a clown car full of millionaires: the 2016 presidential primary thread

Carson accused of not having beaten his mother with a hammer

slanderous

Watching him on morning news insisting "I did too!" has to be one of the more bizarre bits of this campaign.

oops!

Ben Carson admits fabricating West Point scholarship

lol this guy

next yr gonna tell me he didn't saw two kids brains in half

This admission comes as serious questions about other points of fact in Carson’s personal narrative are questioned, including the seminal episode in which he claimed to have attempted to stab a close friend. Similarly, details have emerged that cast doubt on the nature of Carson’s encounter with one of the most prominent military men of that era.

He is sticking with his pyramid story though.

gotcha questions, smdh

I told you guys, A+ comedian.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSB69CEUwAAyCOa.jpg

https://twitter.com/billmon1/status/662680550004649985

Carson reacts angrily to being called on his tales because, like Reagan, fiction & reality are not separate things to him. "Mythic truths."

from Mother Jones article:

In a July 2014 interview, Carson contended that Marxist forces had been using liberals and the mainstream media to undermine the United States. His source: Skousen. "There is a book called The Naked Communist," he said. "It was written in 1958. Cleon Skousen lays out the whole agenda, including the importance of getting people into important positions in the mainstream media so they can help drive the agenda. Well, that's what's going on now." Four months later, while being interviewed by Megyn Kelly on Fox News, Carson denounced unnamed Marxists who were presently seeking to destroy American society: "There was a guy who was a former CIA agent by the name of Cleon Skousen who wrote a book in 1958 called The Naked Communist, and it laid out the whole agenda. You would think by reading it that it was written last year—showing what they're trying to do to American families, what they're trying to do to our Judeo-Christian faith, what they're doing to morality." (Skousen had been an FBI employee—not a CIA officer—and mainly engaged in administrative and clerical duties; later he was a professor at Brigham Young University and police chief of Salt Lake City.) And the most recent edition of this Skousen book boasts Carson's endorsement on the front cover: "The Naked Communist lays out the whole progressive plan. It is unbelievable how fast it has been achieved."

It is unbelievable, as in literally I cannot believe it at all.

dave weigel has the screenshot of the relevant passage in carson's book

https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/662678590249545728

but i don't get why weigel is downplaying this

there are no "scholarships" to the service academies btw. if you get in, it's free. i think you're paid, even!

he repeated the claim a month ago

http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/11/06/conservative-media-react-to-ben-carsons-admissi/206676

Yeah, in the mid-90s when I was _real_ close to heading to the Air Force Academy to go for an aero degree and try to get a pilot seat, you signed up for a 4-year hitch of school, then 6 years active after that minimum, meaning that I probably(possibly?) would have been mustered out to Bosnia/Iraq airspace patrols.

No standard American student debt, however. You do get a wage.

Carson reacts angrily to being called on his tales because, like Reagan, fiction & reality are not separate things to him. "Mythic truths."

― goole, Friday, November 6, 2015 12:37 PM (31 minutes ago)

remember when Peggy Noonan used to say that Reagan didn't lie – he shared "folk stories" with the American people.

Skousen was so right wing that Goldwater didn't want to be seen with him in 1964.

Unless he's mentally conflating it with some ROTC thing, where you attend regular university but hafta do officer shit like wake up for training at/before 6am on top of being an 18-yr-old student.

Balls/Tombot, you guys were enlistees, right? Do we have anybody who actually went to a service academy or OCS(American or not)?

are people ever going to get over the communists

^communist

still upset about the barbary pirates tbh

looking forward to the revelations that ben carson was not actually at woodstock, did not inspire the song "imagine," and was not even close to being the secret identity of Deep Throat

https://paulsagemarketing.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/zelig-black.jpg

When you've lost Erick Erickson...

Carson’s life story has been a central point of his appeal and the West Point story has been part of that appeal. If the other campaigns and the media can go after Carson on trust, his campaign is finished. His support levels are very high, but his support is also very, very soft. People are supporting Carson because they are not enamored with the rest of the field, but they are not wedded to him.

As CNN goes after the knifing story and now the Carson campaign is admitting this fabrication, we’re about to see a novice politician with a less than highly skilled campaign begin to head into a storm the candidate himself created.

this is all just a repeat of 2012 - Trump as Giuliani, Carson as Cain, Jeb as Mittens (only even worse), Cruz as idk Bachmann or something...

A caveat: Romney's support never wavered; he stuck in the teens and twenties, thus was prepared to take advantage of the benefits. Bush is doing far worse.

yeah that's true, and there's more guys this time around, support is generally spread thinner

cruz is santorum!

motherfucker was the last to drop before willard.

i can't see jeb getting the nomination but then again i can't see any of the others getting the nom either.

time frames are wayyyy different this time. cain was poular for a week. trump and carson have been popular for months.

are people ever going to get over the communists

Not until you get enough people in power whose formative years were post-'90/91 or do

are people every going to get over the communists they only killed ~100 million people in the 20th century

some poll a while ago where socialism polled better than capitalism

trump and carson have been popular for months.

CAIN WAS 'POPULAR' AFTER PPL STARTED VOTING GAAAHHHHH GAAAHHHHH

"i'll see you in the spring, millennial fussbudgets"

*wakes, yawns, stretches, sets clock forward an hour*

classic mordy

(Also of course this is horseshit, Cain had already quit at the start of December 2011)

But Cain's popularity came during the primary debates, right? Shorter length, but later in the season

Xp

We 'got over' the Chinese Communists in a big way.

dave weigel has the screenshot of the relevant passage in carson's book

https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/662678590249545728

but i don't get why weigel is downplaying this

― goole, Friday, November 6, 2015 12:47 PM (1 hour ago)

some welcome restraint and objectivity amid the hysteria, probably

when coach k visits kids houses (ok, maybe 25 years ago before anyone cared about recruiting violations), you think he had them fill out applications before talking to them about scholarships? with carson's grades and ROTC service, it's not out of the realm of possibility that general whatshisname told him that west point would be lucky to have him, he'd be glad to write him a recommendation, yada yada. is it possible carson was excited and flattered and took it to mean something it didn't? sure. idgaf really

on another note judging by that excerpt he hired one of his neurosurgery patients to edit his book, though

Oct 2011:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44881446/ns/politics-decision_2012/t/nbcwsj-poll-cain-now-leads-gop-pack/

re carson:
https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/662504792627920896

chinese communists kinda got over capitalism more than we got over communism. i'm not like one of these guys who thinks that just bc communist govts killed a hundred million people that means that communism as an ideology is entirely without merit but u kno no one is asking when we're going to get over fascism (except for like these neo-reactionary weirdos)

western societies are far more likely to turn in the direction of fascism atm than to spawn a revolution of the proletariat

this is all just a repeat of 2012 - Trump as Giuliani

but Trump is actually running

That's not really an exclusive choice, West Point vs med school, is it? You sign up and you get paid to get trained, right? My former doctor got trained in the US Navy, for example.

guys I know the analogy isn't 100% but the pattern is p clearly similar - they didn't learn the lessons they were supposed to from the last time around.