A Facebook correspondent likes Carson:
I like to listen to the man, but he is to nice to win.
Perhaps. His speech at the National Prayer Breakfast was apparently not the nicest:
Dr. Ben Carson, former pediatric neurosurgeon and author of “You Have a Brain” declared that President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast “makes me feel that perhaps we’re [Christians] being betrayed” on Saturday’s “Fox & Friends” on the Fox News Channel.
Given what appears to be his level of ignorance on a number of subjects important in the political arena, I think he’ll either be out in a hurry, or he’ll be quite entertaining as he finds it very rough sledding in a field that he doesn’t own.
Which brings me to a somewhat startling result: sympathy. I’ve noticed that as we become a more and more specialized society – an inevitability, given what we (for example, Dr. Carson’s specialty as a pediatric neurosurgeon) – our opinions on nearly anything outside of our specialty can be horrendous. Dr. Carson thinks a President can ignore the Supreme Court; that the 2016 elections may be canceled; that our troops should be immune from war crimes prosecution … these are all positions that I would take to be from an unserious candidate. Yet Dr. Carson’s indisputable accomplishments mark him as extremely serious, and being a surgeon who pioneered new surgeries marks him as a rung or two above your standard-issue doc (who I also admire for their memories and their intense work ethic – but recognize that’s what it’s all about).
So … what’s the deal? My personal theory is simply a person can only do so much, no matter what their level of intelligence may be. At some point, you have to turn off the info flow and rest; and if your information flow is tainted, well, GIGO.
We no longer have renaissance men or women. We’re specialists, or we’re general laborers, working so many hours that being informed on much of anything is difficult; or we’re poverty-stricken and therefore even deeper in the hole, and sadly not well educated, either. This all plays into a perpetual conundrum (& worry) for me: we keep on trying to govern using amateurs rules, yet moving to professional rules invites ruin. So we keep running elections full of people who may, or may not, know what they’re doing. It’s one of those hard questions…
