Right-wing neurosurgeon Ben Carson, gearing up to launch a Republican presidential campaign, has been preoccupied for much of the year with a rather provocative comparison.
Back in February, Carson made the case that liberals may turn the United States into Nazi Germany. A month later, he went a little further, insisting that Americans are living in a “gestapo age,” which is “very much like Nazi Germany.”
Asked in August about his nutty comments, the Republican added, “You can’t dance around it…. If people look at what I said and were not political about it, they’d have to agree.”
And yesterday, Carson refused to back down while speaking to a national television audience.
Neurosurgeon Ben Carson stood by his controversial comparison of the United States to Nazi Germany in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday. Asked by Blitzer whether he would amend or take back his comments, Carson said “Absolutely not.” […]In elaborating on those comments Wednesday, he again suggested that the U.S. “government is using instruments of government, like the IRS, to punish its opponents.”
For the record, the IRS “scandal” was discredited months ago, and there is literally zero evidence of the government using agencies to punish domestic political opponents. Carson is basing his American-Nazi comparison on a controversy he doesn’t seem to understand.
He went on to lecture Wolf Blitzer, telling the host, “What you were doing is allowing words to affect you more than listening to what was actually being said. And that’s part of the problem.”
How poetic — Carson doesn’t want us to listen to his words; he wants to listen to what he says. What does that mean? I’m not entirely sure, but apparently my inability to understand his incoherence makes me “part of the problem.”
Carson went on to complain about “PCism,” adding, “‘You may not say this word, regardless of what your point is. Because if you say that word, I go into a tizzy.’ We can do better than that. When I was a child, and when you were a child, they used to say, ‘Sticks and stones break my bones, words will never hurt me.’ What ever happened to that? We need to get to the point where we can look beyond the word and look for the meaning.”
In other words, Ben Carson believes modern American life is comparable to Nazi Germany, but he doesn’t want us to dwell on the part of his comparison that involves Nazi Germany.
And if you happen to find his truly bizarre and increasingly twisted worldview offensive, then you’re apparently hung up on “PCism.”
Ed Kilgore added that Carson has positioned himself as “the true and perhaps ultimate leader of the Post-Modern wing of the conservative movement, where ‘facts’ are just an inconvenient artifice.”
Postscript: A national poll this week found Carson running second among all likely Republican presidential hopefuls, trailing only Mitt Romney.
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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."