Neurosurgeon-turned-conservative-activist Ben Carson continues to move forward with his presidential ambitions, though he realizes he faces long odds. Carson recently told the Des Moines Register, “The way I have kind of looked at it is it’s the same thing with some of the so-called inoperable brain tumors. Everything’s impossible until to you do it. And then it’s possible.”
How refreshing. So few candidates compare their campaigns to inoperable brain tumors.
But as it turns out, Carson is quite adept at making unusual connections. Right Wing Watch reported yesterday on the right-wing activist’s latest appearance on America Family Radio, where Carson reflected on Michael Brown and the violence that claims the lives of too many young African Americans.
“Certainly in a lot of our inner cities, in particular the black inner cities, where 73 percent of the young people are born out of wedlock, the majority of them have no father figure in their life. Usually the father figure is where you learn how to respond to authority. So now you become a teenager, you’re out there, you really have no idea how to respond to authority, you eventually run into the police or you run into somebody else in the neighborhood who also doesn’t know how to respond but is badder than you are, and you get killed or you end up in the penal system,” Carson said. […]When host Lauren Kitchen Stewards broke in to tie his remarks to young people’s “sense of entitlement,” Carson traced it all back to the women’s liberation movement.“I think a lot of it really got started in the ’60s with the ‘me generation.’ ‘What’s in it for me?’ I hate to say it, but a lot of it had to do with the women’s lib movement. You know, ‘I’ve been taking care of my family, I’ve been doing that, what about me?’ You know, it really should be about us,” he said.
Hmm. A white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teen, and according to Ben Carson, the problem is … feminism?
Amanda Marcotte replied, “You know what this means. Give up your independence and suffer unhappy marriages, ladies, or else it’s your fault if your son is gunned down in the streets by an overly aggressive police officer.”
Remember, as ridiculous as Carson may sound, connecting ‘the women’s lib movement’ to gun violence is just the tip of a deeply misguided iceberg.
For those who’ve forgotten Carson’s rise to Tea Party notoriety, let’s not forget that Carson last year equated homosexuality with pedophilia and bestiality. He soon after started comparing the Affordable Care Act to slavery, before comparing Americans to Nazis.
More recently, Carson characterized the debate over marijuana legalization as a distraction from Benghazi.
Specifically on developments in Ferguson, Carson has said political correctness contributed to Michael Brown’s death, and those who protested the shooting reminded him of Hamas.
The debates for the Republican presidential candidates will be lively affairs, won’t they?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."