The most popular conservative heroes of 2014 are also the ones that sound the most like Ann Coulter circa 2004, and Ben Carson is living up to the vile and outlandish wordsmithing (if you can call it that) Coulter made famous. Not only is a repugnant pundit, but he's also a massive hypocrite when it comes to our social safety nets. His life survived and then thrived because of the welfare system, which he now attacks at every turn, calling people who need it moochers who aren't ashamed enough.
Now he's reached another plateau of conservative goo rags by going on a crazed jag about Obamacare, saying that it's much worse than 9/11.
He really told The Daily Beast that:
Dr. Ben Carson, the Republican right’s favorite African-American neurosurgeon, often says that President Obama’s health care law is the worst thing since slavery.
But in my recent interview with the good doctor—who is riding high in the presidential preliminaries, having come in a close second to Sen. Ted Cruz this past weekend in the Republican Leadership Conference’s much-ballyhooed straw poll—he upped the ante.
He claimed that Obamacare has been even more damaging to the United States than the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
“You said Obamacare was the worst thing since slavery. Why do you think it was worse than 9/11?” I asked him.
“Because 9/11 is an isolated incident,” he answered.
Giving uninsured Americans a chance at affordable healthcare is worse than ramming two jetliners into the twin towers and killing thousands of people. This is so far right that he firmly lands in the Posse Comitatus camp of extremism. This is really sick stuff.
He's a crackpot's crackpot.
He uses a technique of describing what he believe the future will hold for policies he disagrees with and then treats that as reality. When Carson was pressed to explain himself, he needed help from Armstrong Williams, a man who was exposed as a secret Bush administration paid shill for NCLB policy, which cost him most of his network gigs after he was found out.
Me: “Who do you think caused families more pain—Obamacare or Osama bin Laden?”
Carson: “Let me explain.”
Williams: “Let him answer the question!”
Carson: “Things that are isolated issues as opposed to things that fundamentally change the United States of America and shift power from the people to the government. That is a huge shift.”
Me: “Right. But what do you think caused specific families more pain—Obamacare or Osama?”
Carson: “You have to take a long term.”
Me: “You’re not answering the question.”
Carson: “Will you listen? You have to take a long-term look at something that fundamentally changes the power structure of America. You have to be someone who reads. Who is well-read. I want you to go back tonight and pull out what Saul Alinsky says about health care under the control of the government.”
At which point Williams cut the interview short and canceled a promised post-show session at Penn Station where Carson, a retired pediatric brain surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, would be waiting for his train back to Baltimore.
Read the rest of the piece by Evan Gahr, it's very good.
