The President has already admitted, in the very same book, that names have been changed and characters combined or compressed. The other stuff could be easily fact checked, if the media had had any interest in fact checking it. Unlike Carson, the media chose to take Obama’s story on faith.
And because Obama admits names were changed, and with no evidence other than third-hand accounts by biased resources, you are ready to conclude Obama lied, yet, as far as you’re concerned, in Carson’s case “Being poor with your facts isn’t a sign of dishonesty.” :dubious:
Come on, man. Whenever Carson opens his mouth something ridiculous comes out. The man is either a compulsive liar or he is a blithering idiot. The possibility exists, I guess, that he could be both. What surprises me is your seeming inability to see it.
No, just noticing that the standard of evidence of dishonesty is pretty low here. Hillary Clinton meanwhile, well, we have to PROVE that she had malicious intent when she used a private email account, and we have to PROVE that she knew that the material she handled through that account was classified. And any lies she told about the whole controversy are non-stories.
But Carson might have some details of his childhood that are unverified, so he’s a pathological liar.
Well, yeah, see, because accusations of playing fast and loose with national security stuff? Most everybody thinks that’s some heavier shit than telling stories. Even tall tales don’t quite get to that level.
And when the author tells you in the book itself that he used some authorial devices, that’s not really “admitting” anything. That’s just telling you. You can put the book down if that bothers you, but nobody else is likely to give a rat’s.
I can’t wait until he describes building a clock and taking it to school.
In post #18 I hinted that he may be an idiot. A compulsive liar, i.e. con man seems more likely to me. And he could be both, it’s not surprising when a con man doesn’t realize he’ll eventually be caught. But he’s a Republican, and his party kind of likes that sort.
Of course you have to prove she had malicious intent and of course you have to prove that she knew the material was classified. The Republicans made the allegations so it is their responsibility to make their case before Clinton rolls over and allows her career to be destroyed. Republicans want Hillary to be guilty of everything they accuse her of but, too bad for them, accusations are not proof, and throwing any old BS out and expecting it to be believed only works on the GOP base, I am glad to say.
Carson is a liar for far more than the alternate reality of his childhood he is in the process of weaving. You don’t misremember details from an incident of having a gun pointed at you, and you don’t misremember details of having stabbed someone, unless of course you’re a psychopath.
But far more important, at least to me, are his nonsensical beliefs, which sound crazier by the day, and which prove to me that Carson has absolutely no business being the leader of anything, much less the United States. Just today, I saw yet another crazy video, this one of Carson admitting to a reporter that he believes the pyramids in Egypt were built by the biblical Joseph and used for grain storage and not as crypts for the pharaohs’ sarcophagi. I can’t even laugh at Carson’s idiocy anymore. The guy is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and freaking dangerous.
Yeah I saw that too, great fun.
I wonder where he got the idea? From church, maybe? Apparently the idea goes back quite a bit:
Unverified stories don’t make him a liar. Telling three or more mutually contradictory stories of the same incident make him a liar.
But with the pyramid thing, and with some of the other nonsense he spouts, I’m a lot more worried about his intelligence and sanity than his honesty. The country has survived liars in the White House, but it might not survive a loon who thinks that a war in the Middle East might be what Jesus wants.
To become a top-tier medical doctor of any sort, you have to understand and embrace the foundational truths of science. I simply don’t understand Ben Carson, the man. He’s not some d-rate “Dr . Nick” (Heyyy Everybody!) from The Simpson’s. How can the acceptance of science be cherry-picked by its own practitioners? I still believe he’s a cynical fucking pothead laughing at the silly shit he comes up with when he’s baked on national TV.
And, Carson deftly tapped into the Republican whine-du-jour, by blaming those bad folks in “media” for forcing him to change those names.
The practice of medicine, and surgery in particular, have little to nothing to do with science.
Maybe, maybe not. I am sympathetic to the notion that people of all stripes can form false or shifting memories; perhaps Carson is exhibiting that very phenomenon. OTOH after all the hay that has been made about Clinton’s Bosnia tarmac story, I’m certainly happy to sit back and enjoy watching Carson get bonked over the head with this stuff and called a liar.
That, combined with Rubio’s nearly identical resume to Obama’s in 2008, is truly making this the cycle wherein the GOP is hoist on its own petard–in a most delightful way, as Mary Poppins would say. Too bad the GOP isn’t running some war hero whose record can be shat upon by a super PAC.
Carson really got into it with a CNN reporter this morning. He better not get caught in a verifiable lie here. The media (including Fox) is in no mood to take any more shit from these guys. They have overplayed their hand.
If someone gets some facts wrong and unwittingly repeat them, then that’s not great, but doesn’t mark them as a liar or stupid or bad person. But if they keep telling wrong facts, and keep going to the same sources of information that give them wrong facts, then that shows that they just don’t care about the facts or the truth. A comparison to conspiracy theorists is a good one.
If he made up stories in his biography I find that interesting, but not a reason to vote for or against him. I know a lot of memoirs and biographies have exaggerations to make stories work better, or just have honest mis-remembering things. It wouldn’t surprise me if he made up stuff, since it does look like he straight up plagiarized things in another book he wrote, including large portions from a website called SocialismSucks.Net.
But even if all the stories about his youth are straight up fabrications, that’s not what bothers me the most. I’m more bothered by some of his more current distortions of facts, like these:
[ul]
[li]“In the class of 1968 at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, Mahmoud Abbas was one of the members of that class, and so was Ali Khamenei. And that’s where they first established relationships with the young Vladimir Putin.” [/li][li]When ICE releases illegal immigrants, “a lot of those people are not from Honduras and Mexico. They’re from Iraq and Somalia and Russia.” [/li][li]Pediatricians have cut down on the number and proximity of vaccines because they recognize there have been “too many in too short a period of time.” [/li][li]“A lot of people who go into prison straight, and when they come out they’re gay.” [/li][/ul]
Saying things like this doesn’t sound like someone gullible repeating things that he’s heard. (And even if he was a naïve person repeating things because he was gullible, that doesn’t sound presidential). This sounds like someone deliberately choosing to see the world a certain way, not caring about the truth. It’s troubling to hear from a presidential candidate.
I want the stuff from his book to be investigated, just because I’m super curious about it and how much he might have made up. But I hope he’s brought down by his constant disregard for actual facts regarding science and politics in the current day, not for possible lies about his childhood.
Shocked! Shocked am I to hear that presidential candidates may have made statements that are not perfectly aligned with the truth.
Does this count?
Why would he lie about the West Point scholarship? Which, IIRC, is not really how it works. It’s such an easy story to fact-check. So why would he?
The seventh-day Adventist stuff scares the crap out of me. And I think he is totally cuckoo for cocoa puffs. I would never vote for him anyway. But that just seems like such a stupid thing to lie about.
Because no one fact checks the autobiography of a surgeon, which is what he was when he originally made that claim (along with the claims of being a violent youth, which also now look to have possibly been fabricated). A presidential candidate, OTOH…
I’d even go so far as to rate brain surgery as the least impressive and least complicated of any surgery disciplines. Biomechanical is near zero (knee surgery far more complex), proximity to other sensitive systems is near zero (the brain is about as isolated as anything can be), zero musculature (stay away from the ear-wigglus majoris muscle, nurse! By god, his ear lobes could slump!).
It’s trapanning with anesthesia, of which the anesthesia is a separate medical expertise anyway.