Nice Squirrel
Contributor
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2004
- Messages
- 6,083
- Location
- Minnesota
- Basic Beliefs
- Only the Nice Squirrel can save us.
As been pointed out by posters in the past, he has a compelling story and there is no need to tell such whoppers, but his stories are approaching Commander McBragg level.
http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/11/06/ben-carson-west-point/
Alright apologists have at it. Let's see the back flips on this one.
No need to. Like all the other ginned gotcha stories of petty quibbles, his biographical recollections will likely turnout to have a basis in fact. IF, on the other hand, it is totally made up THEN we have an issue...we shall see.
So you believe the following are true (from the WSJ) as relayed by Mother Jones:
- Ben is broke. Finds ten-dollar bill on sidewalk. Thank you, Lord!
- A year later, Ben is broke again. Looks for ten-dollar bill, doesn't find one.
- Ben gets notice that all the final exams in Perceptions 301 were accidentally lit on fire. He goes in for the retest.
- The new test is really, really hard. A girl near Ben tells her classmate they should leave. "We can say we didn't read the notice."
- Everyone starts leaving. Ben is conflicted. "I was tempted to walk out, but I had read the notice, and I couldn't lie and say I hadn't."
- Eventually Ben is the only one left. The professor comes back in with a Yale Daily News photographer. The whole thing was a hoax, she said. "We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the class. And that's you."
- Ben concludes the story: "The professor then did something even better. She handed me a ten-dollar bill."
So the tests were from a class that never existed, taught by a professor that didn't exist and were lit on fire (like the professor couldn't mimeograph more)... you believe this is a case of forgetting small aspects and not a straight up fabrication?
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/11/ben-carson-and-tale-redemption
.Mother Jones said:Are these embellishments unnecessary? Sure. But Carson knows his audience. Serious evangelicals really, really want to hear a story about sin and redemption. That requires two things. First, Carson needs to have been a bad kid. Second, redemption needs to have truly turned his life around. He was already a student smart enough to get into Yale, so he needs more.
That's where these stories come in. He needs to exaggerate how violent he was when he was young. And after he finds God, he needs to exaggerate how great everything turned out. This culminates in the absurd story about his psychology class. No one who's not an evangelical Christian would believe it for a second. But evangelicals hear testimonies like this all the time. They expect testimonies like this, and the more improbable the better. So Carson gives them one. It's clumsy because he's not very good at inventing this kind of thing, but that doesn't matter much.
Not all of Carson's deceptions follow this pattern. But several of them do. And they were far from unnecessary. Carson needed to sell his story to evangelicals, and that required a narrative arc as formulaic as any supermarket romance novel. So he gave them one