Ben Carson and West Point

[billhammond]

www.politico.com/story/2015/11/ben-carson-west-point-215598#ixzz3qjMC812R

[Dub]

I'm guessing it was at West Point that he learned the Biblical Joseph built the pyramids for storing grain.

[fauxmaha]

Campaign response:

“Dr Carson was the top ROTC student in the City of Detroit. In that role he was invited to meet General Westmoreland. He believes it was at a banquet. He can’t remember with specificity their brief conversation but it centered around Dr. Carson’s performance as ROTC City Executive Officer.



He was introduced to folks from West Point by his ROTC Supervisors. They told him they could help him get an appointment based on his grades and performance in ROTC. He considered it but in the end did not seek admission. There are “Service Connected” nominations for stellar High School ROTC appointments. Again he was the top ROTC student in Detroit. I would argue strongly that an Appointment is indeed an amazing full scholarship. Having ran several Congressional Offices I am very familiar with the Nomination process.



Again though his Senior Commander was in touch with West Point and told Dr. Carson he could get in, Dr Carson did not seek admission.



The Politico story is an outright Lie. Dr. Carson as the leading ROTC student in Detroit was told by his Commanders that he could get an Appointment to the Academy. He never said he was admitted or even applied.



The campaign never “admitted to anything.”



This is what we have come to expect from Politico.”

[patrick]

"... and was offered a full scholarship to West Point.”

"...and was thrilled to get an offer from West Point."

"Later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point.”

Being encouraged to apply and getting an offer from West Point are not the same thing. That should be obvious.

This is becoming a habit with Carson, he says something, gets asked about it, and then blames the media for misrepresenting things.

Fiorina seems to have learned from the kerfuffle with the CMP videos. She said recently that 92% of the jobs lost in the Obama admin were women, then when it was pointed out that that statistic had been debunked, she backed off it. Good for her.

[Russell Letson]

My first reaction was, "Wait--a scholarship to a military academy that is nominally already free?" At the very least, he seemes to be sloppy about describing whatever he thought he was being offered--which at best would have been a nomination for an appointment. Scholarships are part of the ROTC system, which is distinct from the (very stiff) competition for academy slots. There seems to be at the very least a streak of careless self-aggrandizement in Carson.

[fauxmaha]

I'm no fan of Carson's (so I find this all exceptionally disappointing), but this kind of story is a perfect example of why the country is disgusted with how things are run and how the media operates. I expect you will see a bounce in Carson's favor as a result of this.

It seems clear to me that when he was in high school his superiors made it clear to Carson that an appointment 2 West Point was his for the asking. I don't think there is any reasonable disputing of that.

So what is his crime here? That he failed to describe that incident with Jesuitical precision? Please.

The take away that millions of Americans are going to have from this story is that it represents yet another example of the media going out of its way to present a conservative's history in the worst possible light. It is a reflection of pure bias. Take this exact same set of facts, apply them to a Democrat, and you would never see the story presented in this way.

One needs only to consider the overlap between those people who are gleefully embracing this current story, and those who to this very day think that John Kerry was grossly mistreated through the Swift Boat story to understand that. What I think the media fails to understand is that millions of people, probably a strong majority of people, find all of this completely disgusting and irrelevant.

[Deleted]

Actually Jeff, I'm kind of on the media's side here. When Carson writes a book and states, "Later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point," the reader can rightfully assume Carson was offered a scholarship, and not, as he says now, informed that if he applied to West Point, his education would be free. Implicit with that is an acceptance to attend West Point along with the scholarship.

While I'll agree with you that the affair is disgusting, and evident of the gotcha culture we've bought into, it's not irrelevant. I'm sick and tired of people peppering their personal CVs with wiffs of military service, or adventurous dangers like running from sniper fire in Tusla. F 'em all.

[jdd2]

Hey, I'm a Vietnam era vet, maybe I should've gone into politics and made something of it myself.

[Fingerplucked]

Nov 6, 2015 15:23:39 GMT -5 patrick said:

"... and was offered a full scholarship to West Point.”

"...and was thrilled to get an offer from West Point."

"Later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point.”

Being encouraged to apply and getting an offer from West Point are not the same thing. That should be obvious.

This is becoming a habit with Carson, he says something, gets asked about it, and then blames the media for misrepresenting things.

Fiorina seems to have learned from the kerfuffle with the CMP videos. She said recently that 92% of the jobs lost in the Obama admin were women, then when it was pointed out that that statistic had been debunked, she backed off it. Good for her.

I'd use "pattern" over "habit," but I agree. There's this, there's his relationship with the scam drug company, and then, strangest of all, there's his insistence that he stabbed his friend and hit his mother over the head with a hammer. And he's pissed off that we don't believe that he actually stabbed his friend and hit his mother with a hammer. That is just a bizarre argument to be having with the press and the public. Whether people believe him or not, he loses either way.

People are scaring me. They're liking the freakiest of the contenders. I don't want to see a Republican in the White House, but if it's going to happen, give me someone who will only wreck the economy and start a few new regional wars again.

[dradtke]

Nov 6, 2015 16:36:25 GMT -5 Fingerplucked said:

I don't want to see a Republican in the White House, but if it's going to happen, give me someone who will only wreck the economy and start a few new regional wars again.

You mean Jeb?

[Fingerplucked]

Jeb, Marco, Chris, Carly, you know, the garden variety Republican.

[Russell Letson]

The Jesuits who trained me (and, if I recall, Jeff as well) valued precision in many things, including language. As should people in public life who want people to take them seriously. And as the video of Carson's pyramids remarks from '98 demonstrates*, neither language nor fields outside his medical specialty get precise treament from him. (His portrait of scientists is particularly interesting.) He has nice manners and a kind face and certainly has led a life admirable in many ways. But on the basis of his public statements (let alone the policies he supports), I wouldn't want him on a zoning board, let alone in a legislature or any executive office. There is such a thing as a level of incompetence, and Carson is a couple of flights of stairs above his.

* To be fair, he seems to be using Joseph and the pyramids parable-wise to make a point thinking big and about having God on your side. Here's the whole speech, with the notorious part around 4:00. I confess that I crapped out around eight minutes in.

[Dub]

Why should we give this guy a break? Come on, folks, he's not running for class president. I'm starting to think we should be digging into his medical career to see what he's actually done. He clearly made up the West Point thing. Pentagon sources confirmed that Westmorland was not even in Detroit when Carson claims. He was probably playing golf in DC.

And he really believes, in spite of a couple of centuries of study and scholarship to the contrary, that Joseph (coat of many colors) built the Egyptian pyramids as storage for grain. Someone asked his Seventh Day Advent church about this and they responded that it was "his own interpretation" and that they were unaware of any church teaching to that effect.

I've read that he's been a shill for some kind of supplement but I don't have any details or anything I can verify so he gets a pass for now.

None of this means he's necessarily a bad guy. I would still take my laundry to his cleaning establishment (if he had one) but I definitely don't want him in the White House.

[Deleted]

No breaks. We should also hold Hillary to task about lying about being under sniper fire in Bosnia. Check. I'm all on board, Dub.

[TKennedy]

It would be interesting to be able to do candid interviews with his old chief residents.

[james]

Carson appears to me a weird conspiracy theorist who is often unable to tell the difference between reality and utter codswollop.

[Village Idiot]

Codswollop. I like that.

In four years no one is going to remember who he was anyway, so this s story doesn't bother me.

[Chesapeake]

I'm inclined to agree that the West Point thing boils down to a not terribly important question of semantics, whether Carson was officially offered admission to the Academy, or if it was more (as he now says) of a suggestion by some nice official that he would make a good cadet. Carson is also learning that to run for president is to open one's self up to intense scrutiny of the minutest details of one's life, which others, including Obama (despite what Carson thinks) also have gone through. The stories about attacking somebody with a knife is a little more troublesome, but one which could easily be dispelled if the subject of the story would just come forward voluntarily and confirm it. Again, it all goes with the territory of running for president. People want to know - and I believe they have a right to - what kind of person they are considering voting for. By the way, the next time Carson sits down to write a memoir, he might want to hire a professional fact-checker, somebody who almost certainly would have questioned both these things.

[epaul]

Whatever "damage" revelations such as this one do to candidate is usually brought on not by the revelation itself but in the candidate's clumsy and increasingly silly attempts to deny the event, blame others for the event, redefine the event, and then trip on the growing pile of obfuscations and fall face flat.

It is the reaction that is telling, not the event.

Lot's of people exaggerate and retell events favorably. I would love to see Carson (or any other candidate caught similarly) to just say, "yea, I kind of pumped that one up a bit. Hell, I was writing a book. I had to come up with stuff, and, yea, I dressed that West Point thing so it would look good. I didn't apply. I do believe if I had applied I would have been accepted. And..., well, hell, the Bible is full of guys who made up stuff... whoa, hell, that wasn't what I meant,...um, anyway, yes, I exaggerated an event in my book so it would look better. I just want you to know that when I'm, like, dealing with those Russians and Chinese, I'll make up shit, too, like how many missiles we have pointed at them and stuff like that. Do you really want a president that doesn't exaggerate and make stuff up once in awhile? I wouldn't. Now, about those pyramids ..."

Ok,I veered a little off track, but, really, what is the harm done here? Puffing up something in a book whose only purpose was to pump him up? That's not called lying, that's called an autobiography. No, the event is nothing, it is the screwball, overly defensive, blame everyone else reaction that tells the tale.

(not saying he has screwed the pooch yet, but why not just say, yes, I exaggerated that event some in order to make it look a little better. People would respect him for being honest about a little lie. Hell, we aren't perfect and don't expect it.)

[Chesapeake]

PS: I share Col. Paul's disdain for people who go too far in embroidering their resumes. We all present ourselves in the best light possible, but there is a line. In reviewing my current capsule bios recently, I discovered I'd said (when I wrote it years ago) that I had been "nominated for a Pulitzer Prize" while working at the Washington Evening Star. When I wrote that I really believed that was the case, but when I noticed it again I recalled that it was the editors at the Star who had sent in a story I'd written along with a recommendation that it deserved a Pulitzer. I suddenly realized - and a quick bit of research confirmed - that being proposed by one's own newspaper for such an honor is a long ways away from being nominated - which is a term defined in the prize's submissions guidelines as having been vetted by a Pulitzer board and voted on. Not quite willing to let mention of the "P" word go entirely, I changed the line to read "proposed for a Pulitzer Prize." Maybe even that's a stretch - I'm still thinking on it. My only point is, resume-inflating is a common temptation, and whether you're seeking a job from the American people or McDonald's, it can get you into trouble if you think and hope it will be overlooked.