Dr. Ben Carson feels like he is being treated unfairly by the media and that no other GOP presidential candidates are under the scrutiny that he has faced thus far in the campaigned. Welcome to being the front runner Dr. Carson, you think things are bad now, you have not seen anything yet.
Most of last week a number of questions was raised about Dr. Carson’s past, most of them coming from numerous media outlets fact checking of his autobiography, “Gifted Hands.”
Every presidential cycle someone from either the Republicans or the Democrats thinks that they are being targeted un fairly. Perhaps he missed the stories on Donald Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio’s financial dealings.
On the Democratic side you have former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her e-mail issues and Sen. Bernie Sanders on his being a Socialist. My point is when you are running for president you are going to be vetted by the press.
Dr. Carson is without question a world renowned neurosurgeon and a brilliant man. He has high poll rating along with Trump at the top of the GOP presidential campaign. Dr. Carson, is well liked with poll numbers that give him high respect ratings with both Republican and Democratic voters.
But unlike most of the candidates running for president in both the Republican and Democratic races he has no voting record that defines where he stands on a number of key issues.
The ironic part of Dr. Carson’s complaints about being targeted by “the liberal media,” is that he supplied the ammunition in his biography “Saving Hands.”
He went after POLITICO last week because they suggested Carson “fabricated” his memory that he had been admitted with a full scholarship to West Point. He says that in a meeting with General William Westmoreland it was intimated to him that he could have a scholarship if he wanted one. But according to the POLITICO story, Westmoreland’s records suggest he wasn’t in Detroit when Carson said they met.
Following the POLITICO story came an extensive report from CNN that nine people who grew up with Dr. Carson in Detroit told the network that his recounting of his troubled youth and angry temperament don’t match up with their remembrances. When Dr. Carson was pressed by CNN he refused to name even a single person involved in several of the incidents of violence he wrote about in “Gifted Hands,” his memoir. “I’m not giving any information about who the person was that I tried to knife,” Carson told Chris Jansing of NBC news on Saturday.
The point that Dr. Carson is missing here is not that he is unfit to be president or that anyone in the press see’s him as a liar. He wrote a book and he is allowed editorial license, but when you are running for the office of president of the United States and you are questioned about part of the book that you wrote have a plausible answer.
Dr. Carson needs to get a tougher skin because the further in this process that he goes the tougher the questions will get.
