Posted on 11/05/2015 5:39:41 AM PST by jimbo123
Ben Carson, the soft-spoken, Yale-educated brain surgeon who has surged in the GOP presidential race, has written and spoken powerfully of divine intervention at several pivotal moments in his life.
At the core of his narrative of spiritual redemption are his acts of violence as an angry young man - stabbing, rock throwing, brick hurling and baseball bat beating - that preceded Carson's sudden transformation into the composed figure who stands before voters today.
In his 1990 autobiography, "Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story," Carson describes those acts as flowing from an uncontrollable "pathological temper." The violent episodes he has detailed in his book, in public statements and in interviews, include punching a classmate in the face with his hand wrapped around a lock, leaving a bloody three-inch gash in the boy's forehead; attempting to attack his own mother with a hammer following an argument over clothes; hurling a large rock at a boy, which broke the youth's glasses and smashed his nose; and, finally, thrusting a knife at the belly of his friend with such force that the blade snapped when it luckily struck a belt buckle covered by the boy's clothes.
"I was trying to kill somebody," Carson said, describing the incident -- which he has said occurred at age 14 in ninth grade -- during a September forum at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
But nine friends, classmates and neighbors who grew up with Carson told CNN they have no memory of the anger or violence the candidate has described.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Youthful temper? He admits to stabbing the guy so hard the knife blade broke hitting his belt bucket. He obviously tried to kill the other kid. That part of the story remains consistent. However, I agree and then some about slime ball pervert Bill Clinton.
Yeah.. holding ALL candidates to an equal standard would be refreshing... but you know as well as I that's not happening.
Well in that light, what's to say anyone who dealt with anger in their earlier years won't have a relapse? People grow and change.
Unless it never happened...
My opinion is he is exaggerating it to puff himself up. It’s a much better story.
I’m sure many FReepers would agree with you... he’s pretty much despised around here.
I don’t despise him at all. I just don’t trust the schtick.
CNN..
I stopped reading there.
So was Carson a thug who threatened his mom with a hammer?
Or was he just making it all up?
When will Carson fire and repudiate that lunatic Armstrong Williams who has written that he wants tax payers to pay Nation of Islam thugs to patrol Chicago?
Not saying Carson said this, but allowing Williams to stay on show very questionable managerial skills.
Didn’t know it was about Carson... (read reply literally).
Carson may have threatened his mom, and may be a thug. I just choose to read it elsewhere, not on CNN.
And 60% of Americans think Carson is more trust worthy.
Makes sense, too many trust worthy idiots out there.
So Carson’s supporters are telling us:
Trust the guy who threatened his mom with a hammer?
or
Trust the guy who lied about threatening his mom with a hammer?
I don’t get it...
Honestly any poll about Carson to me is an outright lie, i think America isn’t that stupid, not in this age of google search for everything, its just an organized manipulation by the MSM, another in an endless chain of reasons to turn the MSM off.
https://www.conservativereview.com/
Ben Carson: Black, Brilliant, and Intolerable
By: Jeffrey Lord | May 6th, 2015
This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree. - Federal Judge Clarence Thomas on the events surrounding his confirmation hearings to the U.S. Supreme Court (1991)
Here we go again. The rope is out. The word is out. It’s official.
Ben Carson is set to become the new Clarence Thomas. Don’t believe me? Check it out here at the Washington Post, where the headline reads:
As Ben Carson bashes Obama, many blacks see a hero’s legacy fade
This liberal media’s Carson takedown begins like this:
The black man courting crowds of white conservatives doesn’t seem like the same guy that H. Westley Phillips once idolized. Phillips still relishes the day he heard Ben Carson inspire minority students at Yale University with his story of persistence. He can still feel the nervous anticipation he had while waiting in line to shake Carson’s hand. ...For many young African Americans who grew up seeing Carson as the embodiment of black achievement — a poor inner-city boy who became one of the world’s most accomplished neurosurgeons — his emergence as a conservative hero and unabashed critic of the United States’ first black president has been jarring.
Over in the New York Times, the Carson presidential candidacy story was portrayed as follows:
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ben Carson?
Dr. Carson is no longer a serious man; he’s a problem, said the Times:
In 2011, Carson’s politics took a strident turn, mirroring that of many in his party during the Obama years. America the Beautiful, his sixth book, which he wrote with Candy Carson, his wife of 39 years, included a get-tough-on-illegal-immigration message and offered anti-establishment praise for the Tea Party. It suggested that blacks who voted for Obama only because he was black were themselves practicing a form of racism. (Earlier this year he admitted to Buzzfeed that portions of the book were lifted directly from several sources without proper attribution.) His prayer-breakfast performance in 2013, and the extremity of his remarks in the months afterward (Obamacare is the worst thing since slavery; the United States is very much like Nazi Germany; allowing same-sex marriage could lead to allowing bestiality), left some of his old friends bewildered
Got that? So now the one-time icon of many African-Americans is nothing but an Obama-bashing, strident nut job. But wait! The New Yorker, that bastion of liberal elitism, has its own take. Their headline:
Ben Carson, Paranoid
This jewel of elitist thought, after labeling Carson guilty of crackpottery declared:
Carson is a black representative and standard-bearer, not for conservatives but for paranoid Americans.
By now this is the kind of treatment of conservatives who happen to be black – or female or Hispanics or any other minority escapee from the liberal plantation – that has become tiresomely familiar. Justice Thomas was, in retrospect, merely the first and most celebrated to get this treatment. African-Americans, you see, are supposed to be liberals. They are the field hands of the liberal plantation. If they’re not? If they have the audacity to escape the conceptual plantation and think for themselves? Then the deluge of personal insults and racial slurs begins. As is happening right now with Dr. Carson, who has as of this week officially declared his candidacy for president.
Imagine if Ben Carson were a liberal. It takes no imagination to realize the accolades that would be coming his way.
Imagine if Ben Carson were a liberal. It takes no imagination to realize the accolades that would be coming his way. If Carson was saying that to use the word thug is the same as using the n-word? If he wanted a huge stimulus like the Obama 2009 stimulus? If he believed in same-sex marriage? If, like Jay Z, he was a friend and supporter of Obama? If all that were added to his sterling career credentials he would be a lock for the 2016 Democratic ticket, either at the top or as Hillary’s running mate if he didn’t defeat her outright.
But Carson is a conservative. He believes in traditional marriage. He wants to cut the corporate tax rate. He is deeply opposed to political correctness. He asks whether we are Judeo-Christian or not? He mocks socialism. And stands for more – much more.
This from a Yale educated black neuro-surgeon? Ben Carson hasn’t just betrayed his race – he’s betrayed his class. And don’t think class has nothing to do with this.
Back in the 1930s, liberals of the day loved to say the reason the wealthy, Harvard-educated Franklin Roosevelt was so despised in some quarters was because he had betrayed his class. Notes historian H.W. Brands: The wealthy denounced him for having betrayed the class of his birth. Time magazine devoted a lead article to the burning bitterness the better-off felt for Roosevelt.
This type of sentiment has never vanished – except that now the shoe is on the other foot. If you are wealthy in America today, not to mention if you have benefitted from an Ivy League education, you are expected to be a liberal. Without question a reason for the fierce, bitter resentment the American Left has for George W. Bush is because he is from a deeply Eastern Establishment family of wealth and is a graduate not just of Yale but of Harvard as well. Had Bush been a liberal he would today be right up there in Bill Clinton territory with his popularity in the media and with liberal elites. But Bush went in the opposite direction – and when he ran for president in 2000 out tumbled tales of his contempt for the liberal elites who populated Yale when he was a student there. In short – like fellow Yalie Ben Carson – George Bush was a traitor to his class – the class of liberal elitism. And the betrayed Left would make it a point to see that he got what was coming to him.
Another factor in the Carson entry is that the media elites in the New York-Washington axis spend so much time talking and socializing with each other. Over at National Review, Jim Geraghty captured the problem exactly. Reporting from Nashville where he was covering the recent NRA convention that was attended by a flock of prospective GOP presidential candidates, Geraghty wrote:
A lot of members of the media who are covering the GOP presidential candidates have exceptionally little in common with the voters who will select the Republican nominee. Thus, when the Republican candidates make their pitch to grassroots conservatives, the hot-take instant analysis from the big media voices usually concludes that the pitch was a belly flop. But the GOP candidates aren’t trying to win votes in the New York and D.C. newsrooms, and in a spectacular failure of empathy and understanding, a lot of reporters simply can’t grasp the hopes, fears, and priorities of GOP-leaning voters in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina . . . and Tennessee.
Geraghty is right. And his description helps explain the hostile media reaction to Carson’s announcement.
Decades ago, in the aftermath of the 1972 election in which Richard Nixon carried 49 states against uber-liberal Senator George McGovern, studies showed that 80% of the media had voted for McGovern while 60% of the country had voted for Nixon. Famously in the day was the story of the New Yorker’s powerful and celebrated film critic, the liberal Pauline Kael. Kael who, according to the New Yorker itself, said of those Nixon voters that were a distinct majority of her fellow Americans:
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.
Ben Carson, to these people, is not a candidate but an affront. A personal insult. After all, an educated black man is supposed to think like, well, Barack Obama.
A lot of the people writing these Carson stories are, in one form or another, precisely of the snot-nosed urban progressive type of which Geraghty speaks. They look at Carson and see what they know – black, Yale, professional superstar – then hear what he’s saying and are utterly unable to relate.
What Ben Carson sounds like to them is their imagined version of the eternal liberal bogeyman: the basic white, all-too-often Southern bigoted ignoramus. Ben Carson, to these people, is not a candidate but an affront. A personal insult. After all, an educated black man is supposed to think like, well, Barack Obama.
This problem is not limited to Ben Carson either. At the root of liberal criticisms of Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump – just as it was with Ronald Reagan – is that each in their own fashion have offended the liberal notion of who these people should be. Fiorina is betraying the idea that all women are liberals. Cruz and Rubio are betraying their Hispanic heritage. And then there’s the Trump, he the TV celebrity Manhattan-ite billionaire with the degree from Wharton, who says everything conservative anybody from the heart of the elitist beast must never, ever say, much less believe. Each in their own way, like Ben Carson, is seen as a traitor to their gender, race and, as mentioned, their class.
There is a long way to go in the 2016 campaign. But even as the starting gun sounds and the candidates begin their long runs, the media is determined to paint portraits of these people – and the black Ben Carson is at the top of this list – as extremist wackos well outside the mainstream of America.
In the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, what lies in store for Ben Carson is nothing less than another high-tech lynching for an uppity black man who has the audacity to disagree with the masters and mistresses of the liberal plantation.
I am far more concerned about his relationship with Al Sharpton the racist hustler.
If Shapton was KKK Duke, and a white met with him and spoke to a KKK gathering there would be hell to pay.
Hey Romney got labeled a sexist, and Vampire Vulture for a lot less.
I can understand what you are saying, but I have been doing some digging and came up with this article...I think it bears some reading, a new twist on Carson...
If someone wants to make it into a thread, be my guest...I won’t mind a bit and I think the people should know about it...
“If I had a child with a brain tumor there is nobody in this world I’d rather have operating on them than Ben Carson. But there is no way I want him as president of the United States.”
Great points.
Seems he’s in over his head.
Rather find out now than after he he was a nominee. Its a refining process; the good floats to the top.
______________________________________
Hasn't ANYBODY learned ANYTHING after eight years of Obama???
My primary concern about Ben Carson is that he doesn't have any of that left in him. Right about now I think the nation needs a President who has the gumption to give a baseball-bat-beating when it is needed.
Carson strikes me as too nice. What we need is a mean sonofab*tch. I'm worried that Carson won't be mean when he needs to be mean.
Finding the Lord and living a Christian life is all good and everything, but sometimes you need an Attila the Hun or a Genghis Khan.
Re: “So is Carson lying about being a thug as a youth?”
I take Dr Carson at his word until there is definitive evidence otherwise. When the source for questioning his account is CNN, color me skeptical of their version of events.
I heard several things lately about him that casts him in a negative light, and some of them are troubling, if true. But what occurs to me is all the crap said about every potential conservative candidate at every presidential political season since Reagan ran against Carter - namely that the message from the media is they are all idiots, liars, loose cannons, and have some strange ideas - in other words Reagan’s a wack job, Cruz, Carson, Trump, - all wack jobs. They do this all the time.
I DO know that CNN lies about people and events when it suits their purpose, and the same goes for all the other mainstream media.
So, I’m not saying Ben Carson is not a liar, and, everything being said against him may be true, but I haven’t seen that definitive evidence from reputable conservative sources yet - and remember, all this kind of scrutiny will be leveled at any GOP candidate when they begin to rise toward the top. Take it all with a grain of salt when the source is the mainstream media.
The mainstream media WANTS to create doubt on the conservative side - that’s their role as shills for the DNC.
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