The Republican Party has scraped the bottom of the barrel to find a candidate that is the right mix of crazy, likeable, and submissive so that mega donors can pull the strings from behind the curtain.
The biggest problem is that these candidates don’t want to be president because they want to lead – they want to be president because they want that title; they want the power; they want that distinction of winning. Some of them aren’t even qualified to RUN for president, let alone hold the office of the presidency.
The name that stands out the most is Dr. Ben Carson. While he has absolutely no chance of even winning his party’s nomination, Carson is still out there on the campaign trail talking about issues that he really knows nothing about.
And that’s a major problem. Carson may know all of the Republican talking points, but he’s never held an elected office in his life. He has absolutely no knowledge of how to draft legislation, how to negotiate legislation, and no formal training in parliamentary procedure. Even Republican dim wits like Ted Cruz have this knowledge. But Carson is trying to use his lack of experience to his advantage – much like Sarah Palin tried to do – by saying that he’s an outsider, that he’s one of us. He isn’t so entangled with the Washington elite that he can still rule for the people. That may garner him a few more primary votes, but those aren’t qualifications to lead the nation.
How can we expect someone with no political experience to properly negotiate with world leaders? You can’t exactly translate surgical skills to nuclear arms talks – there’s no overlap there. So how much faith can we have in this man to be able to be taken seriously by world leaders?
The honest answer is that we can’t have faith in Ben Carson, and that’s mostly because the man doesn’t have faith in his own beliefs. The man has a larger collection of flip flops than a Hawaiian beach resort.
For example, look at what he’s said about private insurance companies. In 1996, long before Carson declared himself a Republican, he criticized the for-profit insurance industry, saying that they shouldn’t be in the business of making money – their only concern should be paying for healthcare. In fact, that time, Carson said that we should get rid of private for-profit insurance and let the government run healthcare to keep greed out of the equation.
Fast forward to today. Today, Carson believes that the government has absolutely no business being in the healthcare industry, and that the for-profit health insurance industry we have today is absolutely wonderful.
Just two years ago, Carson told Glenn Beck that we need tighter regulations on the sale and ownership of semi-automatic weapons in the United States. Obviously, this caused quite a stir among Republican voters, causing Carson to backtrack on his true feelings, and now he says that if he were in a position of power, people could own any weapons that they want.
The man is literally selling his personal beliefs to become president of the United States, and that should terrify Republican voters.
But what about Carson’s career as a physician? He’s had a major movie made based on his life that portrayed him as one of the most gifted surgeons this country has ever seen.
The film took a lot of liberties with Carson’s abilities, and the truth is that he holds an above average rate of medical malpractice lawsuits against him. Many of these cases have been settled for undisclosed amounts of money, while others are still pending in the Courts. And yes, about 75% of doctors have malpractice claims filed against them at some point in their career, but less than 2% of those claims lead to any form of financial payment to the victim. So the fact that Carson has had a handful of claims against him that resulted in payments to the victims is hard evidence that the claims were legitimate, which completely taints Carson’s image of a surgical phenom.
The bottom line is this: Carson is like a child that says “I want to be president when I grow up.” The child has no idea how to do that, or what to do if they ever make it to that point, they just think it would be pretty cool to have that kind of power. And that is why we need to be very worried about the prospect of Ben Carson becoming the Republican nominee.
