10/26/2015

Taking Ben Carson Seriously

Well, fuck. Now that he's kicking Donald Trump's saggy ass all over Iowa (state motto: "You realize it's hilarious how much the rest of you give a shit about how we vote, right?"), it's time to take America's favorite narcoleptic neurosurgeon seriously as a presidential candidate. "What explains the rise of Carson?" the media punditariat wonder. And the answer is so obvious as to be practically tattooed on the poll takers' foreheads.

The Republicans are turning to Ben Carson because 1. He is bugfuck insane and criminally stupid about anything outside of head goo. 2. He is black and therefore voting for Ben Carson makes white racists who wanted Barack Obama crushed seem like they're not racist. 3. He's not Trump.

Make no mistake, though. Despite his demeanor that suggests someone who is shooting ketamine right into his jugular vein, Carson believes in some of the most savage policies that the conservative movement has to offer. Just because your executioner sounds like he's stoned doesn't mean he won't cut your head off.

Before getting to the reckless, vicious opinions that he gave to Chuckie Todd on Meet the Press yesterday, check out his shitty campaign website. There, under each section "On the Issues," we can read a sub-middle school book report version of a complex issue. It basically goes: "Something being done sucks. It should change. Here's a vague idea on how to change it without ever going into any more details than this."

You think that's not true? Here, in full, is everything the website has on the need to "Keep Faith in Our Society," one of Carson's supposedly important issues: "Our Founding Fathers were courageous men of principle and faith. We know this because the Declaration of Independence, our bedrock document, explicitly acknowledges the existence of our Creator. The United States of America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. We can and should be proud of that fact. It served us well for almost 200 years. However, we need to reverse the recent trend of secular progressives using activist, federal judges to drive faith out of our society. Anyone who wishes to practice their faith, for example by praying privately, can and should be able to do so. Equally, the rights of someone to abstain from private prayer should also be jealously protected. The First Amendment enshrines our freedom to practice whatever faith we choose from any government intrusion. Our Founding Fathers never meant for the First Amendment to be used to drive prayer out of the public square."

That's fuckin' it. Everything that Ben Carson wants you to know about what he believes on any particular issue can fit on a postcard. It's written so that it can be read aloud to the illiterate without tiring out the reader too much. From abortion to education to Russia, nothing is more complex than "We need to do different shit." Telling us what that shit is and how it will be accomplished? Those are meaningless details, man, to be worked out once the country elects a completely inexperienced evangelical doctor to fuck us so hard that we'll feel his dick tip on the back of our uvulas.

And Carson is weird, like in a "what the fuck?" way. One of the marquee things on his website is this:

Four fucking sentences on keeping the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, open. Look, we know that Republicans respect the Constitution so much that they don't give a fuck about indefinite imprisonment without trial. But to put this on an equal plane with health care and taxes? That shit's just really creepy, like it's some kind of personal obsession.

On yesterday's Meet the Press, Carson compared a child raped by her father who gets pregnant and doesn't want the kid to a slaveholder. No, really. He said he didn't want any abortion exceptions for rape and incest and, if a woman wants an abortion, Carson believes, "Think about this. During slavery — and I know that’s one of those words you’re not supposed to say, but I’m saying it. During slavery, a lot of the slaveowners thought that they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that slave. Anything that they chose to do. And, you know, what if the abolitionists had said, 'I don’t believe in slavery, I think it’s wrong, but you guys do whatever you want to do.' Where would we be?"

This is the kind of nonsensical shit you say when you're sitting around someone's apartment after a 36-hour shift on your rotation at the hospital and you're all smoking great weed and making shit up that's so absurd it makes the rest of the interns giggle and get the munchies.

Seriously, when Ben Carson makes a metaphor, it sounds like a psychopath playing a game of Cards Against Humanity. To him, those cards are facts, not funny.

Carson is particular kind of psychopath, the kind who thinks he does no wrong. When Todd asked him about his dropping of Holocaust and Nazi references with alarming regularity, Dr. Ben said that some Jews have told him it's cool and "If I say something about something that we don't want to become and we never even want to get close to it, then I'm comparing it and I'm saying we're there. That's what they do. And, of course, for people who aren't really thinking deeply, you know, that resonates." You got that? You're not thinking "deeply," you dumb liberals with your rationality and your political correctness. Of course, he could say, "I don't want us to become like Chile in the 1970s" but, obviously, that's too shallow for Ben Carson. (And there are probably many conservatives who would love for the nation to become like Chile in the 1970s.)

We should always remember that Ben Carson converted to nutzoid fundamentalist Christianity after he nearly stabbed a guy. Like many teenagers who have done that, he locked himself in the bathroom. Except not with porn, but with the Bible. And something happened during that three hours that changed him. He claimed he was reading the Book of Proverbs. Let's take him at his word. Now, Proverbs contains more than a few passages like this: "I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt. I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves."

Yeah, a nice chunk of Proverbs has to do with fucking "strange" women. The Rude Pundit isn't saying that teenage Ben Carson jacked off to the Bible for three hours and found Jesus. But it would explain quite a bit.

And that's as seriously as we need to take Ben Carson.