"If it was important to know, don't you think I would have learned it already?" |
Ben Carson’s remarks on foreign policy have repeatedly raised questions about his grasp of the subject, but never more seriously than in the past week, when he wrongly asserted that China had intervened militarily in Syria and then failed, on national television, to name the countries he would call on to form a coalition to fight the Islamic State.
Faced with increasing scrutiny about whether Mr. Carson, who leads in some Republican presidential polls, was capable of leading American foreign policy, two of his top advisers said in interviews that he had struggled to master the intricacies of the Middle East and national security and that intense tutoring was having little effect.
“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” said Duane R. Clarridge, a top adviser to Mr. Carson on terrorism and national security. He also said Mr. Carson needed weekly conference calls briefing him on foreign policy so “we can make him smart.”
"Mr. Carson needed weekly conference calls briefing him on foreign policy to 'make him smart?'"
Well that obviously did not help much.
In response to this report the Carson campaign release this response:
"Mr. Clarridge has incomplete knowledge of the daily, not weekly briefings, that Dr. Carson receives on important national security matters from former military and State Department officials," Doug Watts, a Carson campaign spokesman, told Business Insider in an email.
"He is coming to the end of a long career of serving our country. Mr. Clarridge's input to Dr. Carson is appreciated but he is clearly not one of Dr. Carson's top advisors. For the New York Times to take advantage of an elderly gentleman and use him as their foil in this story is an affront to good journalistic practices."
Oh, so old man Clarridge is intelligent enough to be used by the Carson campaign for information about foreign policy but too senile to answer a reporter's questions truthfully?
Let's see, cannot learn anything of substance even after hours of briefings from expert advisers, and then blames his lack of knowledge on those advisers.
Why does that sound so damn familiar?
Wait, don't tell me I've almost got it.