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The Adventures of Young Ben Carson: SNL mocks Republican's knife attack story in skit showing him thwarted by belt buckles

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. The academy has occupied a central place in Carson’s tale for years. According to a story told in Carson’s book, “Gifted Hands,” the then-17 year old was introduced in 1969 to Gen. William Westmoreland, who had just ended his command of U.S. forces in Vietnam, and the two dined together. That meeting, according to Carson’s telling, was followed by a “full scholarship” to...

It was the 1960s. Ben Carson, 14-year-old ninth grader, was growing up rough in Detroit. And, one fateful day, the future neurosurgeon and Republican presidential contender got very, very angry. The argument, like many among teenagers, was about nothing: what radio station to listen to. Carson's friend Bob dared turn the dial on the transistor radio. "You call that music?" Bob said. "It's better than what you like!" Carson yelled back, grabbing for the dial. That could have been it - good friends have argued about greater things and quickly made up. But Carson found himself consumed by rage. "In...

Newly minted Republican presidential front-runner late Wednesday night went online to further a narrative that he has been using for weeks on the campaign trail, describing a childhood filled with homelessness, hunger and hard times. The retired surgeon used his Facebook page sometime after 11 p.m. to post a rambling defense of his lack of political experience, his pride at his years as a neurosurgeon, and a hard-luck boyhood in which he says he witnessed segregation first-hand. 'I grew up poor. I know what it is like to be homeless and hungry. I know the pain of poverty... I know...

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...