Candidate Carson Rides atop the Republican Clown Car

Originally thought to be the backseat candidate, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson has now taken the wheel of the Republican clown car. Being a Christian candidate is so important to Candidate Carson that he feels he must continue to support a particularly strange theory that he came up with in college to validate the Bible. In his college days, Gentle Ben invented his own pyramid scheme, which hypothesized that Joseph created the Egyptian pyramids to store grain.

The biblical story of Joseph says the Jewish patriarch, being the pharaoh’s advisor, saved Egypt from famine by storing grain for seven years. Joseph had a dream in which God told him to store grain during the upcoming seven fat years in which the land would be rich in harvest for use during seven lean years to follow. I have no issue with the likelihood of any of that, but …

Ben Carson’s theory of Joseph and the pyramids of Egypt

According to Carson’s pyramid scheme, the pyramids stand as proof of this biblical story, though I cannot see that the story requires pyramidal proof nor the obliteration of logic to make this particular proof work. I wouldn’t believe it even if it were in a Hollywood movie.

To believe Candidate Carson’s theory — and this is just the kind of wise man one wants for president of the United States of America — you’d have to think it made perfect sense to spend a hundred years building grain storage bins that were supposed to be used for the immediately upcoming fourteen years. The project would be completed many years after the drought had ended. Great plan. (No wonder pharaoh used one for a tomb, since its original use was obsolete by the time it was finished … and pharaoh was dying of old age.)

You would also have to believe it made perfect sense to build storage bins that are 95% solid rock and 5% interior storage space. You’d also have to believe it would make sense to start a project that would likely consume more grain in feeding slaves during its hundred-or-so years of construction than the pyramidal bins could contain. Finally, didn’t Carson notice that the pyramidal shape of a grain bin is usually upside down to help the grain flow out the bottom? I guess the Egyptians had yet to perfect the hopper concept.

I know I want a man for president — just because he’s a swell Christian guy — who doesn’t have the common sense to figure out that you don’t spend your entire lifetime building stone pyramids to store grain for a small portion of your lifetime. I trust that, at least, Joseph was smarter than that. Since Carson thinks this was a grand idea, it leaves me concerned about what projects Carson might start in order to save the United States if he were president. Perhaps food-storage pyramids in every town? (I mean, they make the same sense today that they did back then.)

The impeachable character of Candidate Carson

Oh, I meant impeccable. Well, maybe not:

I especially want a man for president who confesses in his own self-aggrandizing book ([amazon_link id=”0310214696″ target=”_blank” ]Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story[/amazon_link]) that he once hammered is mother on the head because of her taste in clothing and tried to stab a friend for changing a radio channel. (I know: he’s forgiven now because he’s a changed man, thanks to having read some verses about anger in the Book of Proverbs. Still, I question the stability of a man who ever had to learn such a lesson in the first place. Few of us have ever had such anger problems as to whack our moms with hammers, much less over such trivial things as clothing. However, what Carson cannot be forgiven for is thinking that his 60’s fashions could have been any better than his mom’s.)

This does perhaps explain, though, why he majored in psychology — to figure his narcissistic, angry self out. And perhaps he became a brain surgeon in order to work out his guilt over hammering the head of his mother by fixing the head of another. As a brain surgeon, Carson’s greatest claim to fame is (and this is true!) that he brought back into use a disregarded surgery known as hemispherectomy, a drastic surgery that removes one hemisphere of the brain in order to control epilepsy. Carson performed the surgery many times and, apparently, once on himself. Given Carson’s story-telling creativity combined with a serious logical handicap, one has to think Carson removed his own left hemisphere years ago.

Candidate Carson the story teller

Not-so-gentle Ben has a penchant for fabricating a richer history for himself, and he appears to be quite the embellisher. As important as it is for this best-selling Christian author to validate biblical truth with ancient grain-storage theories, telling the truth is apparently not in the least bit important to being a Christian candidate when it comes to boasting about himself as the linked article will show:

Besides lying about West Point, Ben Carson told people in 2002 that he was completely healed of prostate cancer due to surgery; but in 2004, when he was shucking and jiving for Mannatech, a “nutraceutical” company, he said that Mannatech’s glyconutrient product had cured his cancer. Subsequently, Mannatech was successfully sued for $7 million for making false claims about the efficacy of its products in curing cancer, but that didn’t stop Carson from continuing as Mannatech’s spokesman … for forty grand a speech. After all, a guy has to raise campaign funds.

Carson also claimed that Mannatech contributed toward a $2.5 million endowment to get him an endowed chair at John Hopkins Medicine. When that contribution was later refuted, Carson replied that he was merely “confused” and conceded that Mannatech had not made such a donation. Given the likelihood of his self-inflicted hemispherectomy, I think we need to go easy on him. He probably was just confused. Forgetting where two-and-a-half-million dollars came from is surely a mistake any of us could make.

In his book America the Beautiful ( [amazon_link id=”0310330912″ target=”_blank” ]America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great[/amazon_link] ) Carson says, “I believe it is a very good idea for physicians, scientists, engineers, and others trained to make decisions based on facts and empirical data to get involved in the political arena.” I wonder if his pyramid scheme was based on empirical facts and data about the pyramids. Didn’t he wonder, for example, why the facts showed that pharaohs were actually buried in these “hermetically sealed” vaults. Perhaps he surmised they were wrapped in all that cloth and herbs to keep the pharaohs from polluting the grain. Or maybe the pharaohs just decided grain bins would be useful for storage of their own bodies after they had fulfilled their seven-year grain storage objective.

I know: I’m not being nice. And one should be nice to presidential candidates if they are nice Christian candidates, or one will get booed by other nice Christian people. In the very least, I hope Kookie Carson has thought his tax policy out a little more thoroughly than he has his pyramid scheme.

Carson also doesn’t believe in evolution because he doesn’t “believe that something as complex as our ability to rationalize, think, and plan, and have a moral sense of what’s right and wrong, just appeared.” Hmm. I’m not sure in Carson’s case that it ever appeared at all. Carson is his own argument against evolution toward higher thinking.

One wonders, after sixteen years of being presented candidates like this, if the Republicans will ever be capable of finding a candidate who isn’t a clown or a buffoon. Hmm. We could have Sugarpuff Palin or Not-So-Gentle Ben Carson, the lying pyramid theorist, who would be great on Art Bell’s Coast-to-Coast radio show, or the boisterous boasting buffoon who trumps everyone with his trumpeting mouth. One has to wonder why Republicans want to be such a gift to comedy. I can’t even make up material this rich.

Please add your own comedic insights below (about any of the candidates … or about me if you’re voting for Candidate Carson), and then share this post with others so they can enjoy your humor, using the convenient buttons I’ve placed at the top of the article.

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November 6, 2015 @ 10:44 am

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