" The phrase “It’s not brain surgery” will have died at his hand." [View all]

[smirkymonkey]

I lol'd when I read this one! Great op piece in the UK Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/06/ben-carson-us-presidency-brain-surgery

"Whatever happens to Ben Carson as far as the Republican nomination goes, he stands on the verge of making linguistic history. On current form, the former brain surgeon will have committed idiomicide by Christmas. The phrase “It’s not brain surgery” will have died at his hand. A steady hand, yes – but the one that wielded the knife.

As a noted historian of the Third Reich – he recently put it out there that gun control might have caused the Holocaust – Carson will know how much one man can do for a name. You didn’t get too many baby Adolfs being registered in the decades after 1945.

But to kill off an enduring popular phrase in the space of a few months is an achievement no one will be able to take away from the Detroit-born presidential hopeful, brilliantly described by the Nation as coming across “like a neurosurgeon who performed his own lobotomy”. This week’s intervention hastened the demise, with Carson restating his belief that the pyramids were not pharaonic tombs, as some crackpot Egyptologists claim. They were grain stores– and what’s more, they were built by Joseph of Technicolor Dreamcoat fame. Come on – this stuff isn’t brain surgery.

Admittedly, things did look shaky for “It’s not brain surgery” a few years back, at least on this side of the Atlantic. The abortive terrorist attack on Glasgow airport in 2007 was claimed by police to have been masterminded by a brain surgeon – yet you may recall it was primarily self-foiled, as the terrorists had failed to account for the fact the airport door was narrower than the Jeep they intended to storm it with. Photos of the burning vehicle stuck in the airport doors simply cried out for the caption: “Come on, Johnny al-Qaida: it’s not brain surgery.” more....