The coming of Ben Carson

In Tulsa to sell books and save America

The event at the Barnes and Noble store on 41st Street east of Yale won’t start until 11:30 a.m. but a line began forming before 6 a.m. outside the store to see the presidential candidate.

The arrogance of GOP Presidential Candidate Ben Carson, though, arrived even earlier.

“That would demonstrate (a person has) no idea how much knowledge it takes to be a neurosurgeon,” Carson said. “You’re not the first one to say that, which shows me people have no idea what they’re talking about when they make that comparison.”

That was Carson talking to Tulsa World reporter Randy Krehbiel the day before coming to town to peddle his latest book, A More Perfect Union, his latest tome on how the Left is destroying America. Carson was annoyed because Krehbiel, a solid political reporter, had the temerity to ask him about what it takes to be president and if, in fact, Carson is as qualified as a career politician. Carson chafed at the suggestion (while essentially calling Krehbiel a moron) that looking at people’s brains didn’t prepare him, for example, to build a coalition to fight ISIS.

“What you really need is the ability to put things together,” Carson said. “I certainly have the ability to do that. When I was in charge of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, it wasn’t even on the map. I had to build all of those different divisions until by 2008 U.S. News and World Report ranked us No. 1 in the nation."

The suggestion, Hippocrates, that scheduling the pediatric anesthesiologist rotation prepares one for the White House is as laughable as the notion that operating on conjoined twins helps one hammer out a wheat deal with India.

A word about this book tour. Carson suspended his presidential campaign—evidently he loves commerce more than he does country—for two weeks in October to tour bookstores in the south and southwest, states in which a Ben Carson mannequin would carry in the 2016 election, so let’s not read too much into how early the crowds queued up or how mesmerized they were.

More importantly and the point here, on issues from domestic battery, free speech, to Muslims, to women’s reproductive rights, Ben Carson can be a monstrous and delusional constitutionally challenged zealot with a dog whistle.

One example:

On the Second Amendment, he told KRMG in advance of his Barnes and Noble gig, “It is there so the populace could fight against the government if it decided it wanted to dominate them.”

Populace … dominate, who talks like that?

I know. Someone who tells an insupportable story about being held up at a Popeye’s organization and boasting about how he told the gunman to attack the cashier.

To his premise, though, someone want to show me where in the constitution the founders hid that passage about how the populace needs guns to fight the government?

Carson also believes it is the lack of Second Amendment rights that exacerbated the Holocaust, because, as we all know, the only thing that stops a bad Nazi in a  Panzerkampfwagen is a good Jew with a Ruger.

The retired neurosurgeon says “the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.”

Yugoslavia lost more than a million, many who were armed; Poland lost more than 5 million, many who were armed; Russia lost more than 19 million, many who were armed, but apparently if more Jewish families in Hamburg in 1937 had kept guns in the cupboard, they could have minimized the Final Solution. His ignorance of the bravery, futility and impossibility of the time is astonishing and insulting.

An estimated 7,000 Jews perished during the uprising, while nearly 50,000 others who survived were sent to extermination or labor camps. By May 16, the ghetto was firmly under Nazi control, and on that day, in a symbolic act, the Germans blew up Warsaw’s Great Synagogue.

And what is it with Carson’s peculiar affinity for Nazi metaphors anyway?

There was this:

In an interview with Newsmax host J.D. Hayworth today, Ben Carson said that if people want to know the truth about President Obama, they should simply “read ‘Mein Kampf’ and read the works of Vladimir Lenin.”

Lovely.

When another reporter asked if he was really comparing President Barack Obama to Hitler, Carson said, “No. I am saying in a situation where people do not express themselves, bad things can happen.

Of course that’s what you were doing.  

And then there was this:

Neurosurgeon Ben Carson stood by his controversial comparison of the United States to Nazi Germany in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday.

When pressed on it, he answered:

“You are just focusing on the words ‘Nazi Germany’ and completely missing the point of what is being said,” he added.

The burden of being Ben Carson. Nobody hears the subtlety of his insight, just the dissembling; still, he promises to soldier on. 

“I know you’re not supposed to say ‘Nazi Germany,’ but I don’t care about political correctness,” he said in an interview last year. “You know, you had a government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe.”

Just. Stop. It.  

Who exactly is afraid? Cliven Bundy? Ted Nugent? You?

Williams had said Obama looked “elegant” that night.

And Carson responded: “Like most psychopaths. That’s why they’re successful. That’s the way they look. They all look great.”

That was back in March.

This was two weeks ago.

“It’s nice to know that people are actually listening to what I’m saying as opposed to how it’s being reinterpreted,” Carson said.

We heard you the first time, the second time, the third time, so, no, it’s not the media; it’s you. It’s not the reinterpretation, it’s your intent. You blame political correctness, though, hiding behind your faith and well-rehearsed exasperation should anyone call you on your absurdity, paranoia, detritus. Your demeanor—how calming, how learned, reporters and candidates still call you Doctor Carson, as if that meant anything, carried any weight, outside an operating room. There were “doctors” at Soboibor, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, too, and I know you’re not supposed to say that, but I don’t care about political correctness, either, so if you think I’m comparing you to Nazis, you’re just focusing on the words and completely missing the point of what I’m trying to say. Your honorific helps to sell books, doesn’t it, (as well as selling nutritional supplements that you can then lie about selling), makes people wait in line to hear your great, gentle wisdom, and stern warnings about a constitution in peril? Obama is a tyrant, a psychopath, his government the Third Reich, his health insurance initiative (and abortion) worse than slavery.  You speak to the uninformed, insane, unhinged, but you’re soft-spoken, well-liked, a doctor, so people are listening. It’s us against them, prepare yourself, you say. The Muslims, gays, liberals, immigrants, media, feminists, socialists are coming for you, for me, our guns, our way of life—just like the Nazis did 70 years ago. It could happen here. Join me in defeating them. Oh, yeah, buy my book. I’ll sign it.

It is a campaign that traffics in fear, xenophobia, death porn. 

“Not only would I probably not cooperate with him, I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say ‘Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me but he can’t get us all,’” Carson said.

That was his reaction to the shooting at Umpqua Community College. 

Carson’s photo of himself holding up a sign reading “I am a Christian” went viral following reports that the shooter at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, had asked students whether they’re Christian.

Parents of dead sons and daughters had to watch and listen to this self-glorifying tripe, how their freshly buried children didn’t defend themselves properly, had to watch them be used as props to defend faith and guns.

Let me finish on a personal note. When it comes to the blowhards, the mendacious and the duplicitous around these parts, I try to spare no snark in this column and gladly throw all the rhetorical rotten fruit in their direction I can, but this time, it’s different. Ben Carson, who he is and what he’s selling, is different. I could tell you that’s because I’m Jewish and my daughter goes to school 103 miles from Umpqua Community College, but it’s more than that.

For more from Barry, read his reaction on the Tulsa World's farewell to Sheriff Stanley Glanz.