Snapping at Carson's Heels

Still Waiting for the Apology

Ben Carson, campaigning for the nomination to be the Republican candidate for the United States, is running into the buzz saw of liberal left-wing progressive media.  Which is a good thing.  It shows that his campaign has got well beyond the butt-of-jokes stage.  He is now being taken seriously.

The normal enmity and disingenuous concern for public rectitude is now on display.  There have been several hit pieces on Carson's back story and his biography.  The objective is to convince readers and watchers that Carson is at best an embellisher, at worst a rank liar.  Carson appears to be handling it pretty well.  He says he has always expected it would come.  He is certain that such hostility and gutter journalism wins him support: down home folk get so outraged they want to stand by him.

We admire Carson--have done for years--long before this latest "career move".  We are thankful for his life and testimony.  We rejoice at his firm repudiation and condemnation of abortion.  On the other hand we remain sceptical of his grasp of world affairs, of economics, and of his experience and sophistication in such maelstroms.  But we are more comfortable with Carson than with what Sarah Palin calls the "swamp-dwellers" of establishment Washington.  New brooms sweep clean, our parents once taught us.  Carson is a man of integrity and a sharp mind.  As the ultimate outsider, we have no doubt his broom would sweep exceedingly clean.

In the meantime, The Federalist provides an example of the unprofessional journalism, dripping with foetid cant, disguised as genuine public concern, which is now snapping at Carson's heels.

Ben Carson Responds To New Accusations Of Faulty Memory

After the Wall Street Journal reported it could find no evidence to confirm Ben Carson's account of his college years, he produced some.

By D.C. McAllister

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Ben Carson’s account of a hoax at Yale University, which he wrote about in his 1990 memoir “Gifted Hands,” isn’t true, but Carson has produced evidence to prove otherwise.

Here’s what Reid Epstein reported in the Wall Street Journal:

In his 1990 autobiography, ‘Gifted Hands,’ Mr. Carson writes of a Yale psychology professor who told Mr. Carson, then a junior, and the other students in the class—identified by Mr. Carson as Perceptions 301—that their final exam papers had ‘inadvertently burned,’ requiring all 150 students to retake it. The new exam, Mr. Carson recalled in the book, was much tougher. All the students but Mr. Carson walked out.

‘The professor came toward me. With her was a photographer for the Yale Daily News who paused and snapped my picture,’ Mr. Carson wrote. ‘“A hoax,” the teacher said. ‘We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the class.”’ Mr. Carson wrote that the professor handed him a $10 bill.

No photo identifying Mr. Carson as a student ever ran, according to the Yale Daily News archives, and no stories from that era mention a class called Perceptions 301. Yale Librarian Claryn Spies said Friday there was no psychology course by that name or class number during any of Mr. Carson’s years at Yale.

Carson issued the following response on his Facebook page:

On Saturday a reporter with the Wall Street Journal published a story that my account of being the victim of a hoax at Yale where students were led to believe the exams they had just taken were destroyed and we needed to retake the exam was false. The reporter claimed that no evidence existed to back up my story. Even went so far as to say the class didn’t exist.

Well here is the student newspaper account of the incident that occurred on January 14, 1970.

Will an apology be coming. I doubt it.

He also produced evidence that the class actually existed.

Allow me also to do the research for the Wall Street Journal reporter.

Here is a syllabus for the class you claim never existed.

Still waiting on the apology.

While there is no evidence of a published photograph, this doesn’t prove Carson wasn’t involved in the incident. Photographers take photos all the time that their editors choose not to use. Carson never says his photograph actually ran in the school’s newspaper, only that the photographer snapped his picture.

There has been no correction of the Wall Street Journal article that claims the class or the incident never happened. As Carson asked at a press conference on Friday, will the same kind of scrutiny that the press has given Carson be given to Hillary Clinton?

Denise C. McAllister is a journalist based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @McAllisterDen.

The establishment Commentariat are starting to break out in a sweat.   That's a robust leading indicator that Carson is now being taken seriously, as a threat to "business as usual".