according to West Point, there is no such thing as a 'full scholarship' to the military academy, as Carson represented in his book.... When presented with these facts, Carson's campaign conceded the story was false.... Carson has said he turned down the supposed offer of admission because he knew he wanted to be a doctor and attending West Point would have required four years of military service after graduation.... Carson repeated his West Point claim as recently as Aug. 13, when he fielded questions from supporters on Facebook." CW: Read the whole story: it's a typical boy's pipedream, not one a man relates as a real event of his youth. The fact that Carson has continued to repeat it makes me think he came to believe his boyish pipedream. ...
... Update 1. Steve Eder of the New York Times: "In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Mr. Carson said: 'I don't remember all the specific details. Because I had done so extraordinarily well you know I was told that someone like me -- they could get a scholarship to West Point. But I made it clear I was going to pursue a career in medicine. It was, you know, an informal "with a record like yours we could easily get you a scholarship to West Point."'... , In a Facebook post in August responding to a question, he wrote that he had been 'thrilled to get an offer from West Point.'"
... Update 2. Rachel Stoltzfoos of the Daily Caller: "'The campaign never "admitted to anything,"' a spokesman for Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson told The Daily Caller News Foundation in response to a hit by Politico claiming his campaign admitted to 'fabricating' a key point about his West Point story. 'The Politico story is an outright Lie,' Doug Watts told TheDCNF." ...
... Carson gets the best honesty grades among top candidates [of both parties], a positive 62 - 24 percent. -- Quinnipiac poll, November 4
... Kevin Drum: "Evangelicals love stories of youthful rebellion followed by redemption and a full Christian life. They do not like serious lies told many years after finding God. They especially don't like lies about military service. If Carson's fans blow this off, then he's truly invulnerable.... He told this lie in 1992, when he was 39 years old and already director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He wasn't running for president at the time, so he figured no one would ever check up on it. He deliberately invented a story just because it made him look good. Ben Carson is either a serial liar or else he lives a very rich fantasy life. At this point, I'm honestly not sure which." ...
... Dave Weigel of the Washington Post: "Friday afternoon, conservative talkers like Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, and Sean Hannity criticized the coverage that had made Carson out as a dissembler." ...
... Steve M.: "Many right-wing commentators concluded that this was real trouble for Carson's campaign.... But then the right remembered: Hey, wait. This is from the liberal media. We hate the liberal media. So it must be a lie! And now they're in the process of talking themselves into that.... Carson's going to get a lot more scrutiny, and there are going to be more skeletons in his closet, but the right is living in a post-truth environment, so it'll all be a liberal media plot." ...
... digby: "So, if you combine the weird stuff he said about how he would behave in the presence of a disturbed gunman (lead others to run into the line of fire like he's Audie Murphy), his unverified story of how he was a violent potential mad dog killer in his youth and now this fake story about getting a scholarship to West Point, Carson appears to be someone who is very insecure about his macho bona fides. (Most of his friends from school remember him as a smart nerdy kid which makes sense.) It's just sad since his verifiable real life story is truly great and needed no embellishment. On the other hand he's got a lot of nerve saying President Obama reminds him of a psychopath for 'lying' about the unemployment rate."
... Paul Waldman argues that Joseph the Pyramid Builder is a bigger story than the West Point lie: "Ben Carson's ideas about things like the pyramids, combined with what he has said about other more immediate topics, suggest not only that his beliefs are impervious to evidence but also an alarming lack of what we might call epistemological modesty. It isn't what he doesn't know that's the problem, it's what he doesn't realize that he doesn't know. He thinks that all the archeologists who have examined the pyramids just don't know what they're talking about, because Joseph had to put all that grain somewhere. He thinks that after reading something about the second law of thermodynamics, he knows more about the solar system than the world's physicists do. He thinks that after hearing a Glenn Beck rant about the evils of Islam, he knows as much about a 1,400-year-old religion as any theologian and can confidently say why no Muslim ... could be president. So what happens when President Carson gets what he thinks is a great idea, and a bunch of 'experts' tell him it would actually be a disaster? What's he going to do?" ...
... John Cole of Balloon Juice: "As a side note, IMHO, no profession has suffered more damage in my eyes in the last few years of enhanced wingnuttery than the medical profession. It's been eye opening how many doctors are just sociopaths."
*****
Michael Shear & Dan Bilefsky of the New York Times: "President Obama said Thursday evening that there was 'a possibility' that a terrorist bomb was responsible for the destruction of a Russian passenger plane that broke up last Saturday over the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. Mr. Obama said in a radio interview that there may have been a bomb on the plane, but he did not go as far as his counterparts in Britain, who have suggested that the destruction of the plane, and the death of all on board, was likely the result of a terrorist explosion." ...
... Neil MacFarQuhar & Dan Bilefsky of the New York Times: "President Vladimir V. Putin on Friday suspended all flights from Russia to Egypt, the most popular tourist destination for Russians, as several airlines imposed bans on checked luggage over concerns that a bomb in the cargo hold brought down the Russian charter jet that broke apart over the Sinai Peninsula on Saturday, killing all 224 people on board."
Keith Laing of the Hill: "The House approved a bill to spend up to $325 billion on transportation projects on Thursday after a weeklong vote-a-rama and an intense debate about federal gas taxes. The measure also includes a reauthorization of the controversial Export-Import Bank's charter, which has been held up in Congress since it expired in June. The extension, which was included in the Senate's highway bill and left unchanged by the House, reauthorizes the bank's expired charter until 2019. The House voted to approve the bill in a 363-64 vote. It calls for spending $261 billion on highways and $55 billion on transit over six years. The legislation authorizes highway funding for six years, but only if Congress can come up with a way to pay for the final three years. The measure must now be conferenced with a separate Senate measure...." ...
... Ron Nixon of the New York Times: "From coast to coast, the country's once-envied collection of bridges, dams, pipelines, sewage treatment plants and levees is crumbling. Studies have shown that a lack of investment in public infrastructure costs billions of dollars a year in lost productivity, as people sit in traffic or wait for delayed shipments. But experts ... say the economic measures obscure the more dire threat to public safety: Every year, hundreds of deaths, illnesses and injuries can be attributed to the failure of bridges, dams, roads and other decaying structures. On Thursday, the House overwhelmingly approved a highway bill that would make significant investments in transportation infrastructure over the next three years. But the bill, and a similar Senate version passed earlier in the year, still fall far short of what many infrastructure experts say is needed, both in terms of time and money."
Remember the Catfood Commission? It Was Way Worse than We Knew. Paul Krugman: "... there's growing evidence that we critics [of austerity policies] actually underestimated just how destructive the turn to austerity would be. Specifically, it now looks as if austerity policies didn't just impose short-term losses of jobs and output, but they also crippled long-run growth."
... CW: There's another irony here, which Krugman is too polite to mention: the co-author of a 1986 paper warning of the affects of austerity & of a new paper documenting the actual effects on the Great Recession was Larry Summers -- the guy who hid from the Christina Romer's counsel to go big on the stimulus & who drove economic policies that specifically hurt the jobs market (& helped Wall Street). The country is suffering now because President Obama listened to a man instead of a woman, a man who would be Fed chair instead of a women had not another woman led the fight to give the Fed job to a woman. Just saying.
Capitalism Is Awesome, Ctd. Justin Gillis & Clifford Krauss of the New York Times: "The New York attorney general has begun a sweeping investigation of Exxon Mobil to determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how those risks might hurt the oil business. According to people with knowledge of the investigation, Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman issued a subpoena Wednesday evening to Exxon Mobil, demanding extensive financial records, emails and other documents.... The bitter irony of the story is that this catastrophic policy was undertaken in the name of long-run responsibility, that those who protested against the wrong turn were dismissed as feckless." ...
... Clifford Krauss: "The opening of an investigation of Exxon Mobil by the New York attorney general's office into the company's record on climate change may well spur legal inquiries into other oil companies, according to legal and climate experts, although successful prosecutions are far from assured." ...
... "Fossil Fools." Tim Egan: "It's not surprising, given its army of first-rate scientists and engineers, that Exxon was aware as far back as the 1970s that carbon dioxide from oil and gas burning could have dire effects on the earth. Nor is it surprising that Exxon would later try to cast doubt on what its experts knew to be true, to inject informational pollution into the river of knowledge about climate change. But what is startling is how a deliberate campaign of misinformation -- now disavowed by even Exxon Mobil itself -- has found its way into the minds of the leading Republican presidential candidates.... Trump calls climate change 'a total hoax.' He arrived at this position, judging by several tweets, after experiencing a couple of especially cold winter days in New York.... And here's Carson: 'I'll tell you what I think about climate change,' he said earlier this year. 'The temperature is either going up or down at any point in time, so it really is not a big deal.'... In trying to win the support of the Koch brothers, Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul have signed a pledge to do the bidding of the billionaire oil industrialists, promising to 'oppose any legislation relating to climate change' that would involve higher taxes or fees."
** Michael Lind, in Politico Magazine: "... it's fair to say that the three great projects of the post-1955 right -- repealing the New Deal, ultrahawkishness (first anti-Soviet, then pro-Iraq invasion) and repealing the sexual/culture revolution -- have completely failed. Not only that, they are losing support among GOP voters. This is nothing less than a failure of conservatism itself.... But instead of fading from the scene and opening the way to new thinking, old-fashioned Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan movement conservatism came back, in an even more radical form in the 2000s, catching me (by then an ex-neoconservative) and others by surprise."
Joseph Goldstein of the New York Times: "At a news conference in Kabul on Thursday, [Doctors Without Borders] said that more than a month after the attack the United States military had yet to offer an explanation for why a clearly marked hospital was struck, other than to say it had been hit by mistake. 'A mistake is quite hard to understand and believe at this stage, [Christopher] Stokes[, the organization's general director,] said at the news conference. The organization shared more details of the attack and renewed its call for an independent investigation, which both the United States and Afghanistan have resisted so far. 'From what we are seeing now, this action is illegal in the laws of war. You cannot do this. You cannot bomb a hospital.'"
Steven Mufson of the Washington Post: "President Obama has concluded that a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians is beyond reach during his presidency and will press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take steps to preserve the mere possibility of a two-state solution, senior administration officials said Thursday." ...
... CW: Yeah, when one party's likely top "diplomat" calls the President an anti-Semite & his chief negotiator a nincompoop, things might not work out. ...
... Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times: "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel indicated Thursday night that he was reconsidering his choice for public diplomacy chief after a furor over the nominee's critiques of public officials, including a suggestion that President Obama was anti-Semitic and Secretary of State John Kerry had the intellect of a preteenager.... Mr. Netanyahu's pick for the post, Ran Baratz, is a conservative academic who lives in a settlement in the occupied West Bank. Just last week, he insulted Israel's president, Reuven Rivlin.... "
Presidential Race
Mahita Gajanan of the Guardian: "Hillary Clinton did not shy away from criticizing Republican candidates' platforms in an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Thursday. Watching the most recent GOP debate left Clinton 'a combination of being appalled and being amused'..., [she] said."
Daniel Strauss & Hadas Gold of Politico: "Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee failed to make the cut for the main stage at next week's Fox Business Network/Wall Street Journal debate.... The two Republican candidates failed to meet the 2.5 percent average polling threshold, meaning they'll both be bumped to a 6 p.m. undercard debate on Tuesday, appearing alongside former Sen. Rick Santorum and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.... Sen. Lindsey Graham, former New York Gov. George Pataki, and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore failed to register enough in four recent national polls to participate in the Nov. 10 event at all. They needed to get just 1 percent support in one of those polls." ...
... So now the Demoted are all mad at their former BFFs -- Fox & the Wall Street Journal. I guess Fox & the WSJ are the new "liberal media." ...
... Greg Sargent: "... it's striking that four candidates with real governing experience are getting booted, while Donald Trump and Ben Carson will be at center stage."
Mythmakers. Elizabeth Wiliamson of the New York Times: "To run for president this year, it's not enough to be a neurosurgeon, a senator or a former secretary of state. One must be a neurosurgeon who chased his mother with a hammer as a child; a senator whose father was beaten toothless in prison and fled Cuba with $100 sewn into his underwear; or a former secretary of state whose mother went without food as a first grader.... Ever since Bill Clinton rode his hardscrabble history as an abused kid from Hope, Ark., into the White House, it has become increasingly fashionable for candidates to display authenticity by plumbing their family histories for (often questionable) examples of 'I made it, America, and you can, too.'"
Gene Robinson: "Majorities of Republicans do not favor deporting 11 million people, reject all gun control legislation or believe Obama is a psychopathic slave master. But enough do hold such views to make it unlikely that the Trump and Carson campaigns will collapse of their own weight. The outsiders look to be settling in for a long stay."
In today's Comments, bkeil writes, "Some Surgeons are the last of the 'Doctor as God' stereotype." CW: I'd say bkeil was onto something here.
... CW BTW: Six years later, when he made his Great Pyramids Speech, Carson boasted to the kidz that he had showed "a lot of courage" for dumping on his pro-life friends. But the facts Fahrenthold & Weigel lay out suggest that it was Carson's profound, inexplicable ignorance or confusion or something weird that forced him to reverse himself & denounce the anti-abortion group, not some heroic spasm of personal courage. His turnabout may have had something to do with the fact that he was advising his own patients to get abortions if he found fetal abnormalities. Courage had nothing to do with it. We need not wonder why Ben Carson does not want reporters delving into his history: his stories -- and his self-image -- are at odds with the facts.
... Tierney Sneed of TPM: "Ben Carson is standing by his theory that the Egyptian pyramid theory -- that the pyramids were built by the biblical figure Joseph to store grain -- which has come under scrutiny since Buzzfeed surfaced a 1998 video of Carson referencing it. 'Some people believe in the Bible, like I do, and don't find that to be silly at all, and believe that God created the Earth and don't find that to be silly at all.' Carson told reporters in Miami during a stop on his book tour. 'The secular progressives try to ridicule it any time it comes up and they're welcome to do that.'" CW: Once again, "secular progressives" are at fault here. I don't know that Carson believes any of what he says. In the video embedded in the story, he closes his eyes every time he launches a new whopper. It's creepy. ...
... Turns out Ole Doc is not the only "pyramid truther." Tierney Sneed: "In the fringier corners of the Internet, variations of the pyramids-as-grain-storage argument has spawned entire blogs and a 30-minute documentary." BTW, the Good Book never says Joseph built graneries, much less pyramids, some of which, as Akhilleus pointed out in yesterday's thread, were built centuries before the era in which Christians place Joseph.
I'm really big into conspiracy theories, so I think they were probably built by the aliens as grain silos, don't you think. -- Rand Paul, mocking Carson Thursday
Aliens make more sense, both as regards the construction of the pyramids and as regards a candidacy for president of the United States. -- Charles Pierce
... Katherine Krueger of TPM: "The Wall Street Journal called out Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson Thursday for wrongly claiming the Founding Fathers 'had no elected office experience.' In a Facebook post late Wednesday, Carson wrote: 'Every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience...What they had was a deep belief that freedom is a gift from God.' The Journal pointed out the historical inaccuracy Thursday. Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams, John Hancock and many other signer of the Declaration of Independence all held elected seats in colonial assemblies.... A spokesman for the Carson campaign, when asked about the error, told the paper that the retired neurosurgeon had since edited his post to clarify the signers has no experience in 'federal' office." ...
... CW: Right. Because there was no U.S. federal government before there was a U.S. & the founders established a federation -- on confederation. See, that's why they're called "founders." ...
... "A Tale of Two Ben Carsons." Um, maybe Carson invented even the stories he likes to tell about his violent acts as a teen. CW: Why would he do that? Well, the holy conversion from violent youth to successful, soft-spoken neurosurgeon makes his life story more compelling. It's all part of the grift.
... UPDATE: Eric Levitz of New York: Carson defends himself by asserting he did too try to kill a kid, only it wasn't a fellow student, it was a relative who does not wish to come forward. "'I would say to the people of America: Do you think I'm a pathological liar like CNN does? Or do you think I'm an honest person?' Carson said." CW: I vote for pathological liar. Although I have no idea if he tried to kill somebody or if he tried to hit his mother over the head with a hammer. I'm with Trump on this: "The Carson story is either a total fabrication or, if true, even worse-trying to hit mother over the head with a hammer or stabbing friend!" ...
... Ed Kilgore: Carson's campaign is placing the ad "in six 'urban markets' (code for African-American stations) in the South... You do have to wonder if the real 'target audience' isn't African-Americans likely to vote in upcoming Republican primaries (a very small audience, particularly if it's limited to rap aficionados), or if instead it's part of an effort to convince white conservatives that Carson is willing and able to cut into the overwhelmingly Democratic African-American vote in a general election. That's a pretty compelling electability argument, particularly for primary voters who are in no position to question its credibility. Maybe Ted Cruz should try to same gambit by running some ads with salsa music." ...
... ** Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Time: "Ben Carson is terrible for black Americans." Abdul-Jabbar counts the way. ...
... James Downie of the Washington Post runs down the list of recent remarks Carson has made that show "he doesn't know what he's talking about." But his "striking ignorance" doesn't stop him from arrogantly opining on matters about which he knows nothing or from criticizing people who know more about the subjects than he does. ...
... Dr. Carson's Traveling Medical Show & His Soothing Magical Elixirs. Charles Pierce: "... here is the most overwhelming irony of all as regards to what's happening with Doctor Ben Carson and his former career as a Mannatech shill. The entire Republican primary process has been rendered a travelling medicine show, and he's just one wagon in the caravan. After all, what is Republican economics, if not supply-side quackery and sleight of hand? All the candidates are playing the muscle men, flexing at Vladimir Putin and at Hafez al-Assad and at ISIL from across an ocean. Come early, bring the kids, watch the Magic Asterisk do its work, and make gold fall from the sky into your pockets! The process began with Ronald Reagan, the greatest patent-medicine salesman of them all."
CW: I don't know why we're mocking Ben Carson when we still have Rick Santorum to kick around. While we weren't looking, Santorum took on both ISIS & the Ladies of "The View." Meanwhile, Santorum reminds us, President Obama "doesn't have the guts to appear with Sean Hannity...."
... CW: I'm pretty sure that thumbing his nose at his own father in service of Dick Cheney will help Jeb!'s campaign a lot. ...
... I'm Not Arrogant; He's Senile. Claire Phipps of the Guardian: "Donald Rumsfeld has dismissed George HW Bush's criticism of him as 'arrogant', saying the former president 'is getting up in years'."
News Ledes
New York Times: "The American economy added 271,000 jobs in October, the government reported Friday, a very strong showing that makes an interest-rate increase by the Federal Reserve much more likely when policy makers meet next month. The unemployment rate dipped to 5 percent, from 5.1 percent in September. Average hourly earnings also bounced back, rising 0.4 percent in October after showing no increase in September; that lifted the gain to 2.5 percent over the last 12 months, the healthiest since 2009."
Washington Post: "Confusion reigned at the airport in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh on Friday as a British plan to quickly evacuate thousands of its citizens under emergency security rules was thrown into doubt. Despite repeated assurances from British officials that the airlift would go ahead as planned, the low-cost carrier EasyJet announced Friday that 'rescue plans that were put in place yesterday have been suspended by the Egyptian authorities.'"
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Reader Comments (14)
Great news. Chris Pissy and Mike Shmuckabee won't be in the next debate. The potential bad news is the Pissy might actually be governor
of NJ again.
..."Um, maybe Carson invented even the stories he likes to tell about his violent acts as a teen. CW: Why would he do that? Well, the holy conversion from violent youth to successful, soft-spoken neurosurgeon makes his life story more compelling. It's all part of the grift."
This fits with his delusional paranoid (or paranoid delusional personality, if you prefer). I found while working in a mental hospital many years ago that these patients were all "grifters" in a sense. They seemed psychopathic, because they could change the context of their delusions in a New York minute. However, they always came "back to the basics." Which, of course, meant they were untreatable, in the sense of seeing the folly of their delusions. The best I, or any of the therapists, could do was to encourage them to keep their delusions to themselves, because the world was not ready to accept or deal with them. Oh, those were the days! And, lucky us, they are back again in the Republican Clown Car.....
I've commented here before about my distaste of military involvement in sporting events. Mixing entertainment and war seems like a potentially disastrous cocktail for something so deadly serious. Now we've got some hard facts about the financing behind these "Patriotic" outpourings. $9.1 million of Paid Patriotism.
"The report includes details of contracts with payments totaling $9.1 million to teams in the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Soccer. Investigators identified $6.8 million worth of contracts to the major sports teams that included events considered to be paid patriotism."
That the Pentagon is spending our tax dollars of trying to jeer up patriotism within major sports venues is questionable, even despite the relatively "low" cost given their gargantuan budget, but the fact that the sports teams accept the cash and won't do it out of good will and "Patriotism" is even more despicable. I guess this one goes under "Capitalism is Awesome"?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/11/04/millions-paid-pro-teams-patriotic-events-sens-flake-mccain-say/75141688/
Some Surgeons are the last of the "Doctor as God" stereotype. That is why they are best left in the OR to pontificate to patients who can't hear them and staff that have to remain in the OR suite as the captured audience. Surgeons tend to live in a gilded cage and expect others at work to tend to their activities of daily living.
Carson comes by his arithmetic ingenuity more or less naturally, being a Seventh Day Adventist. Adventists derive from the 19th century (CE) doomsday prophet William Miller, who famously predicted the return of Jesus would occur on October 22, 1844. Which non-event became known as The Great Disappointment. Miller based his prediction on years of exhaustive scriptural research and some highly creative numerology. Many modern Adventists still believe he was right -- the End of the World happened, but nobody noticed.
Some Googling will discover much more of such, uh, interesting notions. Interesting to students of "Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds" (an excellent read).
To sum up today's Carson posts, yes he knows absolutely nothing. Physics and biology were last weeks, now its archaeology, history and even the bible. The reason he knows nothing is that why bother studying anything when already knows everything.
And yes, no scientist, historian or anyone else knows as much as Carson on anything. Think about a POTUS who needs no facts.
So why is he doing so well? Because his base wants to know absolutely no truth. It's called religion.
BTW I gained some serious information about delusional NPD from an encounter with a colleague. After actually seeing someone with serious mental illness in action I (unlike Carson) actually studied the subject including checking with psychiatrists. Hopefully the media will do the same so that Carson is exposed. Saying he is loony is not enough. He is dangerous.
The Problem with Liars.
The Problem with Ben is somewhat reminiscent of the Problem with Dubya. Both claimed to have done something in their younger days that no one has been able to verify independently.
Bush promised that he was doing his duty in the Texas Air National Guard where he went to hide from Vietnam. But for over a year no one had seen him, and he couldn't prove where he was which is almost ridiculously impossible for someone in the military, even the National Guard. The wingnuts destroyed Dan Rather's career for saying so. How dare he. But you can bet the farm that were Bush able to produce a single soul who saw him on base during that lost year, there would have been a parade across the media landscape that had not been seen since John Glenn orbited the planet.
Not to mention the fact that, of all organizations, the military is pretty good at keeping up with who is where and when and for how long. It's not like they don't document that stuff. They were able, however, to produce some documentary evidence about The Decider. The fact that he had decided not to take a required physical. The proved, that for at least that event, he was a no-show.
Carson's supposed doings took place at an earlier age but there are similarities. He has written of multiple, seriously dangerous attacks on a number of people with bricks, bats, rocks, and a knife. Not one of those events can be corroborated. In fact, people who knew him back then are shocked to think he could have done any of those things. One old friend points out that had even a couple of those attacks taken place, the news would have been all over the school. I think most of us could probably agree that few things of that nature were kept quiet in a high school setting. Carson is now hoping for his own Dan Rather moment, someone being fired for daring to question his unprovable recollections.
And perhaps there are other similarities. It's entirely possible that young Ben Carson kept a lid on his anger. Maybe he felt, in retrospect, that unlike many of his peers, he sat on the sidelines when black America was erupting after centuries of abuse. Not only did he sit out a time of violent upheaval, he was on the side of the oppressors, the white establishment, the Army, fer crissakes. But not the real Army, not deployment in Vietnam, where there were plenty of black Americans fighting in the jungles. He was, like Trump, and like Bush, parading around like a toy soldier in his JROTC uniform with the braids and the medals for making the bed properly and not tripping over his shiny shoes while marching up and down.
Perhaps he felt like he needed to balance this image of himself with something a little more dangerous and sexy. So he creates the image of the violent loner, the boy with the temper and a killer's heart.
Bush, years after pretending to be a warrior, a pretense he couldn't even keep up for a short term, provided "balance" in his own way, by starting an unnecessary war and prancing around on the deck of an aircraft carrier dressed up like a real fighter pilot. He showed everyone that he was too a real army guy.
Both of these guys also "found Jesus". But that's whole 'nother psychological investigation.
It's possible that Carson did feel a twinge of regret for not involving himself in the movements of the 60's. And it's possible he did have some level of deep seated anger which he was able to control. Or perhaps he blew up at his mom once or twice or some other kid. But it seems a lot more comforting, in a weird way, for him to expand on those minor events and pretend he was a dangerous volcano of violence whom only god could cure. Oh man! That Bennie was one tough hombre!
Hey, at least he didn't start a war to compensate for his past.
But if enough voters have their way, he may yet get to show everyone that he was too a tough guy!
The problem with liars comes when they start to believe their own tall tales or, at the very least, set out to prove that those tales were true after all. We're still cleaning up after one liar. We don't need another.
The Many Friends of Harvey.
Marvin has a point about Carson and religion.
Let's put aside, for a second, Carson's religious beliefs and then examine his claims and stories as if there were some other pathology operating as the origin of his many wild assertions.
How long would anyone be listening to him?
But let's grant that the operative pathology IS religion, just not Christianity. What if he were a Buddhist or a Rastafarian or, for shits and grins, a Muslim?
How long would anyone be listening to him?
I've said before, and I maintain, that religion, in its purest form, that is, without the overlay of control and prejudice and manipulation, as a spiritual aspect of human life, has a lot to offer. But we rarely encounter it in that form. Instead, religion as a type of neuropathology, is responsible for some pretty horrible stuff throughout history.
And if we looked at Ben Carson (and Huckabee, and Santorum, and Bush, and most other Confederates) as being in the thrall of a different kind of neuropathology, say, a form of depression or delusion, how long would anyone be listening to him?
But Christianity? Oh, he's god's chosen one! Give him the nuclear codes and put him in charge of things like job creation, the economy, foreign policy, domestic investment, war and peace. He doesn't know shit about any of it, but god will take care of it. If you changed that around and said "oh, he doesn't know anything about any of those vital aspects of the presidency, but his friend, a big invisible rabbit named Harvey will help him out" people would cross the street whenever they saw you coming.
And when (if) he doesn't win, it will be further proof that everyone is out to get the Christians. They really do win both coming and going. But in the meantime, the rest of us spend ridiculous amounts of time and energy countering the assertions and demands of the friends of Harvey.
More on Liars...
So I see Rick (that frothy mix) Santorum is opening his mouth again. Which means that he's lying. Again.
I love his assertion that he's more of a manly man (what is it about Confederates always feeling the need to assert their manhood?) than the president because he (Mr. Frothy Mix) stood up to the ladies of The View and "beat" Rachel Maddow in a "debate", while Obama won't even take on Sean InsHannity. First, let's dispense with the idea that Hannity has anything of value to say or would pose any questions beyond the "Why are you still denying you're a Muslim who was born in Kenya?" variety.
I want to get to that part of Mr. Frothy having taken on Rachel Maddow and won. I watched the interview. In it, Frothy Man dispenses huge amounts of bullshit like he's been storing it for decades in a grain silo shaped like a pyramid. (Oh, he has? Sorry.)
He clearly demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about how government works. Maddow tries to explain to him, like you would to a slow person, that the Supreme Court, not congress, gets to decide what's constitutional or not. Mr. Frothy disputes this. So his declaration of "winning" the debate extends from his personal definition of "winning" which seems to be saying "I know you are but what am I" over and over again when told he's flat out wrong. Myself, I'd call this pigheaded and asinine, but I suppose Frothy has his own Dictionary as well as his own version of American Civics.
He also backed down on his "man on dog" slur, saying he never should have said it.
I guess that's also "winning".
Did he wrestle the ladies of The View to the ground too with his stunning forensic abilities?
Such manly men, these Confederates. But not too up on definitions. Or civics. Or history. Or science. Or...
The president just went on national TV to say ixnay to the XL.
The screams from the Confederacy will be reaching you shortly.
Impressive! Not the usual Friday afternoon/over-the-weekend news dumps today! Thank you, Mr. President!
Charles Pierce: "You could see it coming ...when TransCanada, the multinational corporation seeking to build the death funnel, begged the State Department for a reprieve that would have pushed the decision to approve the tunnel past the end of the current president's term."
Then it is Bloomberg putting up his own money against Attorneys General in several states. NYT times: "Michael Bloomberg Targets Attorneys General With Ads on Carbon Emissions"
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/07/us/politics/michael-bloomberg-state-attorneys-general-carbon-emissions.html
"If Jobs Report Heralds a Solid Upturn, Democrats’ Fortunes May Also Rise" by Jackie Calmes. Does that explain why the Market was low on the news and according to CNBC is struggling to retain highs? Try to figure the Market, if the news is good, it goes down. Bad new, up. On other days, just the opposite. I try to follow the conflicting forecasts: Peter Schiff sez "...it'll be a horrible Christmas.", is Jeremy Siegel still looking for the Dow at 18,000 (believe that's down from a once predicted 20,000 by years' end). Get out of Gold!
Oh good, heavens...just as I finished typing about the Dow went back to check on something...and a new lead story just popped up:
"Dow 18K is officially back on the horizon as the index has rallied to within 3 percent of its all-time high. But while Wall Street eyes that as the next important level, some traders are looking at what stocks could take the index into uncharted territory: Dow 20K."
UnF-ing-believable.
Paul Waldman's Carson column is getting there. "It isn’t what he doesn’t know that’s the problem, it’s what he doesn’t realize that he doesn’t know." Now that the media is starting to look more closely I think we are going to see some real doozies. I can't wait to hear more about details of his medical career.
The Carson West Point lie is being sloughed off by him saying he didn't exactly remember all the details. Well I do. I applied to West Point. I had the recommendation letter from my senator and the whole nine yards. I think the admission had more to do with the films my football coach sent them. It was a bit of a lark on my part. I never thought I'd get in. But I was also admitted to another school it was hard to pass up, so I never made it to West Point. But I remember most of the details. For instance, I remember a call from their admissions people telling me that there would be no need for loans or scholarship money because if I was accepted, it was free. Of course I never got encouragement from someone like Westmoreland, but the whole thing was pretty memorable.
Funny it wasn't quite so memorable for a killer like Ben Carson.
P.S. to my earlier post on Benny Carson.
I mentioned that delusional paranoids, (or NPD/delusional type) are very much like psychopaths in that they can twist and turn any angle of a lie in which they are caught--and end up back at the center of their own story. This has always amazed me, because I lack the ability even to imagine how difficult this must be to pull off. However, since I have seen this happen at least a dozen times, I know it can be done. Do NOT expect The Ben to back off his stories or to admit he has lied. He might claim a fuzzy memory or declare an inquiry to be unimportant or stupid. But his belief in what he has said will remain unshaken. Promise you that! We will feel crazier than shithouse rats in the end if we try to get him to tell THE truth!