Nov 16^th

The morning paper today featured dueling columnists: Thomas Sowell was writing to chastise the press for its coverage of Dr. Ben Carson’s many unusual utterances and Eugene Robinson’s column suggested that Carson should stop whining about that very same coverage. Sowell was badly overmatched.

Sowell begins with a claim of “the media going ballistic over discrepancies in a few things he (Carson) said.” Then Sowell tells us, “…the biggest discrepancy has been between the furor in the media and the irrelevance of his statements to any political issue.” Part of the problem is that Carson rarely makes any political relevant statements. He follows the conservatively correct position on the minimum wage: he opposes raising it. On same sex marriage, he claims that this is tantamount to bestiality. On this he is to the right of the most righteous right winger! Most of what we know of Carlson comes from his books and from his recent utterances.

It should be obvious, even to Sowell, that some pronouncements by a candidate, which have nothing whatever to do with politics directly, are still very relevant to the public’s judgment of the candidate’s mental fitness for office. Carson has claimed he has a theory that the pyramids were constructed under Joseph’s direction for grain storage. Sowell claims that, “Carson was smiling as he said this so it is not clear whether he was using this theory to illustrate some point. But in any case he was not claiming it as fact.” Well, that makes it curious because most folks with even an elementary knowledge of Egyptian history know the pyramids were used to store dead Egyptians. Hey, Carson said that this was just a theory so what’s the big deal? His handlers need to be very cautious about any other “theories” Carson might have.

Sowell tells us that the media has, “… shown no such zeal to disclose Barack Obama’s associations and alliances with a whole series of people who expressed their hatred for America in words and/or deeds.” This is a bald faced lie. The media pounced on the President’s associations with Bernadine Dorn, Bill Ayers and Pastor Jeremiah Wright. If they hadn’t, how would Sowell and the rest of us know anything about them? Even now more than 20 percent of Republicans believe the President is a Muslim and the leading contender for the Presidency on their ticket harangued him for years claiming he was not born in this country. Currently Trump has not changed his mind.

Sowell’s final inanity is to claim that Obama, “…directly promote the destruction of governments in Egypt and Libya that posed no threats to American interests…” The action against Libya was a NATO effort and the notion that Libya posed no threat to American interests might not sit well with the relatives of the 270 men and women murdered by Muammar Khadafy, the head of the Libyan government, who confessed to arranging for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. That, Mr. Sowell, is more than twice as many deaths as in the recent ISIL attacks on the citizens of Paris. That Libya and Khadafy were “no threat to American interests” is absurd. So you sweep the deaths of 270 people under the rug because that suits your political agenda? How pitiful.