Mother Jones: Ben Carson and the Tale of Redemption

[Quixote1818]

No one who's not an evangelical Christian would believe it for a second. But evangelicals hear testimonies like this all the time. They expect testimonies like this, and the more improbable the better. So Carson gives them one. It's clumsy because he's not very good at inventing this kind of thing, but that doesn't matter much.

By Kevin Drum


For those of you who may have missed it, the Wall Street Journal decided to check out another Ben Carson story yesterday. Here's the story as recounted in Gifted Hands, about Carson's time as a student at Yale:
◾Ben is broke. Finds ten-dollar bill on sidewalk. Thank you, Lord!
◾A year later, Ben is broke again. Looks for ten-dollar bill, doesn't find one.
◾Ben gets notice that all the final exams in Perceptions 301 were accidentally lit on fire. He goes in for the retest.
◾The new test is really, really hard. A girl near Ben tells her classmate they should leave. "We can say we didn't read the notice."
◾Everyone starts leaving. Ben is conflicted. "I was tempted to walk out, but I had read the notice, and I couldn't lie and say I hadn't."
◾Eventually Ben is the only one left. The professor comes back in with a Yale Daily News photographer. The whole thing was a hoax, she said. "We wanted to see who was the most honest student in the class. And that's you."
◾Ben concludes the story: "The professor then did something even better. She handed me a ten-dollar bill."
◾End scene.

Article continues: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/11/ben-carson-and-tale-redemption

[truebluegreen]

1. Cloud Cuckoo Land. That is all.

[hifiguy]

2. More bats in that belfry than in the Jornada Bat Caves. nt

[immoderate]

3. He's a wacko!

--imm

[Person 2713]

4. His nutters will easily accept the stretch with some BS like he was just using parables just like Jesus

evangelicals love Carson and his fables
If only he was just wacko and not all his voting followers along with him

[starroute]

5. And then there's the 1968 riot story

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ben-carson-hid-white-classmates-race-riots-af-article-1.2426739

Last month, Carson detailed how he protected his white high school classmates the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination. Violent race riots ravaged Detroit’s Southwestern High, which enrolled more black students than white students.

Carson, a junior lab assistant with a key to the school’s biology workroom, shepherded his frightened friends to the lab to shield them from the violence, he told the Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper spoke with a half dozen of Carson’s classmates and his high school physics teacher: Not one remembered his heroic hideaway.

“It may have happened, but I didn’t see it myself or hear about it,” Gregory Vartanian, who served in the junior ROTC with Carson, told the Wall Street Journal Friday.

[yellowcanine]

6. Damn cheap professor to only give him 10 bucks.

That kind of honesty should have been worth at least $20, even in 1970 or whatever. Would be an even better story if the prof offered him $20, but honest Ben said, "No, I only need $10" This fucker reads like a Jack Chick tract. Come to think of it, the Joseph built the pyramids story may be from a Jack Chick tract.

[rhiannon55]

7. His redemption story reminds me of my brother

who became a Mormon at 18 and has always told the wildest stories about his badass teenage years before he prayed with a doorstep missionary and heard Heavenly Father's audible voice.

We are 14 months apart in age, and I don't remember any of it.

Evangelicals eat that shit up.