Politico's Hit on Carson

Some notes.

(1) The headline is misleading. The Carson campaign statement does not admit he fabricated anything. Here's the statement: "Dr. Carson was the top ROTC student in the City of Detroit,” campaign manager Barry Bennett wrote in an email to POLITICO. “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,” Bennett added. “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.”

(2) The lede is outright false. Politico's Kyle D. Cheney starts with this claim: "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." But no where in the piece does Cheney tell the reader where Carson made this "application and acceptance" claim.

(3) It is, of course, very easy to show that Carson never applied to or was accepted to West Point, if in fact he never applied. Thus, the entire piece hinges on this missing piece of information: where and when did Carson say that he applied to and was accepted to Westpoint?

(4) There is a lot of evidence that Carson never made that claim. Particularly, because in both his book and his speeches, he talks about whittling his options down to Harvard and Yale, and in the end deciding to apply only to Yale, where he was accepted.

(5) Carson's book does have a single line: "Later I was offered a full scholarship to West Point.” This isn't quite wrong either. Nobody gets scholarships per se to West Point; as a service academy, repayment is the term of service after graduation. But that's exactly Carson's point when he says he didn't take up the West Point opportunity because he didn't want the service commitment to delay his medical career.

In short, the Politico piece is deeply misleading because it misstates the lie that Carson supposedly told and mischaracterizes the campaign's response. I give it Four Cow Pies.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 01:58 PM

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