[Follow-up to Saturday’s blog on election fraud: Until last week’s election in Kentucky, the polls showed Kentucky democrat Jack Conway leading Tea Party extremist Matt Bevin by a margin of 3 to 5 points, but Bevin gained almost 15 points on Election Day, supposedly winning by a nine-point margin. The same state voted for Democrats Secretary of State Alison Lundergan and Attorney General Andy Bashir. This “significant anomaly” indicates a strong indication of rigging the vote. Richard Charnin published results that found “cumulative vote shares indicate likely fraud.” His methodology and results are here.
Kentucky has a history of vote rigging: in 2011, “eight former Clay County, Kentucky officials were convicted on conspiracy charges, after it was discovered that they had rigged elections in 2002, 2004 and 2006,” according to Brad Friedman. Among the eight are “a circuit court judge, a county magistrate, an election commissioner, a county clerk, a polling place officer, an election officer, a school superintendent. The conspiracy also included business owners who were receiving county and city contracts.”
In the GOP presidential race, Ben Carson may have surpassed Donald Trump in the number of hits on the Internet. That accomplishment, however, may not be a positive force for Carson’s presidential campaign. As Carson ascended in the polls, searches in his background showed his increasingly outrageous comments. Four years ago, Mitt Romney was the “post-truth” candidate”; Carson has joined Romney in adding “post-knowledge” to the post-truth piece.
Carson believes that God helped Joseph to build the Egyptian pyramids to be grain silos and not tombs. Sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, Joseph was taken to Egypt and interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream, causing Egypt to save grain before a time of famine. The Bible contained nothing about the pyramids. Carson lives in a bubble of biblical literalism and magical homeopathic cancer-curing drugs. His speech about the grain storage in the pyramids was made 15 years ago, he still supports this belief.
Texts going back to 2400 B.C. shows that the pyramids were to help pharaohs get to their afterlife. In the tombs were directions on the walls to guide the spirits to the gods and treasures useful to the pharaoh after death. The tombs also didn’t have enough space for grain storage.
Trying to justify why an inexperienced person like himself should be president, Carson said, “It is important to remember that amateurs built the Ark and it was the professionals that built the Titanic.” The question is whether people would select an amateur to perform brain surgery on them rather than a highly trained professional. Those who maintain than an “outsider” with no experience is more qualified to be president have no evidence. Carson also tried to excuse his inexperience by saying that not one signer of the U.S. Constitution had ever been elected to office. In fact, 28 of the 58 signers of the Declaration of Independence were prior office holders.
While signing books in Florida, Carson said that the birthright citizenship in the constitution’s 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. Unlike others who think that another constitutional amendment is required, he said, “The interpretation [of the 14th Amendment] is left up to the Congress. They don’t have to amend it. They just have to reinterpret it.” According to the U.S. Constitution, he’s wrong.
Carson will now receive Secret Service protection that he requested because of great danger from “the secular progressive movement.” The veracity of such a statement is highly doubtful as more and more indication of his falsehoods has inundated the Internet.
Carson was also caught in an open lie about his background with a nutritional-supplement company under fire for fraudulently practices. He said he had nothing to do with it although videos show him advertising the product.
In his autobiography, Carson claims that he was offered a “full scholarship” to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Yet West Point has no scholarships because no one is charged for attending the school. Carson finally admitted that he had not applied to West Point but claimed that someone suggested he should go there. Carson’s campaign did admit that he made up the story in Gifted Hands that he was “the Junior ROTC at a dinner for Congressional Medal of Honor winners [and] marched at the front of Detroit’s Memorial Day parade as head of an ROTC contingent.”
Known in the past for being level-headed, Carson descended to a rant against a reporter who asked about the West Point story, accusing the media of not running “this level of scrutiny for President Barack Obama.” Carson’s memory does not include the heat on all many issues against the president, including the consistent accusation that President Obama was not born in the United States. Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton received heat equal to, and perhaps more, than President Obama while not raving about the unfair media. The president may have said it best, early in his first term:
“I think it’s fair to say that I don’t always get my most favorable coverage on Fox, but I think that’s how democracy works. We’re not supposed to all be in lock step here.”
No one has been able to verify Carson’s story that he protected white students from attacks by angry black students on the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968.
According to Carson in his book Gifted Hands, a Yale psychology professor told the class, Perceptions 301, that they had to retake the examination because their final exams had burned up. Carson wrote that every student in the class except him walked out. The story of the burned exams was a hoax, and Carson was declared “the most honest student in the class” with his photo taken for the Yale Daily News. Yet there is no record of the event of the photo that was supposedly taken in the early 1970s. There’s not even a class called Perceptions 301 although Carson posted a link for a similar class, Psychology 323b, that was offered in Spring 2002.
Reporters have been unable to find anyone to verify Carson’s stories that he punched a seventh-grade classmate in the head while holding a lock and tried to stab a classmate named “Bob” in ninth grade. One classmate Gerald Ware said that if it had happened, “it would have been all over the school.” Sometimes when Carson tells the story, “Bob” is a classmate; at other times, he is a family member. Asked if “Bob” was his brother, he refused to answer. If Carson lied about the story, he broke a commandment; if he told the truth, people should remember the Bible’s story of Abel and Cain.
Carson believes he is a famous neurosurgeon because God gave him the answers to a chemistry final in a dream. His home is a shrine to himself, including a painting of himself with Jesus Christ. A painted portrait with Jesus hangs in his house’s hallway. [Photo by Mark Makela]
While candidates Jeb Bush and Chris Christie use family members and friends to campaign against harsh punishment for drug users, Carson said they had a lack of values and principles. The whole drug abuse problem is traced back to an over-emphasis on “political correctness,” according to Carson.
In a post on Science Blogs, a physician with the pseudonym Orac gave two reasons for the dichotomy between Carson being a brilliant surgeon and suffering from anti-science views. People with low expertise in a subject overestimate their confidence in that area contrasted to experts who underestimate their expertise, acknowledge less certainty, and recognize the limits of their knowledge. Entering medical school, students are told they are the “best of the best,” destined to be top dogs with great power and privilege. That makes doctors sometimes believe that they are experts in other subjects.
Frequently the most intelligent people are the most avid believers in pseudoscience, and they have the skill to protect their pre-existing beliefs. That may be why Ben Carson thinks that gay rights is a Communist plot with President Obama as part of the Communist conspiracy to bring down the United States and that the theory of evolution comes from Satan.
Carson tries to play both sides of the field. He either dismisses expert opinions by doubling down when questioned about them or panders in a reversal of positions, for example his switch regarding school vaccine mandates during the first GOP debate. Neither one is an attribute for a good president.
Lacking a professional background in politics, Carson uses his personal experiences as his campaign, saying that “honesty is more important than political experience.” He appears to have neither.
Tomorrow night is the fourth GOP presidential debate and the first one since all these questions about Carson have been widely publicized. Topics are jobs, taxes, the “general health of the economy,” and international issues. If the moderators don’t bring up Carson’s controversies, Donald Trump most likely will.
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