I guess It Sounds Better To Say Dr. Ben Is An Idiot Savant Than Pointing Out That He's Just Incredibly Dumb

But, man is this guy an idiot. And you thought Trump was a moron? Well, Trump is moron, of course, and just about as ignorant as Dr. Ben. They are both representin' though. This is exactly what the dumbed down, Foxified Republican Party base wants. Remember, according to a PPP survey released yesterday, 79% of Republican primary voters-- despite 9/11-- think George W. Bush kept us safe. And that is 79%, not 7.9%. But, if normal people aren't careful the Democrats will nominate a fatally flawed establishment shill that no one wants to vote for and we could actually wind up with something like Trump or Cruz or Dr. Ben in the White House. Yeah, so back to Dr. Ben... before he completely disappears from the presidential stage (today's NBC poll confirming his slowly but steadily disintegrating poll numbers), his brand enhanced and if he made $10 million catering to the suckers last year-- he did-- he can rake in $15 next year.



Trevor Noah should team up with Trumpy for a Ben Carson marathon on the Gaza Strip Club and how to utilize experts. Yeah, that expert who the NY Times quoted the other day as a top Carson foreign policy advisor, Duane Clarridge. Now this is a walking freak show. He did so much damage to Carson this week-- pointing out that they can't "make Carson smart" and that he doesn't know the first thing about foreign policy or the world-- that the campaign was reduced to claiming he's senile.

“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” said Duane R. Clarridge, a top adviser to Mr. Carson on terrorism and national security. He also said Mr. Carson needed weekly conference calls briefing him on foreign policy so “we can make him smart.”

As the deadly assaults in Paris claimed by the Islamic State reframe the presidential race, the candidates’ foreign policy credentials are suddenly under scrutiny. And Mr. Carson has attracted extra attention because his statements give rise to questions about where, as a retired neurosurgeon without government experience, he turns for information and counsel on complex global issues. What is unusual is the candor of those who are tutoring him about his struggle to master the subject.

In last week’s Republican debate, speaking of the turmoil in Syria, Mr. Carson said that “the Chinese are there.”

Both the White House and China denied that China had intervened militarily in Syria.

This week, Mr. Carson’s advisers said that his source for claiming Chinese involvement in Syria was a telephone conversation he had had with a freelance American intelligence operative in Iraq.

According to notes of the briefing kept by a Carson aide who was also on the line, the operative said, “Multiple reports have surfaced that Chinese military advisers are on the ground in Syria, operating with Russian special operations personnel.”

Mr. Clarridge, 83, a former C.I.A. agent who had connected Mr. Carson with the operative in Iraq, said on Monday that the information was wrong. The operative in Iraq had “overleaped” in suggesting that Chinese troops are in Syria, Mr. Clarridge said, adding of the operative, “You know how it goes when people are desperate for some headline.”

So who's Carson-crony Duane Clarridge? Someone who should be rotting in a prison cell for his part in Iran-Contra, but escaped with a presidential pardon from George H.W. Bush to protect the guilty before a public trial could commence. Clarridge, who well may be as fuzzy in the brain as the Carson campaign says he is, was a cloak-and-dagger crackpot working for the CIA starting 50-60 years ago and wound up as Reagan's man-on-the-ground when Reagan, who whoever was running the White House when Reagan was debilitated with severe Alzheimer's (according to Bill O'Reilly's new book on the subject) was trying to use Iranian and Israeli assets to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. Sounds perfect for Dr. Ben. This deranged freak in the video:

Clarridge’s commitment to U.S. intervention is well documented. It has led him to defend the CIA’s tactics in Chile in the 1970s and the mining of Nicaraguan harbors in the 1980s.

“We will intervene whenever we decide it is in our national security interest to intervene,” Clarridge told Australian-born journalist John Pilger in a 2008 interview. “And if you don’t like it, lump it. Get used to it world. We are not going to put up with nonsense.”

In an interview archived by George Washington University, Clarridge divulged how he finally came up with the idea to place mines in Nicaraguan harbors. He told the interviewer, he was getting a lot of frustration from Washington to do something but he recounted that he had limited resources.

“Guerilla warfare experts will tell ya don't hit the economic targets you make enemies of the people you need. I don't believe, that's not true, it maybe true in certain circumstances, but it is not an all encompassing rule, and everything needs to be looked at,” he said. “I knew we had 'em, we'd made 'em outta sewer pipe and we had the good fusing system on them and we were ready. And you know they wouldn't really hurt anybody because they just weren't that big a mine, alright? Yeah, with luck, bad luck we might hurt somebody, but pretty hard you know?”

In 1991 he was indicted in the Iran-Contra scandal for lying to Congress. His trial was never completed. In 1992 he was pardoned before George H.W. Bush left office.

From a Cold War spy, Clarridge transitioned into self-made operative in the war on terror.

The New York Times reported as recently as 2011, that Clarridge was conducting a Middle East private spy ring from his home in Southern California.

Back then, the New York Times characterized Clarridge’s tips from spies on the ground from Pakistan to Afghanistan as “an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports” that he pushed “to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan.” Once funded by money from the military, Clarridge managed to keep his network afloat with private donations after officials lost interest. He used the money to try and investigate “Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in hopes of collecting beard trimmings or other DNA samples that might prove Mr. Clarridge’s suspicions that the Afghan leader was a heroin addict,” The Times reported.

In 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported Clarridge was using his own money to look at Saddam Hussein's money ties to countries like France and Russia.

"It will be a huge bombshell if we can pull it off," Clarridge said at the time.

In national security circles, Clarridge is seen as an off-beat privateer who walks the tightrope between sanctioned spy and citizen security activist. Still, he has taken on some high-profile clients, including the New York Times, who hired the company he worked for-- American International Security Corporation-- to help find and free kidnapped reporter David Rohde in 2008. Rohde managed to eventually escape from Taliban captivity, but according to a report from Gawker, someone who worked with him said "Clarridge was inflating his role in facilitating Rohde's escape in an effort to justify AISC's enormous fees."

Carson’s reliance on Clarridge as an adviser-- no matter how limited-- speaks to the former neurosurgeon’s newness to politics. While Clarridge confided in The Times that Carson “need[s] to have a conference call once a week” to “make him smart,” the Carson campaign immediately rushed to downplay Clarridge’s role in the campaign, going so far as to portray him as a old man who was being taken advantage of by the Times.

But that doesn't answer who gave Carson the advice to compare Syrian refugee families fleeing ISIS terrorists to rabid dogs. He told reporters in Mobile, Alabama yesterday that "We must balance safety against just being a humanitarian. For instance, if there's a rabid dog running around your neighborhood you're probably not gonna assume something good about that dog, and you're probably gonna put your children out of the way. Doesn't mean that you hate your dogs, by any stretch of the imagination, but you're putting your intellect into motion, and you're thinking, 'How do I protect my children?' At the same time, I love dogs, and I'm gonna call the humane society. Hopefully they can come and take this dog away and create a safe environment once again. By the same token, we have to have in place screening mechanism that allow us determine who the mad dogs are, quite frankly. Who are the people who want to come in here and hurt us and want to destroy us? Until we know how to do that-- just like it would be foolish to put your child out in the neighborhood knowing that that was going on-- it is foolish for us to accept people, if we cannot have the appropriate type of screening." Ha, ha, ha? Just remember this-- some of these people could be your neighbors or, worse yet, sitting at your Thanksgiving dinner table next week: