Who would ever have guessed that someday we’d have a serious presidential candidate who makes Donald Trump look sober and grounded? And yet, that’s what Ben Carson has done. Here’s one 
of his foreign policy advisors, perhaps under the misapprehension that he was speaking off the record:
“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” Duane R. Clarridge, a top adviser to Mr. Carson on terrorism and national security, said in an interview….After Mr. Carson struggled on “Fox News Sunday” to say whom he would call first to form a coalition against the Islamic State, Mr. Clarridge called [Armstrong] Williams, the candidate’s top adviser, in frustration. “We need to have a conference call once a week where his guys roll out the subjects they think will be out there, and we can make him smart,” Mr. Clarridge said he told Mr. Williams.
Mr. Williams, one of Mr. Carson’s closest friends, who does not have an official role in the campaign, also lamented the Fox News interview. “He’s been briefed on it so many times,” he said. “I guess he just froze.”
“He just froze.” Maybe. But there’s another possibility. A friend of mine recently had a conversation with a guy who once sat on a board with Carson: “He told how, at that time, Carson advocated that the way to reduce CO2 emissions was to build hydrogen-powered cars. Once he had embraced that policy solution, according to his fellow board member, Carson showed no interest in alternate policies.”
This seems to be Carson’s MO. One way or another, he decides what he believes. Glyconutrients are a miracle. Hitler took away people’s guns. The Chinese are in Syria. Hydrogen cars will fix global warming. And once he’s fixated on something, that’s it. He just isn’t interested in learning any more. You can brief him until you’re blue in the face, but it’s water off a duck. He’s already made up his mind.
I wonder what happened to make him this way? It seems clear that he wasn’t always like this. Did this change occur slowly? Or was there some dramatic event that changed his worldview? We’ll probably never know. But it leaves him wide open to every weird idea and kooky conspiracy theory out there if it happens to press one of his buttons. Usually characters like this are relegated to post-midnight talk radio or sending out chain emails about Obama getting ready to declare martial law. But this one is running for president. And winning.
UPDATE: This is great. The Carson campaign recommended Clarridge as a source and provided the Times with his phone number. But now they’re throwing him under the bus. “Mr. Clarridge has incomplete knowledge of the daily, not weekly briefings, that Dr. Carson receives on important national security matters,” the campaign said in a statement. “For The New York Times to take advantage of an elderly gentleman and use him as their foil in this story is an affront to good journalistic practices.”
Very classy.
