Ben Carson: If God Calls Me to Run for President, I'm Going to Run for President

I mean no disrespect to the religious when I note that "God wants me to do this" is the sort of thing one says when one decides "I'm doin' this."

Carson writes that he suspects many others interested in high office would be better candidates. But in his book he has a caveat: "If I felt called by God to officially enter the world of politics, I would certainly not hesitate to do so."

Interviewed this week, Carson said he's "starting to feel it. Because every place I go, it's unbelievable." One lady "really touched me the other night … She just kept clinging to my hand and said, 'You have to run. You have to run.' And so many people tell me that, and so I think I'm starting to hear something."

Here's one more quote:

On political correctness: "And if you believe that life begins at conception and that that is a wonderful progression from that fertilized egg to a human being who is active and interactive in only nine months time, then you're anti-woman. And if you believe in traditional families and the strength of traditional marriage then you have to be a homophobe. And of course none of those things are true by any stretch of the imagination, but by stoking those fires, you shut people up and they're afraid to say what they believe because they don't want to be labeled with those labels. It's intimidation, that's all it is, intimidation. I've just decided that I'm not going to be intimidated, and of course they don't like that very much. And they've tried to intimidate me into silence but it's just not going to work, because the more they do it, the more vocal I'm going to be."

There's more at the link, including his thoughts on why Martin Luther King, Jr., would be "appalled" at the current welfare state, and some non-political musings on the brain -- he notes, just as a sort of medical fun fact, that if your brain is stimulated just so with electricity you can recite verbatim a page you read fifty years ago.

Of course, the quote most conservatives are interested in aren't these latest ones, but this one but one from March 2013:

When asked by Glenn Beck if people should be allowed to own semi-automatic weapons, Dr. Benjamin Carson said: "It depends on where you live. I think if you live in the midst of a lot of people, and I'm afraid that that semi-automatic weapon is going to fall into the hands of a crazy person, I would rather you not have it." (Glenn Beck Show, March 1, 2013)

That's a very confused and shallow answer. It certainly will disqualify him with many conservatives.

But the confusion and shallowness of the answer might be its saving grace; it could be that Ben Carson simply hasn't thought about this issue very much at all.

Given the way he speaks of "semi-automatic weapons" like the media does -- as if they are some exotic category of weapons rather than the most common type of gun in the world, as they are -- it does seem he's speaking from a position of nearly-untainted ignorance.

So who knows. Perhaps he'll do what Rick Perry did not (with respect to immigration/border issues) and think a little more deeply about an important conservative agenda item before he actually runs for office.

posted by Ace at 02:53 PM

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